Posts by Mark Taylor
Punctuation Mats
Do your pupils struggle to use punctuation accurately?
The accompanying activity sheets and display resources also encourage them to use perfect punctuation every time!
To celebrate our English & Literacy season TeachingPacks.co.uk have generously given you the opportunity to download some of their wonderful resources for FREE. During each week of this season I will add a new resource for you to use in your class.
This week:
To download the Punctuation Mats please click the link below.
Mark Warner from Teaching Packs has given Education on Fire a coupon code for you to join their membership of Teaching Packs Plus for just £19.50.
Please click below for details.
Robert Young General Secretary – NAPE 026
In the latest episode of ‘Meet the National Council’ I interview Robert Young General Secretary and Interim Chair of National Association for Primary Education.
Robert Young
General Secretary
Robert has been active in NAPE since 1986 when NAPE SE London was established as a university based branch and was elected as its first chair, remaining in post until 2013. His professional background is in initial teacher education, having been involved in higher education since 1973, retiring from full-time work in 2007. Since then he has continued to support the University of Greenwich as a part-time link-tutor in schools and doing some external examining for other universities. Semi-retirement has also enabled him to develop his interest in school governance, both as a chair of governors in a Greenwich primary school and as a national leader for governance.
For more information about National Association for Primary Education please visit
095: My education expert discusses English and literacy
Peter Cansell talks to me about his thoughts on the English & literacy season so far.
Peter is my resident education expert. The person who provides the bigger picture and will tell me that you can’t just play music all day at school other subjects are important too!
Peter has been in education professionally for 35 years, teaching in middle schools in Oxford, doing advisory work, teaching higher education and as a Primary Headteacher at Harwell Primary School. He retired from that post in September 2014, but has continued as Chair of OPHTA (Oxfordshire Primary Headteachers’ Association), was elected to become Chair of the National Network of Chairs of Headteachers’ Groups in June 2014 and was delighted to have become a NAPE council member this year, serving on the editorial board for Primary First. In January of 2015 he co-founded the Oxford School of Thought, an independent education think tank. He is a trustee and chairs the management committee of another charity, Full Circle, which is well regarded for its ground breaking intergenerational work.
Show Sponsor
National Association for Primary Education
Our aim is to achieve a higher priority for the education of children from birth to 13. High quality learning in the early years of life is vitally important to the creation of an educated society. Young children are not simply preparing for the future, they are living a never to be repeated time of life and the best way to learn is to live.
Kognity with Karin Bjerde. LF032
Karin Bjerde joins me on the Learning on Fire podcast and explores the most important learning and educational moments that shaped her life.
Our guest – Karin Bjerde
Karin Bjerde is Head of Strategic Growth at Kognity, and a true global citizen having lived abroad most of her life. She has been named one of the world’s 75 future global leaders by Goldman Sachs and the Institute of International Education, and is now channeling this to challenge, rethink, and ultimately improve existing norms in education, firmly believing in the power of combining technology and pedagogy. Karin has a MSc in Economics, and worked at Morgan Stanley for 4 years before joining Kognity.
Questions asked on the Learning on Fire Podcast Interview
1. Who are you?
2. What does your life look like now and how is it different from when you were growing up?
3. What was valuable about your school experience?
4. Which teachers do you remember and why?
5. Who did you admire when you were young?
6. What was it about that person that had such an impact?
7. What was the best piece of advice you have ever been given and who gave it to you?
8. What advice would you give your younger self?
9. What does your future look like?
10. What podcast, book, video, film, song or other resource has had the biggest impact on your life and why?
Resources mentioned
Contact information
Show Sponsor
National Association for Primary Education
Our aim is to achieve a higher priority for the education of children from birth to 13. High quality learning in the early years of life is vitally important to the creation of an educated society. Young children are not simply preparing for the future, they are living a never to be repeated time of life and the best way to learn is to live.
Reading for Pleasure with Prof. Teresa Cremin – NAPE 025
National Association for Primary Education in collaboration with the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, present the Annual Schiller Lecture
READING FOR PLEASURE : developing readers for life
Prof. TERESA CREMIN
The lecture will explore the cognitive, social and emotional benefits of reading and in particular will focus on how, when teachers share their reading lives and books in common with children, new and closer relationships develop reader to reader and human to human.
The Annual Christian Schiller Lecture commemorates the work of an enlightened and inspirational figure in primary education, who was especially influential in the post-War years through to his death in 1976. It is fitting that this year the lecture is to be given by Prof. Teresa Cremin, one of the most articulate and distinguished figures in primary education, whose commitment to the creative dimension in education is very much in line with Schiller’s values. Teresa has written and edited nearly 30 books, including the forthcoming Experiencing Reading for Pleasure in the Digital Age (Sage, 2019); previous examples include Writer Identity and the Teaching and Learning of Writing, Teaching English Creatively ; Researching Literacy Lives; and Building Communities of Engaged Readers. All are welcome to this event.
You can find out more about Teresa Cremin and Reading for Pleasure on the Open University website
http://www.open.ac.uk/people/tmc242#tab1
https://researchrichpedagogies.org/research/team/reading-for-pleasure
National Association for Primary Education
CHRISTIAN SCHILLER CBE, MC, MA
Christian Schiller was born on the 20th September 1895. He went to a prep school and then to Gresham’s School where he was head boy. Military service in the First World War followed and he was wounded in action.
After the war he read mathematics at Cambridge and then studied with Percy Nunn at the London Day Training College before beginning his teaching career. In 1924 he was appointed HMI and then followed a long period of work with the schools in Liverpool where his
contact with poor children and their families was a deeply formative experience. He became District Inspector and later filled this role in Worcestershire.
In 1946 he became Staff Inspector for Primary Education and his influence, often in partnership with his friend Robin Tanner, HMI and etcher, was strongly felt as elementary schools developed into primary schools with a distinctive child centred approach which drew on children’s innate creativity and which recognised the powerful learning which comes from direct experience.
On his retirement in 1955 he began a new career as he created a one year course at the University of London Institute of Education for teachers and heads seconded from their schools. Each course was kept small, no more than 12 people who spent their year visiting schools and in discussion led by Schiller who often remained largely silent until he revealed his vision and optimism about the future in a brief summing up. There were no examinations or required coursework yet, as this writer will testify, everyone worked extremely hard. The course was hugely influential and most of his former students have gone on to hold senior leadership positions in education.
Christian Schiller died on the 11th February 1976. The following year the first memorial lecture was presented in London and the annual lectures, now organised by the National Association for Primary Education, continue to the present day. We are pleased to be able to celebrate the work of this great man who contributed so much to the principles and practice of primary education. To those who say look at us, obsessed with children being coached to pass tests, schools competing rather than co-operating, I reply , look more deeply , beyond today’s political froth. Schiller’s work continues and one day, will prevail.
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‘Christian Schiller in his own words’ was published by the Association in 1979. The book is available price £5.00 from the NAPE national office.