creating engaging classrooms

For many, marking is the bane of the teacher's existence. I, however, love it, for it is the perfect opportunity to give feedback . Feedback is your opportunity as an educator to have a personal conversation with each student about their learning, what they did well, what they need to improve and how they can do better. As such, done well, it is a massive opportunity for you to engage students by celebrating their successes and then granting them agency to achieve meaningful goals.  So, what are the key ingredients? Given I did my PGCE in 2011, unsurprisingly I use the acronyms WWW, EBI and DIT. That is: What went well   Even better if Directed improvement task However, while many teachers tend to focus on the latter two, I want to suggest that the first one, the WWW, is actually the most important.   Put yourself in the shoes of a mid-level student: you try your hardest, really revise and prepare, put your best into a piece of work, and when that comes back all...

Back when I was a new teacher, I was having trouble motivating a class. My very wise mentor, Chris Campbell, told me to show them the success . I started doing this, and I noticed engagement go up, behaviour improve and students progressing. Now showing students their success can take many forms: displays of great work; cascading good practice through precise praise; messages home; feedback; peer reviews; and so on. I'll do blog posts about some of those at other times. What I want to write about here is showing them success over time .  You might call these progress passports, or assessment trackers, or success sheets . Whatever you call them, the essential part is it's a sheet that is easily accessible to students where they record their marks from assessments. Rather like this: For those classes using exercise books, I have them glue it in the inside front cover; for those using Chromebooks, I have them pin it onto their bookmark bar.  Over the course of the year, this beco...