The (Passionately) Boring Teacher

I have a confession to make: for a large part of my career I disliked, dreaded, and often flagrantly avoided marking books. My trusty trolley often stayed in the car all weekend or, when brought into the house, it sat there as a conspicuous reminder that I should be working. Even when I did eventually start on ‘the pile’, I often felt that my comments were repetitive and, at worst, were simply an attempt to get through the set as quickly as possible, rather than actually give effective feedback. This whole process left me wracked with guilt: I desperately wanted to help pupils to improve, but I couldn’t seem to be able to bring myself to do it. Fortunately, last year my head teacher recommended “Making Every Lesson Count” by Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby. While reading the chapter on feedback, I came across a section named “What is the quickest way of speeding up my marking?” and, to put it bluntly, my mind was blown. What struck me most was that this chapter was titled "Feed...

I’m lucky enough that over the past three years I have worked in a school and a department which encourage teachers to regularly read books and blogs to improve their pedagogy and to develop their teaching philosophy. During this period, a number of books and blogs, such as Daniel Willingham’s excellent “Why Don’t Students Like School?”, James Theobald’s “The 5 worst education arguments by graphics” and, more recently, Ben Newmark’s blog about the use of empathy in history (“Never Live Like Common People”), have caused me to think carefully about the purpose of education and how I implement this in my classroom. Whenever I’m planning lessons, I always like to go back through my archives to see if there’s anything I can use to save time. Unfortunately, even when looking at lessons from as early as two years ago, this has recently resulted in me loudly proclaiming “…I actually taught this rubbish?!” while I look through presentations. After some thought, I realised that my apparen...