Search results for ""Author Mary Myatt""

There are a lot of redundant processes in schools. We need to take a hard look at these and consider whether they are adding value to the core purpose of schools. We need to apply Greg McKeown's 'disciplined pursuit of less' in order to create the time and space to do deep, satisfying work on the curriculum. This means that there will be some hard choices and recognise that if we cannot do everything, we need to move to a space which acknowledges there will be trade offs. This is more than a workload issue, it is about focusing our efforts on the most important agenda item in schools today - the development of an ambitious curriculum for every child, in every school.

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Increasingly, across the system, people are talking about knowledge and curriculum. In this timely new book, Mary Myatt is at her brilliant best as she passionately argues that the solutions to overcoming achievement barriers lie in understanding the curriculum and in what children and meant to know. In order to reach coherence on the curriculum, it’s going to require teachers in schools to engage in the conversation; it’s a journey we need to share if we’re going to deliver a curriculum we understand and believe in. In a series of crystal clear chapters, Mary guides teachers and school leaders through one of the most important debates in education.

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This is a book about the things that wise leaders do. It is informed through thousands of conversations with leaders and argues that these leaders do not shy away from the tough stuff. It points to the conditions which these leaders create to allow colleagues to engage with difficult issues enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. It is taken from observations of leaders at work in a variety of settings. While these are mostly schools, these observations are checked against what is happening in wider leadership and management thinking. This book makes the case that any leadership role is concerned primarily with the relationships between individuals. It is the quality of these, whatever the size of the organisation, which make the difference between organisations which thrive, and those which stagnate. This is not to argue for soft, easy and comfortable options. Instead it considers how top leaders manage to walk the line between the impossible and the possible, between the undoable and the doable and to create conditions for productive work which transcend the difficulties which come towards us every day. Instead of dodging them, they embrace them.And by navigating high challenge, low threat, they show how others how to do the same.

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No matter what you teach, there is a 100 Ideas title for you! The 100 Ideas series offers teachers practical, easy-to-implement strategies and activities for the classroom. Each author is an expert in their field and is passionate about sharing best practice with their peers. Each title includes at least ten additional extra-creative Bonus Ideas that won't fail to inspire and engage all learners. _______________ No notice inspections are something every teacher now has to be prepared for. This accessible book provides strategies to embed into your everyday teaching to ensure your English lessons are consistently outstanding every day, whether you are being observed or not. Dip in and pick an idea to use as a starter or develop a whole lesson plan from the practical, step-by-step activities included. The ideas will help your students develop strong foundation skills in spelling, punctuation, reading and writing as well as learning how to work together, listen to each other, give great presentations and tackle and analyse different types of text. But it’s not all about work! There are strategies for inspiring in your class a love of literature and English by delving into a wide variety of texts – poetry, plays, novels, journalism and Shakespeare. There are also ideas to help you improve your teaching practice, tips on how to create the best learning environment for studying English and specific advice on how to cope with those dreaded Ofsted inspections.

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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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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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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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