Search results for ""Author John Tomsett""

Too many of our state schools have become scared, soulless places. John Tomsett draws on his extensive experience and knowledge and calls for all those involved in education to find the courage to develop a leadership-wisdom which emphasises love over fear. Creating a truly great school takes patience. Ultimately, truly great schools don't suddenly exist. You grow great teachers first, who, in turn, grow a truly great school. There is a huge fork in the road for head teachers: one route leads to executive headship across a number of schools and the other takes head teachers back into the classroom to be the head teacher. John strongly believes that if the head teacher is not teaching, or engaged in helping others to improve their teaching, in their school, then they are missing the point. The only thing head teachers need obsess themselves with is improving the quality of teaching, both their colleagues' and their own. This Much I Know about Love Over Fear is an authentic personal narrative of teaching, leadership and discovering what really matters. It gets to the heart of what is valuable in education and offers advice for those working in schools. Also by John Tomsett: This Much I Know about Mind Over Matter, ISBN 9781785831683.

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In 1991 Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum published 'Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible'. Nearly a quarter of a century later John Tomsett encountered their paper and since then, it has influenced his teaching immeasurably. Collins et al. believed that 'domain (subject) knowledge … provides insufficient clues for many students about how to actually go about solving problems and carrying out tasks in a domain'. They believed that you had to make expert subject thinking visible to students. Consequently, Tomsett developed a number of techniques which made his expert subject thinking visible to his students, to great effect. Beyond his own practice, the principles behind Collins et al’s paper have been woven throughout Huntington School in York, where Tomsett is headteacher, a research school whose teachers are committed to developing evidence-informed classroom practice. In this book, a number of Huntington School teachers discuss, in a series of brief essays, what they consider to be the expert thought processes specific to their individual subject domains. They explain in detail how they use cognitive apprenticeship techniques 'in action' to make their disciplinary thinking visible and help their students learn those same expert thought processes. This book is a priceless contribution to the current debate about the curriculum and how it is taught in our schools.

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Tomsett interweaves his formative and professional experience with strategies for addressing students' mental health issues and insights from his interviews with high profile thinkers on the subject including Professor Tanya Byron, Natasha Devon, Norman Lamb, Tom Bennett, Claire Fox and Dr Ken McLaughlin. The book is replete with truths about the state of children's mental well-being, about creating a school culture where everyone can thrive and about living in the shadow of his mother's manic depression. With his typical mixture of experience, wisdom and research-based evidence, Tomsett explains how he manages the pressure of modern day state school headship in a climate where you are only as good as your last set of examination results, a pressure which acutely affects staff and students too. He outlines his strategies for mitigating this pressure and turning the tide of students' mental health problems. The autobiographical narrative modulates between self-effacing humour and heart-wrenching stories of his mother's life, blighted by mental illness. His professional reflections are a wisdom-filled blend of evidence-based policy and decades of experience in teaching and school leadership. Tomsett writes with genuine humility. His prose is beautiful in its seeming simplicity. When you pick up one of his books you will find you have read the first fifty pages before you have even noticed: surely the hallmark of truly great writing. Topics covered include: the real state of the nation's mental health, the perfect storm that is precipitating a mental health crisis in schools, the problems of loose terminology what do we really mean when we talk about a mental health epidemic? and poor understanding of mental health problems and mental illness, the disparity between mental and physical health in public discourse, treatment and funding, beginning the conversation about mental health, the philosophical and psychological principles underpinning the debate, strategies to support students in managing their own mental health better, resilience, growth mindset, mindfulness, grit, failure and mistakes, coping with pressure, York's school well-being workers project, evidence-based strategies that have worked in Huntington School, metacognitive strategies for improving exam performance, interviews with professionals in the field, the reality of living with a parent with a serious mental illness, self-concept and achievement, perfectionism, the relationship between academic rigour and therapeutic education and, significantly, what the research says, what the experts say and what Tomsett's experience says about averting a mental health crisis in schools. Suitable for teachers, leaders and anyone with an interest in mental health in schools. Also by John Tomsett: This Much I Know about Love Over Fear ISBN 9781845909826.

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Schools need to have purchase on the curriculum: why they teach the subjects beyond preparation for examinations, what they are intending to achieve with the curriculum, how well it is planned and enacted in classrooms and how they know whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to. Fundamental to this understanding are the conversations between subject leaders and their line managers. However, there is sometimes a mismatch between the subject specialisms of senior leaders and those they line manage. If I don’t know the terrain and the importance of a particular subject, how can I talk intelligently with colleagues who are specialists? This book sets out to offer some tentative answers to these questions. Each of the national curriculum subjects is discussed with a subject leader and provides an insight into what they view as the importance of the subject, how they go about ensuring that knowledge, understanding and skills are developed over time, how they talk about the quality of the schemes in their departments and what they would welcome from senior leaders by way of support. We have chosen this way of opening up the potentially difficult terrain of expertise on one side and relative lack of expertise on the other, by providing these case studies. They are suggested as prompts rather than the last word. Informed debate is, after all, the fuel of curriculum development. And why Huh? Well, 'Huh?' may be John's first response when he walks into a Year 8 German class but, in fact, we chose 'Huh' as the title of our book as he is the Egyptian god of endlessness. As Claire Hill so eloquently comments in her chapter, “Curriculum development is an ongoing process; it’s not going to be finished, ever.” And we believe that 'Huh' captures a healthy and expansive way of considering curriculum conversations.

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If we do not ensure, first and foremost, that our teachers are feeling physically and mentally well, they cannot be their best for their students. Consequently, a school which does not prioritise staff wellbeing is disadvantaging its own students. 'Students first' is a misplaced sentiment: the best thing for students is a happy, healthy, motivated, well-trained, expert staff. By putting staff first you are providing for students the one thing which will help them make good progress in their learning: truly great teaching. Whilst it is easy to say that schools would not exist if it were not for the students, the glib converse is that without truly great school staff, the students would not be taught. What we need – as recruiting subject specialist teachers, school leaders and specialist support staff becomes increasingly difficult – is a revolution in how we treat our school staff. We have to put our staff before our students because it is the only hope we have of securing what our students need most: a world class education. The longer our schools are populated with hypoxic adults, we imperial all our futures. What follows is a blueprint for the school system which puts our school staff before students.

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Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration. He is the deity Mary Myatt and John Tomsett have adopted as their god of the school curriculum. Their first book in the Huh series focused upon how school practitioners design the Key Stage 3 curriculum. Its popularity prompted calls from many quarters for a similar book on the primary curriculum. Supported by their primary colleagues, Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma & Emma Turner, Mary and John interviewed over 30 primary practitioners about how they design the primary curriculum. Considering the diverse nature of primary schools in this country, it’s not surprising that they were soon confronted with numerous context-dependent curriculum complexities. Designing the curriculum for small primary schools, for instance, means solving the conundrum of teaching the same subject at the same time to three different year groups in one class. The conversations confirmed that shaping a primary school curriculum is a tricky business! The wisdom gleaned from the genuine experts Mary and John interviewed was limitless. The material was so important it meant that they had too much for a single volume. Twenty-one of those thirty-plus conversations comprise the book Primary Huh, which focused upon the curriculum of each individual subject from EYFS to Year 6. In this companion book, Primary Huh 2, Mary and John give a platform to practitioners who lead on the broader issues of primary curriculum design, including, amongst other things: shaping the curriculum for mixed-age classes; designing and implementing a cross-MAT curriculum; building the “cradle to career” curriculum; timetabling; assessment; transition, and diversity. Primary Huh 2 is riven through with authentic voices grappling with the endless challenge of providing our children with a rich, challenging, ambitious, beautiful curriculum.

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There’s plenty to do when planning the curriculum in primary schools. If it feels daunting, then one of the most helpful things is to talk to other people about how they have developed the curriculum for their particular subject or key stage.This is what John Tomsett and Mary Myatt have done. After the secondary ‘Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders’ was published, they were flooded with requests to produce a primary version. They enlisted the help of renowned primary specialists, Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner to have conversations with primary teachers and key stage co-ordinators who are doing great curriculum development work.Each chapter provides insights into the importance of individual subjects and the unique contribution each makes to pupils’ cognitive and personal development. The subject chapters discuss the steps colleagues take to ensure that there is a coherent thread across the year groups, as the discrete subjects deliver, collectively, the primary curriculum. These conversations show how the craft of creating a rich, challenging curriculum for every subject is not a quick fix. This is a nuanced piece of work, and there are many ways of approaching it. Each chapter also contains links to subject associations and helpful resources. Primary Huh has been written for subject leaders and key stage co-ordinators; it has also been written for senior leaders, as they prepare to have supportive conversations with their colleagues who are responsible for curriculum development. Primary Huh is offered as a prompt rather than the last word. Informed debate is, as they say, the fuel of curriculum development.And why have John and Mary called it ‘Huh’? Well, John discovered that Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration, and they thought that was a pretty good metaphor for their work on the curriculum!

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Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration. He is the deity Mary Myatt and John Tomsett have adopted as their god of the curriculum. Their Huh series of books focuses on how practitioners design the curriculum for the young people in their schools.The Huh project is founded on conversations with colleagues doing great work across the education sector. In SEND Huh, Mary Myatt and John Tomsett discuss curriculum provision for pupils with additional needs with some of the leading experts in the field.Mary and John interviewed pupils, parents, teachers, headteachers, CEOs, educational consultants and lecturers. They then edited the transcriptions of those interviews to provide an ambitious, thoughtful, nuanced and challenging vision of what the best possible provision looks like for children with additional learning needs.The challenging conversations that comprise SEND Huh paint an inspiring picture that is hugely hopeful for the future of SEND curriculum provision in our schools.

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