This blog is going to be a record of all the wonderful work you are doing this year as well as a place where you can find useful resources.
I do hope that more and more of you will want to contribute to it and share with others some of your findings or simply an update on your enquiry or an example of a strategy you have used.
In the next post, you will find a list of all the enquiry questions that we are focusing on this year.
Thank you for all your hard work! Below is a positive message from Dylan Wiliam which is worth remembering.
Helene Galdin-O'Shea
“I think the only way that we can improve teacher quality is to create a culture of continuous improvement. That is given lip service in many districts, but nobody is really facing up to what it really means in practice. You see, I think that every teacher needs to get better. In many districts they target help at the teachers who “need support”, who need help, who are having difficulties.
Every teacher fails on a daily basis. If you are not failing you are just not paying attention. Because we fail all the time.
Many of you will walk out of this room absolutely convinced I said stuff I know I didn’t say. As teachers we fail all the time. We teach these brilliant lessons. We take in the notebooks and look at what the kids have written and we wonder what planet they were on when we were teaching the stuff.
Our daily experience as a teacher is a failure. Which makes it the best job in the world. Because you never get any good at it. At one time, André Previn was the best paid film-score composer in Hollywood and one day he just walked out of his office and quit. People said ‘why did you quit this amazing job?’ And he said – because I wasn’t scared any more. Every day he was going into his office knowing his job held no challenge for him.This is something you are never going to have to worry about. This job you’re doing is so hard that one lifetime isn’t enough to master it. So every single one of you needs to accept the commitment to carry on improving our practice until we retire or die. That is the deal.”
This transcript comes courtesy of Alex Quigley here:
http://www.huntingenglish.com/2014/01/04/dylan-wiliam-every-teacher-can-improve/
