planning | Aidan Severs

Along with being a primary school teacher and leader, blogging is where this all started for Aidan. If it wasn't for his passion for writing and sharing his learning and experiences, he wouldn't be working as an education consultant with schools across the country today. Shared best practice should be available to all and here on the Aidan Severs Consulting blog you can get ideas for making a difference in your own school. The blog is also a great place to learn exactly the kind of work that Aidan can partner with your school on.

Task Setting: Adopt, Adapt or Create?

When it comes to planning and resourcing lessons you have three broad options: Adopt Adapt Create I'd have loved to have shoehorned another ad- word in there, but 'create' is the one. Adopt These days there are a plethora of great lesson resources available to teachers. Some of them are even free. Sometimes it's just a case of using one of them. However, the writers of those resources don't know your class, your school and your needs, so however hard they try, they might not

Teacher Development

Aidan Severs

Jan 28, 20253 min read

From SEND To Greater Depth: Taking Everyone On The Journey (And Getting Them All To The Destination)

Imagine your next unit of work as a journey into a city centre. In this post I'll use a journey into the centre of London because it was when working with a school there that I started to use this analogy. You want all your pupils to experience a visit to Buckingham Palace, so you plan a route on the tube. You plan the best route - its economical, its efficient, and, after checking the tube map for stops with wheelchair access, its accessible to all pupils. But you know there

Inclusivity

Aidan Severs

Dec 10, 20245 min read

Why Should Teachers Complete Tasks Before Pupils Do?

One of the things I advocate for when training teachers on planning is that teachers should have a go at the work they are going to be asking the pupils to complete. There are several reasons for this: So that they understand the potential difficulties that children might encounter The 'curse of knowledge' strikes when you know a lot about something but find it difficult to imagine how hard it might be for someone less knowledgable to understand it. Usually we don't eveb real

Teaching

Aidan Severs

Jul 16, 20243 min read

Backwards Planning: What I Got Wrong

Here's the resource that this blog post refers to - you can download it for free below: In the old iteration of the above planning framework, I had the following prompts in the very last step (step 5): Who are the children who will need extra learning steps prior to the ones outlined above? Who are the children who will need extra learning steps following the ones outlined above (NSFD)? In all my recent work around providing for pupils with SEND I have realised how mistaken

Inclusivity

Aidan Severs

Feb 20, 20242 min read

Featured Article: Interleaving: What Is It And How Can It Improve Memory And Learning In The Maths Classroom?

Here's an article I wrote for Third Space Learning about interleaving. It was fascinating to read the research on this strategy and to think through its implications for the classroom. You can read the whole thing here: https://thirdspacelearning.com/blog/interleaving/ If you would like Aidan to work with your school or organisation, you can get in touch here , or by using the links below:

Curriculum

Aidan Severs

Feb 19, 20241 min read

Forensic Assessment

As teachers we are all too familiar with the concept of assessment and its importance. We know that without assessment there is no...

Learning

Aidan Severs

Dec 15, 20216 min read

The Anne Robinson Curriculum: No Weak Links Allowed

Lekha Sharma recently wrote a short but very provocative blog post about the connectedness of the primary curriculum. It prompted an interesting discussion on Twitter between some people who know their stuff and it prompted me to write this. My other prompt was an afternoon of lessons that I taught in a year 4 class. This post is not about my teaching, or even about pedagogical choices, it's more simply about how a well-designed cross-curricular approach to curriculum desig

Curriculum

Aidan Severs

Dec 3, 20218 min read