We’re nearly at the 100 takeaways mark. Amazing! For TOT100 I’m going to be featuring some of the fave blogs and resources from the most-featured contributors to TOT. But for this week, we’re doing things somewhat the opposite way round. We’re focussing on some of the lesser-heard voices in blogging and people who haven’t been featured in TOT before. But don’t let that discourage you, there’s some serious quality here!

Read Takeaway 1 below (with Tom Sherrington) for more context, then read on through Takeaways 2-6 for some tasty new blogs!

Enjoy 🙂

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Blog Amplifier: A google form to get new blogging voices heard!, via @TeacherHead

Tom Sherrington has always been a wonderful amplifier of voices within the edu-blogo/twittersphere. He’s also a particular support to newer bloggers and tweeters who are just getting started sharing their ideas in this space.

To this end, Tom has just created a great google form that can be used to submit blogs that you’ve written, and associated tweets. This is a great way to cut through the Twitter algorithm and get your new blog somewhere where people wouldn’t see it otherwise.

In an effort to help boost the signal further, I’ve dedicated takeaways 2 through 6 this week to some of my fave blogs from rows 1-37 of the google form. I’ll keep checking this in future weeks to see what else pops up. I suggest checking out the results for yourself too, there’s likely something in there that interests you that I haven’t chosen to highlight. Nice work Tom!

Amplified – Developing a teacher culture of deliberate practice, via @DanHudson84

Teaching requires performance, and we get better at performance (and most things really), through deliberate practice. That’s why approaches to professional development that emphasise actually practicing new teaching techniques are so effective (an approach pioneered in many ways by Doug Lemov.

This inspiring post by Dan Hudson lays out exactly how this can be done. This post is exquisite!

Amplified – The Hochman method: Sentence level instruction in the History classroom, via @MrVallanceTeach

This is a fantastic post about how to specifically teach writing in the context of history. A student’s ability to eloquently communicate is fundamentally dependent upon the sentence structures that they know how to fluently use. If we explicitly teach these structures, students will have them. This blog post provides excellent examples.

Amplified – Bias: two studies and some thoughts, via @rmcenta

This is a great post exploring racial bias in schools. It reports on two studies, one focusing upon racial bias in grading scales, and the other from course counselors.

One of the most interesting bits of this blog for me was the fact that bias showed up for some people who showed no bias from an implicit bias test! Also important was the way in which marking with a rubric eliminated the bias.

Well worth checking out!

Amplified – Three Essential Strategies for building Classroom Culture, via @MrRRBurns

This post includes a great discussion of three key strategies that can be used to generate a powerful classroom culture. These are all Doug Lemov’s techniques, but @MrRRBurns offers some nice reflections on them, even if you’re familiar with them.

Amplified – Thoughts on the ‘core and the hinterland' as applied to Psychology, via @PaulCline_psy

If you haven’t come across the idea of core vs. hinterland curriculum yet, this post is worth a look. It’s also worth a look if you’re keen for a fun retrieval-style review activity in psych that could also be adapted to other subjects!

New post: Coaching on the Continuum – Instructional Coaching and Cognitive Load Theory

I’ve been thinking a lot about coaching recently, and following a bunch of posts from prominent bloggers on the topic. Here’s my first post on coaching, relating it to CLT, and suggesting its place within professional development more widely!

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