As part of my ‘role’, I’ve been working with the GAT coordinator to develop a year 7 evening. I’ll do a short session on memory, I’m going to look at mind maps in more detail and if time go over the loci method for memorising information. Might be useful for those developing revision presentations, though the Shake and Vac starter might need adapting.

I’ve just begun to read Ken Robinson’s new book, earlier I listened to his latest R.S.A. talk, as always, much food for thought. Alternatively watch below…

By Barry Schwartz, this hits the mark with me on several levels.

As discovered via today’s TES and Behaviour4Learning website…

Thanks to Rob Chambers for emailing me about this new blog, some useful ideas already related to SMART boards… which I’ll investigate over the coming weeks.

Thanks to Alan for updating my presentation with the new features… (not sure what’s gone off with the first slide?)

Like many schools we have been considering the adaptation of our curriculum content and organisation, to ensure the continued success of our students during the transition from primary to secondary education.

As a part of this I produced a piece of quantitative research ( 300 kb pdf ) about the experience of our present year 7 cohort, in order to see whether there were any specific trends related to the students that were struggling with the transition.

As part of my role, I’ve suggested teaching and learning strategies from the exercise. I feel rather than curriculum reorganisation, there are a number of potential practitioner based strategies, that could be used to ease the introduction of some our students into secondary education.

I wondered whether anyone would like to contribute their wisdom. Two points really.

• From your own experience do you recognise the conclusions I have drawn?  Are the suggestions appropriate? Could you suggest others?
• Have you adapted the Year 7 curriculum to aid transition? How successful do you think the strategies used have been?

Part of my holiday reading was Malcolm Gladwell’s new book ‘Outliers’ – one quote particularly rang true with me.

Especially as I was doing a bit of active research related to transition, more to come later.

I’m also tried working out if I’ve completed 10,000 hours of teaching yet… another two thousand to go!

I’ve started to collate some of my favourite teaching and learning quotes on my Flickr account.

*updated the quote now- typo.

My Classroom, II

Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

Just liked this photo, particularly the back wall comment….