Journeys Through Teaching is a growing education blog that helps teachers stay at the cutting edge of best practice and pedagogy by building links from theory and principles into classrooms.
High Impact Teaching Strategies are a set of reliable practices which can be used to shape teaching and learning in your classroom. There are, of course, many more high impact strategies you can use too - but for today we’re focusing in on these 5. The thinking behind High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS) is to … Continue reading 5 High Impact Teaching Strategies to Support Student Growth
A few months ago we set about redesigning the way we give feedback. Whilst rubrics, standards and criteria are valuable tools to help students understand where they are at this moment in time, the link to growth isn’t always clear for every child (or teacher). Working with a few teachers we began devising, trying out … Continue reading Improving the Way we Reflect: Reflecting on ATL Skills
As mentioned in an earlier post Mark and I have been working on ways to build a community of researchers in school. We're excited to be presenting about this at the upcoming IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi. Before we could begin thinking about what this might look like in the classroom, we identified a … Continue reading Research Skills: Working towards the IB ATLs
A topic Mark and I have been focused on a lot the past few months is that of research. Specifically helping students to become researchers. Both coming from a humanities background has perhaps played a significant role in why we see this as important. The skills you need to succeed in those disciplines (formulating questions, … Continue reading Building a Community of Researchers: What does good research look like in schools?
I've written before about how proud I am of the changes we've made within our school to reporting and feedback this year. We're not claiming to be perfect, but we've made huge strides forward in our shared understanding of what we report on, how we do it, what it means and how we use that … Continue reading Reporting: Learning vs. Work
Last week we hosted the Annual AIS Kuwait Math Night, this is a big event for our school community and one which is well attended and this year was no exception. Children and their families from across the school came to participate in math games and activities, as well as view work exhibited by our … Continue reading Math Night!
If you read my recent post about my return to blogging, you’ll have seen that I’ve been on a bit of a crusade at my school to prove that ed-tech can be, should be, and is being, used to develop the communication skills of students (If you haven’t read it you can find it here). … Continue reading 4 Great Ways to Use Ed-Tech to Build Communication Skills in the Elementary Classroom
As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm soon to be moving on from my current job and to a new school, country and challenge. I'm really excited about this move for a number of personal reasons (mostly quality of life for my young son) and professional reasons (I'm moving to a much more well established … Continue reading A word about the small school
Like many teachers I have a couple of students who are reluctant readers; I try to keep them as motivated and engaged as I can using a combination of different approaches that vary from student to student and change over time as needed. I often use strategies such as praise, positive reinforcement (you've gotta love … Continue reading Motivating Readers: Book Talk
