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We’re Tutors not Teachers
Many clients don’t seem to understand the difference between what we do and what their child’s teacher does in school. They ask us to search for a teacher in a subject, cutting out many extremely good tutors from helping their child and often getting no offers from tutors at all as a result.
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Science and Maths Increase in Popularity
The publication of today’s A’level results has drawn attention to the fact that science and maths are becoming more popular amongst students, with an average of 3% more students taking these subjects compared with last year.
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Lesson Goals
In the assessments this is a point on which many people fail; either because they don’t provide a goal at all and just launch in to what they are teaching us, or because they say things like ‘I thought we’d look at Charles Darwin’ or ‘Classical Poetry’. While you may think the above are goals, they are not specific enough to class as such. ‘I thought we’d look at how Charles Darwin writes in the final paragraph of his On the Origin of Species and what impact this has on ...’ and ‘Today we are going to look at what it is about Ovid’s Amores that upset Augustus’ are far better goals than the former.
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Get Creative - it’s in all of us, not just the chosen few.
Steve Jobs was know for thinking outside the box. Not only in terms of product innovation but also how he reorganised his office building. Recognising that the most creative ideas came when people were relaxed he repositioned all the places where people would naturally bump into each other so that they were central in the workspace. The coffee shop, cafeteria, mailboxes and even the loos were placed right in the centre of the office building so that people would have to meet in an informal setting, encouraging interaction and creativity.
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Mind Mapping
Mind mapping helps to brand information in pupils’ brains according to an article in last weeks’ TES by Simon Porter. And it certainly seems worth a try. Every week I ask my students what features they need to look for in texts and every week it seems like I’m getting blood out of a stone.
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SOLO Taxonomy - can private tutors use such a system?
SOLO is a way of classifying understanding in a student. As a way of teaching it also allows students to classify their own level of understanding. In a planned SOLO lesson students select their own start level and then move on when they have classified their own understanding as ready to go progress to the next level.
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Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail
While the summer is here and it’s tutoring’s quiet season, why not get ahead ready for the rush in August and September? It’s always obvious if you don’t know the curriculum very well, or the board and it’s far more nerve wracking at a trial lesson if you are unsure of how the student will be assessed.
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Big Businesses Kick School Teaching Where It Hurts
Google has waded in to the debate on ICT teaching, just as the London Evening Standard did on Literacy. Both have felt it necessary to intervene in a curriculum that isn’t providing what the industries say they need.
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University of Bedfordshire criticised over PhD appeal.
The university standards watchdog has severely criticised the University of Bedfordshire after a PhD which was failed by an external examiner was awarded a pass, on appeal, by the university panel.
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