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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
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
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
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 I
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:
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...
Aidan Severs
Dec 15, 20216 min read
Ditch The Lesson Plans; Try Learning Sequences
This article was first published in edited form in Issue 8 of HWRK Magazine . It's worth a look at that version too as it is presented...
Aidan Severs
Nov 30, 20216 min read
Flexible Lesson Design: A Model for Responsiveness and the Release of Responsibility
Flexible lesson design can often be difficult to grasp - let's face it, 30 children all with their own needs with only one or two members of staff is quite difficult to manage. This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking more about how we adjust the level of support we provide, rather than creating different lessons or tasks for different pupils. I’ve called this the Mixing Desk Model, and I've written about it here. It's often easy to resort to doing lots of whole class te
Aidan Severs
Nov 30, 20214 min read
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