Innovate My School - Ideas, Practices & Personal Insights

Why it’s time for teachers to get lazy

If you had said in February that we would spend the whole of Summer Term teaching from home, I would have been gobsmacked. The last term has been the strangest of my decade-long teaching career. Not all of the events that unfolded post-lockdown were unpleasant. If you believe some online ‘commentators’, teachers spent that time sitting on the couch, which I did at some points. I spent more time with ...

How to help struggling pupils catch-up

Nothing transforms a young life more than literacy. And, for a few young children in Years 1 and 2, the hours at home during lockdown might have been a blissful opportunity to devour books that they hadn’t previously had time to read. For many others, especially among the 380,000 UK schoolchildren who don’t own a single book, regular reading will simply have stopped when schools closed. With no daily reading record ...

Our whole-school approach to lockdown learning

Covid-19 had struck. We sent the children home from Roundthorn Primary Academy three days before schools closed nationally to all but key workers and vulnerable children. We’d had an outbreak; a number of staff fell ill and I was taking no chances. With little time to plan and just a few photocopied sheets in hand, we sent the children home not knowing what the immediate future might look like ...

School leader reduced to hysterical laughter

How’s your last term been?

Make 2020/21 the year of safe blended-learning

In the final months of 2019/20 schools were forced to adapt, with many attempting live-interaction classes through solutions such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts, but the inherent privacy concerns and safety issues of these meeting platforms became apparent.

Resources for remote-teaching wins

I am not the only teacher who dreaded “going back” after the Easter break, but I had more to dread than most as I had been off sick for a number of weeks before lockdown. This meant that I had no preparation time for remote learning and felt totally out of the loop, both professionally and digitally!

Summer priorities and September planning

How's your last term been? My last term in my new Assistant Head role has been somewhat different. It has consisted of responding to parents each day, Zooming my class and setting learning (Creative writing, Reading Comprehension, Grammar, Maths and Topic Learning) each week. Just want to say a big thank you to Pobble @HeyPobble and Maths Shed @mathshed for providing brilliant resources for the children and parents to use.

What the 2020/21 NQT needs to know

The teaching profession has been shaken this year by enormous numbers of PGCE teachers having been under lockdown without access to months of valuable class-based experience they would otherwise have received. The upcoming NQT year for these new teachers is going to be challenging, strange and mentally trying. Having recently gone through my own NQT year, I’ve assembled a list of the 5 things this year’s NQTs should take ...

Tackling mindfulness & compassion in the new school year

With a stressful September ahead, mindfulness and compassion are and will be more and more essential to their teacher and pupil wellbeing. There are many techniques and strategies, available for all teachers to incorporate into their lessons and interactions throughout the day, which will ensure a whole-school positive approach in the coming months with many benefits for all.

How visually-impaired kids can help education right now

Post-Brexit, and within a global pandemic, discussions around what should or should not happen in education has been both taken back to its roots, and quite simultaneously connected with innovation and future ‘ways of being’. The lockdown gave us all time to reflect and re-evaluate.

Edtech we used to implement effective remote learning

From as early as January 2020 our school’s leadership team could see we were going to have to prepare for delivering all learning and pastoral care remotely. Education during the pandemic has had to play a crucial role in engaging children whilst key worker parents continue to provide frontline services to the nation.

Teaching online safety in a post-COVID world

The COVID-19 epidemic has fundamentally changed the way we use the internet. According to Ofcom, we’re spending on average an hour longer on the internet every day than we did in 2018. This has been especially true for children, who’ve relied on video calls and online games and lessons as a way to continue learning, socialising and playing.