Peer Marking: Lazy Shortcut or Secret Weapon?
One of the first things I heard as a young teacher was that "the person doing the work is the person doing the learning." It's catchy. And it's the foundation of the peer-marking craze that's swept t...
Education
All posts about Education
The Loneliness of the Personalised Pathway
In the international school world, "personalised learning" is the golden ticket. Every student gets a curriculum tailored to their pace and ability. With AI, this is now possible. But lately, as I wa...
Screens at Home, Shakespeare in the Classroom
Walking around my classroom in Shanghai, it's easy to be dazzled by the tech. Every student has a high-spec laptop, and the school's Learning Management System is genuinely impressive. But sometimes ...
Can AI Save Your Sunday Roast?
I remember my first year in Shanghai, spending Sunday afternoons hunched over thirty notebooks, marking the same grammar mistakes for the thousandth time. It felt like a rite of passage. A necessary ...
Could a Law Firm Teach Us How to Run a School?
Before I moved to Shanghai to teach, I spent time in two very different worlds: London local government and the high-pressure M&A team at a corporate law firm. At the time, I thought teaching would b...
Navigating Teacher Collaboration
In the international schools here in Shanghai, collaboration isn't just a practice. It's a mantra. We're told that sharing resources and co-planning units is the key to efficiency and consistency. Bu...
Is lesson planning more effective on a week-by-week or all-in-one-go approach?
Every August, as the heat in Shanghai gets really oppressive, I find myself staring at a blank spreadsheet. The dilemma is always the same: do I spend my final week of holiday building every single r...