Category Archives: Teaching

As the school year begins it’s easy to think you’re working alone with your class with exclusive responsibility for what the children will learn this year. But their education is influenced by many parties.

Meeting with parents and guardians as a group early in the school year serves several purposes. You can introduce yourself to them, respond to questions parents and guardians have, find out about talents and skills they are willing to share with the class, and outline different ways parents and guardians can make contact during the year (via notes, e-mails, phone, text, or in person) with information or a concern about their child.

The meeting I’m describing differs from the parent-teacher meeting about individual children which is a feature in all schools. Some teachers and schools offer an additional introductory group meeting to parents at the start of the year.
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A teacher’s work is to bring about change in others. It’s often invisible.

Wouldn’t it be good to keep in one volume a curated record of children’s creative work done in class over the course of a school year?

It could be held in digital or hard-copy form or a combination of both and could include samples of stories written, poems composed, problems solved, sketches drawn, photographs of models made, links to videos of performances, excerpts from projects completed and so on.

Any child’s work could be included in the class record on the recommendation of the teacher or the child’s classmates.

Imagine if a teacher compiled one such volume for each year of their teaching career.

In every setting and situation we have expectations about what is possible and what is not.

We expect a judge in a courtroom to be fair and impartial. We know that most clergy won’t tolerate people cursing in a church. We’re not surprised when a librarian asks us to be quiet in a library.

But sometimes we are surprised because our experience differs from what we expected.

A serious-looking London Bobby agrees to pose with us for a selfie. A flight attendant departs from the standard script for pointing out the safety features on a plane. A priest personalises and sings from the altar a song for a couple on their wedding day.

As children enter a new class, they have perceptions of their teacher and the teacher’s role in their learning. Their perceptions may be about teachers generally or they may be specific to the teacher they have this year. Continue reading →

“Wasn’t there a lot of fuss about remembering 1916 in schools for the last couple of months?” a friend, who is not a teacher, observed. Many of us have noticed that all over Ireland children have been coming home from school talking about the Easter Rising; schools organised concerts and other commemorative activities to mark the centenary. “How can schools justify spending so much time on one topic this year just because it’s 100 years since the Easter Rising?” the friend asked.

For someone who doesn’t know how teaching works, that might seem like a reasonable question, along the lines of why children spend so much time rehearsing for a school concert, training for a football league final, or preparing for sacraments in religious schools. Continue reading →

It amazes me to observe how quickly coderdojos have become established all around the world. I can think of no other not-for-profit educational initiative that has caught on so globally so quickly. Since July 2011, dojos have appeared in places like Tokyo, Kilkenny and Rotterdam. But for educators coderdojos illustrate how features of constructivism can work in practice. Let’s look at some of their key elements. Continue reading →