Richard Wilson

I have been doing some work with our P6 and P7 pupils regarding aggression. We looked at how to recognise aggression and how we can play a part in making situations better or worse. The pupils had never really made the link between emotions driving feelings and feelings driving behaviour. In the past I had relied on things like circle time to explore these issues. I have begun to develop a powerpoint that looks at the issues surrounding aggression and the part pupils can play in recognising and dealing with it in themselves and others.

Here is a link to
the powerpoint for you to see. I hope some colleagues can find the time to use it and feel free to change it and add notes to help others. I would really appreciate some feedback to allow me to improve its quality.

Have you ever wondered where some people get that unshakeable self belief and supreme confidence? Not the misplaced variety we see on shows like the x-factor and others of that ilk. Well, there is a huge body of secure evidence that tells us we can do something about this for our pupils and dare I say even ourselves, but we must teach it and teach it consistently to bring it out in all of our youngsters.

I was given seven big messages about learning recently and include them here for your comment: Continue Reading »

My project on using wiki pages to embark on some collaborative writing is taking shape. The P5 pupils I am working with have almost finished their own research topics an will be putting them into a word document to make publishing easier. I am using formative assessment techniques to make sucess criteria and get the pupils to make inroads into recognising quality and spotting plagiarism. Not always easy at this level but I feel progress is being made. This is helped by our NQT, Rachel Clark who is doing the bulk of the classwork. Like many new practitioners she already has a good handle on formative assessment and when I talk of progress in this area it is really Rachel who is doing the day to day re-inforcement and I get to do all the flash bits on a Friday! I hope that by the end of October all of the P5 work will be published in a form that the pupils themselves are happy with.

The next task will be to wait for feedback and additions to their efforts on-line. Continue Reading »