Review of 2017

At this time of year it is good to reflect on the positives from 2017. Although there are always stresses and hard times, it is vitally important to always bear in mind the positives. Looking back this has been a good year for me (though at times it didn't always feel that way). In this post I am going to reflect on the positives, both professionally and personally, from 2017.

Professionally
​This has been my first full year as Teaching and Learning Coordinator, leading the CPD of 120 teachers in our Upper School, and coordinating with my counterparts in Lower School and Early Years. Some of the highlights of this role have been:

• ​Organising my first external INSET, which was hugely successful and reinvigorated the staff after a few years without such sessions.
• Setting up a T&L blog to share ideas and reblog interesting posts from around the edu-world. I have largely used this to disseminate reviews of articles and research I have been reading (see below for more on this), but also started to use it to share classroom ideas. I have plans for next year to encourage more staff to write blogs to share with the whole staff body.
• Restructuring our Collaborative Projects system so that staff chose to work in one of 12 groups focused on a specific area of pedagogy, and giving them a fixed meeting time for this. Next year this is going to be further developed with dedicated cross-curricular project meetings once a month and dedicated departmental T&L meetings once a month as well. So there will be a dedicated T&L time for all staff once a fortnight, and most importantly dedicated time for departments to discuss subject specific pedagogy. In the long run I aim to have a session once a week, along a similar line to this post by Harry Fletcher-Wood.
• Running a very successful Collaborative Project Fair, where each of the collaborative project groups ran a "stall" to show what they had achieved throughout the year in their group. 
• I have bought a large number of educational books, and set up a T&L Library in our staffroom, alongside a noticeboard, mainly with images from the excellent Oliver Caviglioli (I have even tried making a few of my own!).

On top of all this I have been using much of my assigned time to do further educational research and to break this down into blog posts on the research. This has been massively helped by listening to the amazing Mr Barton Maths Podcast on my walk to and from work each day, as well as using his list of educational research articles as a starting point. I have also read the amazing "Why Don't Students Like School" by Daniel T. Willingham and "Seven Myths About Education" by Daisy Christodoulou, and have a very long list of books I want to get through in 2018! I have particularly enjoyed reading about John Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory, and the blog by Greg Ashman has been a revelation for this. Another key new finding was the work of the Learning Scientists, on effective study strategies, and the paper "Strengthening the Student Toolbox" by John Dunlosky was enlightening. The teacherhead blog by Tom Sherrington and the Effortful Educator blog by Blake Harvard are two other blogs I have come across this year that have been very useful and interesting. For next year I am going to focus some more attention on memory, in particular the work of Robert Bjork on Desirable Difficulties and his Theory of Disuse. Also, I will be trying to bring "The Principles of Instruction" by Barak Rosenshine to the attention of as many colleagues as possible.

Although I have a responsibility for Teaching and Learning, my main job is still as a teacher of Mathematics. In January we got our IGCSE results, and my Additional Maths class got one of the best set of results our school has seen. This year I finished teaching IB Higher Level for the first time, supervised 2 Extended Essays, started teaching IB Mathematical Studies for the first time and organised a Maths Week lunchtime fair. I also lead the department in participating in the excellent Global Maths Week, and setup a room to explore the exploding dots problem when our new Maths block was opened. In the classroom, I have improved my own practice through my research and deliberate practice, incorporating problem-pairs, working on the clarity of my explanations, and thinking carefully about the examples I use. There is still a long way to go, but this year I felt for the first time that I was on the right path to improving the learning of my students. 

Website
​My main site has taken a bit of a back seat this year as I released my new mixed topic generators, where you can create questions to project or print on (at time of publishing) 49 different topics. I have also created a class website which is still very much under construction, but will provide links to videos, as well as all class materials (including pdfs of SMART board files), for my IGCSE and IB classes.

Personal
​It has been a good year (on the whole) personally too. In January we went to Japan for a month's holiday, which was amazing, and ticked off the fourth Disney park from our list (California, Orlando, Paris and Tokyo done, just Hong Kong and Shanghai to go)! In March, my wife and I celebrated being together for 10 years, and in August we had our fourth wedding anniversary. In July I became a Godfather for the first time, and then in November I became a father! Since then my whole life has changed, and I am very grateful to be in the southern hemisphere so I get to spend 2 whole months at home with my son when he is so young.

All in all, 2017 has treated my family and I pretty well. I hope all my readers can think of some of the positive things that have happened to them this year. Here's hoping 2018 brings as much good fortune!