Category Archives: Teaching

A few words of targeted praise can encourage children to keep going when they’re struggling to achieve or they feel like giving up.

Most of us have bad days at work now and then: days when we’re feeling grumpy, days we’re under pressure because of an enormous workload, or days when nothing seems to go right.

But on occasion unhappiness at work may last for longer than a day. Many reasons or a combination of reasons may contribute to a sense of unhappiness in teaching. One possible cause may be disruptive behaviour by children in the class. Or we may have taken on too much work, in school or outside school, in a given year. We may perceive that we’re no good at teaching. We may have been unsuccessful in applying for a permanent job or for promotion. We may be experiencing tension with one or more colleagues. We may dislike the work of teaching, see it as lacking challenge or being monotonous, and see no way out. The conditions under which we work may have deteriorated. Or our professional unhappiness may have spilt over from personal unhappiness due to illness, relationship difficulties, financial problems, bereavement and so on. Continue reading →

Sometimes unpleasant things happen in class.

Money is stolen from your desk. Someone splashes paint on your clothes when you’re not looking. Graffiti appears on a classroom wall or desk.

You have suspicions about who committed the offence. Coercing a confession from a suspect won’t teach honesty; it might breed resentment.

Why not give space for a child to admit the misdemeanour so that they don’t lose face in front of peers? Wait for an admission until the child is ready.

Even if no one owns up, someone gets to experience the heavy weight of being dishonest.

We can only learn to be honest when we have room to be dishonest.

Some people look on spelling as a lower order skill and one whose importance is diminishing with the use of spell-checking software. However, spelling well helps you make a good impression when you write. As well as that, even though reading doesn’t necessarily help improve spellings, proficiency at spellings can help reading.

The teaching of spellings can be approached in several ways:

• Every child does not have to learn the same spellings. Children’s free writing can highlight common words that the child cannot yet spell correctly. When one teacher, Brendan Culligan, reads children’s writing, he writes out the correct spellings of some of the misspelt common words at the end of the work and allows children to choose a subset of those spellings to learn. Continue reading →