Collaborative Schools Network

You cannot have a good school if you don’t have good teaching. The whole purpose of our partnership is to improve the quality of teaching in our school. Improving school buildings or installing new equipment is easy, but changing the teaching habits of a lifetime is the real challenge. We’re trying to help teachers make … Continue reading Video – this is what (quite) good teaching looks like

The biggest problem many of our teachers face is this; they think their responsibility is simply to teach. It is the students’ responsibility to learn. Their task is to complete the textbook. And if they have done this, then they have done their job, regardless of whether the students have learned anything. The only question … Continue reading Our #1 teaching problem

I recently asked the teachers to do unit tests with their students. We analyse the results not just by student, but by question too. That way we can see which topics/questions the students struggle with, and re-teach them. This ideas is taken from Leverage Leadership – an excellent book for anyone interested in school improvement.   … Continue reading Teach, Test, Re-teach, Re-test

We organised a wonderful community event to celebrate Teacher’s Day and the inauguration of our new school building.

Probably the second biggest challenge our teachers face is teaching students of different abilities, in the same classroom. Our students’ abilities range widely, but our teachers have only ever taught ‘to the middle’. That middle is generally whatever is in the textbook, so anyone who is above the level of the textbooks is bored, and anyone … Continue reading Same class – Different abilities

Most government teachers see their job as simply to teach five lessons. When we arrived at Jana Uddhar, this culture was so ingrained that a teacher who did not have a lesson first period, was not expected to turn up at school until second period. And a teacher who did not have a lesson last … Continue reading The whole school, the whole day