Best Practice

The death of teaching: The pen as anchor

In this six-part series, Joel Wirth takes a look at common elements of classroom practice that we might consider changing in order to achieve better lessons and better teaching. Next up is our reliance on the pen...

So. The Battle of Hastings. It has to be year 7. Every school I visit, it seems, does it then. Flicking through the books, I see they’ve also done a lesson or so on Alfred the Great, which you don’t always see, though I spot some colouring in of apparently Anglo-Saxon things which look worryingly Celtic.

The lesson unspools as so many do, following what one of my mentors called the “I do a bit, they do a bit” structure of learning. Today, the lesson objectives have been differentiated (Meeting, Above, Beyond) and GCSE equivalent grades have somehow been attached to these, revealing as much as we need to know about our profession’s on-going failure to grasp the seismic shift that 9-1 grading represented.

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