I’m aware of how that sounds, but do please hear me out. When I was a full timer with the ALI, and then as an HMI with Ofsted, and even when I’d left the big O and was contracted by LSIS, I use to run the ‘Preparing for Inspection’ nominee training events. Week in, week out for nearly a decade. So you might be surprised to know that I’ve never offered any inspection-preparation training as part of my own work, […]

How easy is it to fall into the trap of simply looking at our syllabus, looking at our empty scheme of work and simply marrying the two – then thinking we’ve got curriculum planning, and ‘intent’, sorted? The issues this causes are often exacerbated by ‘thick’ schemes of work; you know the ones I mean? Those comprehensive proformas that demand you set out all of your teaching, assessment, differentiation, literacy development, numeracy development, equality and diversity integration, health and safety, […]

When learners’ progress isn’t as fast as you’d like, do you lean on staff to make the targets they write SMARTer? Or if you are the teacher/assessor, do you have that sneaking suspicion that SMART target setting doesn’t really produce the intrinsically motivated learners you want? In next week’s open session – The Art of Using Target Setting (Wednesday pm, 17 November) – we’ll be taking a surprising look at the problematic role of SMART in learner target setting. I’ll […]

What do you think about your own learning-outcome writing? It’s fascinating to hear the range of teachers’ responses to this question. Too often, I hear: ‘I usually write those once I know what I’m going to do’. There’s good and bad in this answer. The ‘good’ is that this teacher probably knows their subject very well and doesn’t feel the need to spend much, if any, time on lesson planning. We need this level of vocational expertise in FE! But […]