Cameron Setter

👨‍🏫 Teaching: Just like that Autumn Term is over and Christmas is round the corner. It's been a busy term with lots of ups and downs but I've continued to learn loads.  📚 Read: Jack Tavassoly-Marsh writes about how we can get the most from using mini whiteboards to check for understanding. They are such a great tool but we need to be able to use them effectively. Have a read here .  📚 Read: How do we get the most from meetings? Clarity about what the meeting is for, how to participate and how members will deal with the information afterwards will make them a lot more effective. Read more here .  🔊 Listen:  Knowledge project with John Maxwell talking leadership. He talks about this idea of evaluated experience to make us better. "Reflection turns experience into insight". Listen to it here .   🔊 Listen: Chris Williamson talking with Jake Humphrey about High Performance. Jake speaks about the lessons he's learnt from other high performers that he has sp...

👨‍🏫 Teaching: As I come to the end of my brief spell in charge of my department while my head of department has been off ill, I want to reflect on the role he plays in our department and some of the jobs I have had to do in his absence.  1. Centre of the school I didn't realise how much extra there was to be done as a Head of Department compared to a Second in Department. You are that end point to your team so when they have questions you need to have those answers or at least be able to find the answers quickly to support your team. At the same time when other departments or leaders come to your team, you are that point of contact. It's made me realise how important the middle leaders in a school actually are. They are the driving force of what goes on at a school. Everything flows through them. I can see how the pressure from Senior Leaders and pressure from the teachers below can cause a lot of stress on middle leaders.  2. Teaching and learning conversations My second re...

Fundamentally Cognitive Load Theory says “In order to increase learning, reduce extraneous load and optimise intrinsic load.” The author splits the book into 3 sections; firstly giving the reader some context around the brain and cognitive load, then he looks at ways of optimising intrinsic load before finishing the book identifying ways to reduce extraneous load.   ABCDE of Cognitive Load Theory A - Architecture of the brain . Working memory is the bottleneck to long term memory. New information takes up more working capacity than familiar information. Think about year 1 students writing individual letters up to year 11 students writing full essays. We can reduce working memory load by chunking and automating information. B - Biologically secondary knowledge , which is the focus of schooling and is relevant more recently in evolutionary terms, must be taught. Biologically primary knowledge we have evolved to acquire e.g. listen and speak, recognise faces etc, do not need inst...

👨‍🏫 Teaching:  Everything went wrong in one of my year 9 lessons this week. First, I had to move classrooms and teach in a different room, that didn't have enough tables or chairs. Second, the projector wasn't working so everything I had planned to show the class through my laptop I couldn't do. Third, all of this was happening while one of our trainees was observing me! Fortunately things worked out well in the end. I went back to whiteboard and pen and adapted my lesson so students were still able to learn. It was great to hear that the trainee thought it ended up being a really good lesson and she was impressed with how calmly I dealt with it all. Everyone likes recieving positive feedback but more to the point I wanted to make sure she could do the same in the future.  My advice to her...practice it. Put yourself in those nightmare situations in an environment that you can control. So if it does come up for real you have already had a practice and know what to do.  ...