Beyond Good

Femi and Matt are joined by special guest Simon King to discuss teaching strategies and differentiation for those very top end students that we all occasionally come across.  While the conversation is focussed on extending the top end students, the principles for teaching and differentiation that Simon describes are applicable to all classes.

The themes of Matt and Femi's discussion for this episode are 'starters' and 'the starts of lessons'.  The conversation is equal parts philosophical and pragmatic, and many aspects of starters are covered in great depth.  The conversation covers the importance of starters, their utility for orientating students towards this subject as they arrive from elsewhere around the school, as a device for recap, building confidence, to facilitate a calm and effective start to the lesson, to guide thinking towards today's topic and many more elements.

In this episode of Beyond Good, Femi and Matt return to the Blue Memo to discuss the final three points.  The central themes of these points are 'challenge', 'practise' and 'sequencing'.  If you haven't already listened to the Blue Memo parts 1 and 2, it may be worth listening to episodes 3 and 4, in which the Blue Memo is introduced and the first 7 points are discussed.

In this episode Femi and Matt discuss the characteristics of a good department, visions and values, and achieving consensus within a team about what matters and why we are here.  They discuss the impact of formal 'meetings' vs informal interactions between teachers and the value of rich discussions around teaching and learning.  The conversation then pivots to the skills and attributes they each wanted to have in place before taking on head of department roles, as well as the opportunity cost of teachers spending too much time talking about resources, and the importance of being aware of your own biases and comfort zones.

This is the second of the three-part series on ‘The Blue Memo’ in which Femi and Matt cover points 4-7.  They discuss the importance of engaging all students, ensuring that no one student takes up a disproportionate amount of time at the expense of others, explanations and feedback.  Part 3 can be heard in episode 6, and you can download your own copy of the blue memo from our twitter account, or from our website.

This is the first of a three-part series on 'The Blue Memo'.  In this episode Femi introduces the blue memo, explains what it is and where it came from and then we dive deep into the first three points.  These cover the starts of lessons, the importance of revisiting taught material and what he means by 'getting out into the classroom and experiencing the learning'.  The discussion of the blue memo continues in Episode 4 and then again in Episode 6.  Download your own copy of the blue memo from the website, or from our twitter account.

In this episode of the podcast Matt and Femi discuss mentors and some of the key things they took from their mentors that have shaped them as teachers.  They discuss the idea of 'golden rules' and 'non-essential essentials', the tremendous importance of the first lesson of the year with a new group and laying the foundations for strong relationships with students for the rest of the year.

In this (inaugural) episode of the podcast, Matt and Femi set out what the podcast is and isn’t about, how they each came to teaching and why they’re so passionate about it.  They discuss what makes for good ‘raw materials’ in teaching, and how their own natural dispositions may have shaped their areas of interest, and what they each look for in new teachers.  They discuss the fundamental importance of liking and being able to engage with teenagers, the degree to which experience gained as a private tutor can be translated into classroom practise and they speculate on possible variations in the underlying passion for teaching between teachers of different age ranges and subjects.