nikki able

As a regular attender of #EducationFest, I know that I will leave every year feeling re-energised and inspired, but more importantly, informed.   As we know though, a one off conference does not lead to change in performance and so an important part of ensuring that this incredible CPD has an impact on my practice is to spend some time reflecting on my top takeaways. This year I have decided to write 3 mini blogs rather than one big blog post, with each post focusing on a different area of my practice and this one is about my learning as a senior leader. The first session I attended (after the brilliantly entertaining Hugh Dennis) was Daisy Christodolou who was discussing life after levels 5 years on.   This was a brilliant presentation that began by questioning whether the decision to remove levels was the right one.   She absolutely convinced me that it was by showing exactly how inadequate levels and associated descriptors had been at helping us to measure students progres

As a regular attender of #EducationFest, I know that I will leave every year feeling re-energised and inspired, but more importantly, informed.   As we know though, a one off conference does not lead to change in performance and so an important part of ensuring that this incredible CPD has an impact on my practice is to spend some time reflecting on my top takeaways. This year I have decided to write 3 mini blogs rather than one big blog post, with each post focusing on a different area of my practice and this one is about my learning as someone responsible for the curriculum and assessment practices of a department. For reasons that are irrelevant to this blog, next year I will be deputy head and also subject leader for RE.   I am pretty happy about that for two reasons.   Firstly, I only spent 18 months as HoD before taking on a new role and it was one of my favourite roles.   Secondly, because it is useful as   senior leader to see my own leadership decisions through a sli

As a regular attender of #EducationFest, I know that I will leave every year feeling re-energised and inspired, but more importantly, informed.   As we know though, a one off conference does not lead to change in performance and so an important part of ensuring that this incredible CPD has an impact on my practice is to spend some time reflecting on my top takeaways. This year I have decided to write 3 mini blogs rather than one big blog post (although there may be more to come), with each post focusing on a different area of my practice and this one is about my learning as a classroom practitioner. I am going to focus this piece exclusively on the session led by Nick Rose, a really interesting session entitled ‘what can psychology tell us about learning?'   I knew a lot of what his talk contained from my degree study of psychology BUT I am not applying it in my own classroom.   So here is a short summary of the key points that Rose reminded me about psychology and that I

For my most recent MA assignment, I chose to focus on teacher wellbeing.   For the last two years I have worked with staff to raise awareness of mental health issues in the young people we teach.   The further I have looked into this area, the more I have realised that student wellbeing and teacher wellbeing are two sides of the same coin (Roffey, 2012).   I invited staff from one school to respond to a questionnaire that sought to identify what teacher wellbeing is, to collect a snapshot of teacher wellbeing from the school and to make recommendations of next steps for SLT.    The first issue I encountered in the research was in establishing a working definition of teacher wellbeing.   Much of the literature concluded that it was a subjective term and this almost seemed to minimise its importance and yet, as Danna and Griffith point out “an individual’s experience at work…affects the person while he or she is at work.   In addition these experiences ‘spill over’ into non-work do