Cameron Setter

👨‍🏫 Teaching: With my HOD off with COVID, this was my first full week in charge of the department. Thankfully all the teachers have pulled together and supported me. Have introduced weekly admin emails to keep everyone up to date with what is coming up in the following week and any notices I feel that they need to be aware of. It has improved the clarity of communication and I have had less questions from others about what is going on.  Finished the week with a great lesson with my year 7s converting numbers into standard form. Was lovely seeing them make links between the place value work we did at the start of the year and some of the multiplication we have done in the last week. Even spent some time talking about different number systems!  🔊 Listen: Deep dive with Ali Abdaal speaking to Grace Lordan. Ali and Grace discuss passion and motivation in your job and the secret to success. Listen here .  🔊 Listen: Climbing the stairs from PiXL pearls. Getting out of your ...

👨‍🏫 Teaching : After such a great start to my week is had ended up being very stressful. I was in Exeter for an NCETM professional development lead course on Tuesday. It's great having face to face courses and being able to discuss ideas and thinking in person, I had two key moments that got me thinking: 1. Designing professional development (PD) programmes It's obvious now I think about it, but when designing PD we need to think about what outcome do we want pupils to have? From here we can work backwards to 'in order to achieve this outcome, what must teachers change/adapt about their teaching practice?' Then finally, 'to achieve this change what should PD actually look like?' There's no point delivering PD because we think an idea is 'good' we need to be thinking about what outcomes we want to be seeing from pupils. This also then gives you a clear way of evaluating the effectiveness of your PD programme. So instead of just "I want to deve...

The dream is to teach and learn in calm, peaceful environments that are prosperous and happy, where students can succeed and learn your subject effectively. Teachers want to be free from the stress of paperwork, OFSTED and dealing with challenging behaviour.  Strickland talks about 3 factors that lead to positive impact and long term change in schools: 1. Curriculum - The Teacher is the expert of their subject, we should use professional development to enhance teacher subject knowledge. Curriculum needs to be knowledge driven, influenced by the expertise of the teacher.   - Strickland looked to 3 particular curriculum models that influenced how the curriculum is implemented in his school, namely Rosenshine, Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence and Shimamura’s MARGE model. Using these to create a whole school approach, a system driven method based on routines. As leaders we need to consider what will best fit your subject in your school's context. As Wiliam puts it “everything...

👨‍🏫 Teaching : It's been a really productive week and I've got lots of tasks done that will save me time in the future. I have combined two time management strategies to get the most out of my day/week so that once the last lesson of the day is done, I can go straight home and don't have to do any work at home! I know this may seem unachievable for most people however I definitely think you can better manage your time to be more productive.  1) Time blocking : blocking out times in my day to complete specific tasks. So for example, an hour in my week is just for completing tasks and admin around the NCETM course I am doing. I do not complete any other work during this time. I know that I have other time in the week to use for planning lessons, calling parents etc. It gives me the security that during this time I can completely focus on that one thing. This video explains more. Check out this video that explains further.  2) Batching tasks : grouping similar tasks togeth...

👨‍🏫 Teaching: I was in Birmingham Tuesday/Wednesday for part of the NCETM Secondary Mastery Specialist course. It was great seeing the rest of the cohort in person after 'virtually' meeting everyone last year. We discussed ways of adapting resources already out there, how to assess students understanding and collaborative planning. It's inspired me to start up some collaborative planning in my own department to introduce some of the concepts we have spoken about. After speaking to my Head of Department, we are going to start with Year 7 lessons. We have changed this year to focus just on Number topics in Year 7, giving more time to go into depth with the concepts, so it would be beneficial to give some extra support on how we could teach to depth. The plan is to meet up once a week to discuss the following weeks lessons. Initially I will plan the lessons myself incorporating some of the Mastery ideas I have been learning about, and then we will discuss ways of improving a...