Ron Berger

What's the point of classroom displays?

2013-07-21T11:53:30+01:00July 21st, 2013|learning|

Having broken up for the summer and feeling warm and expansive, I foolishly asked Twitter what it would like me to write about next. Michael Oxenham came back, quick as a flash with "classroom display". Dutifully, I then asked Twitter what made a good classroom display. These are some of the responses: @tim7168 Also things that make the classroom 'theirs' (primary). Lots of photos, work etc. @benking01 Examples of best-practice from students and ensuring that the work displayed is more than just 'pretty' - Must be informative. @oldandrewuk Having nothing which can be used as a projectile or cannot be easily repaired. [Health & [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 4: Practise

2013-07-19T14:12:46+01:00July 4th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

What does practice make? Well, it turns out that my mum was wrong. Doug Lemov points out in Practice Perfect that practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. What we practise we get good at. And sometimes we get very good at doing things badly. Take writing for instance. When I scribble notes I always use capital letters correctly. This isn't a boast: I just do. It would never occur to me not to, I don't even think about it. When I read students' work they invariably omit capital letters for proper nouns. Now, I rarely meet a secondary student who [...]

Project Based Learning: I did it my way

2012-09-23T21:17:38+01:00September 23rd, 2012|English, learning|

I've finally managed to cobble together my first post since starting back in September. What with starting a new job, teaching A level for the first time in over a decade and languishing in post-publication blues after the release of my (hopefully) first book, I've not had much headspace for writing and I've missed it. Hopefully, this post marks a welcome return to the blogosphere. There's so much going on that it's been hard to pick what to write about but I've settled on detailing how I've gone about solving the age old problem of what to do about everyone's favourite [...]

The art of failing

2017-03-15T09:19:13+00:00July 6th, 2012|learning|

Why on earth would we ever want to fail? Failing’s bad, right? Obviously getting something wrong, performing poorly and making mistakes is uncomfortable. But these things are a part of life. An important part. Apart from all the stuff about failure being character forming there’s the more important consideration that if we only ever experience success then maybe we aren’t trying very hard? So why are we so seduced by the tawdry allure of success? TV screens are crowded by attractive idiots who are held up as contemporary models of success but really don’t seem to have tried very hard at [...]

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