Curios of the week #109

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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This week saw me travel to England with the boss to conduct some interviews for teaching positions at Clarendon. It’s always a little sad leaving my family but I will have the opportunity to catch up with my parents and sister as part of the trip. It is also great to be back in England. A few UK residents have been insisting to me that it has all gone to the dogs, but I am more optimistic. London is as vibrant as ever and Britain still has a lot going for it, not least in terms of the deep reserves of intellect it can draw upon. Perhaps a little more self-confidence is part of the solution.

It was also the last week of term and student-parent-teacher interviews were the big event. We now have a two week term break for teachers and students to refresh and recharge.

This week’s Curios include lorry drivers, luxury beliefs, critical thinking and much more.

Video of the week

At Clarendon, we have a School Improvement Group that meets to plan professional learning and run focused projects. There are a number of themes that we try to regularly revisit though professional learning and for our professional learning day at the start of Term 2, we have decided to revisit explicit teaching.

A School Improvement Group meeting was scheduled for first thing on Monday morning which just so happened to be when a bunch of new videos produced by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) dropped. One of these was on explicit teaching:

We therefore spent a few minutes watching this video together and it was great. Some of the objectives for our professional learning, such as the importance of teacher modeling and thinking aloud, are explicitly addressed. We are going to set it as one of the ‘readings’ we ask teachers to complete in preparation for the professional learning day.

Retraction of the week

Have you ever written a harsh open letter about someone and then, within a couple of days, retracted it and sent it down the memory hole? No, me neither. It’s weird.