I’ve been thinking about an underappreciated element of professional development.

In general, CPD is provided through inset, staff meetings and department meetings and this is great

Through engaging with new ideas and research I am likely to improve my practice.

However...

The dialogue chapter of ‘Sentence Models for Creative Writing’ by Chris Youles is ideal for any Year 6 teachers who are concerned about the increased focus on using dialogue to convey character and advance the action 👌🏻👌🏻

It’s been too long since I spent money on books…🤓

Spending today marking some Year 6 writing and reflecting on the relationship between reading and writing outcomes. Weirdly, I appear to have a handful of fairly decent writers who I don’t think will pass the reading paper 🤯

What’s really interesting here is that if pupils struggle most with pronouns for cohesion, then they must tell us something about their ability to comprehend text. Misattributing a pronoun to the noun is seriously going to confuse a situational model.

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Thoroughly enjoyed this afternoon’s trip to the local high school to see their performance of Matilda the Musical - so many ex pupils really shining on the stage 🤩🎵

What words do children encounter when they read independently? Read our new QJEP paper analysing the language in children's books (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17…); and for an accessible blog post (rastlelab.com/post/what-word…). Congrats to lead author Maria Korochkina!

The government wants to cut 'unproductive tasks' from teacher workload.

What happens if you ask 9,000 teachers to give examples of the unproductive tasks they spend most time on?

🧵 Here's what we found via Teacher Tapp ....

Ofsted have released their English subject report. Some brief thoughts on my first impressions...

gov.uk/government/pub…

Braving teaching plural possessive apostrophes tomorrow. Pray for me.

Thoroughly enjoyed showcasing our KS2 catch up provision with one of our governors today. Can’t help but get quite emotional listening to some of our pupils, who have had to work pretty hard on their reading journey, reading aloud with such confidence.

Looking forward to spending most of the day refining our music curriculum 🤓🎵

At Steplab, we're *obsessed* with codifying great teaching.

Eg. we've just spent 3 months re-organising our steps around a 'simple model of teaching'.

This is to help...

A. Coaches make better diagnoses
B. Teachers develop more expertise

A geeky thread:

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This has slightly blown my mind to be honest…

Walked into the library at lunchtime today to find one of our slowest progress readers reading a novel to a few other children. Watching pupils discover the joy of books, after many years of finding reading challenging, really is one of my favourite things about this job 🤓

Fighting off this flu bug with some chill time…

Top morning…

After recommendations for handwriting schemes - Sophie Bartlett Christopher Such could you be of any assistance? Retweets appreciated.