Tag: Rogers Pedagogical Palnner

Good Teachers Are Also Good Students

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management)

Accompanying video:

I have always loved mathematics, but I’ve not always been ‘good’ at maths. I got a grade A for GCSE Mathematics when I was 16 years old (a grade I worked really, really hard for) but I struggled with mathematics at ‘AS’ and ‘A’ – Level (the UK’s pre-university qualifications). 

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“An AMAZING Book!”

It just so happened that mathematics wasn’t a subject I needed as a prerequisite for my university course anyway. So, in a sense, I committed the cardinal sin of thinking that it ‘didn’t matter’. I was planning to study molecular biology at university, and my admissions tutors were mainly interested in my biology and chemistry grades.

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I achieved my goal of going to uni and doing my PGCE in order to become a fully qualified Science teacher in 2006. I was happy for several years, but my failure to complete my mathematics education at school kept gnawing at me like an annoying itch. I needed to do something about it. 

I decided to complete the Certificate in Mathematics course with the Open University in 2009, after three years of being a full-time science teacher. This course covered everything in my ‘A’-Level syllabus with some extra, university-level topics thrown in. It was challenging and offered me just what I needed: closure. As a distance-learning course, it also offered me the chance to study and work as a teacher at the same time. 

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As I started studying the course and handing in assignments (which had to be snail mailed to the UK  – I was living in Thailand at the time), I began to realise how much I had become disconnected from the student experience as a teacher. It had been around three years since I had ever studied anything seriously, and this mathematics course was teaching me how difficult it was to:

  • Meet deadlines
  • Seek help when in doubt
  • Have the self-discipline needed to study at a regular time-slot each day

These skills were, of course, things I had to do whilst completing my degree course and schooling earlier in life, but it had been a few years since I had been immersed in serious study like this. I was slowly losing empathy for my students: that was until this course gave me a wake-up call. 

Another big thing I took from this experience was just how stressful it can be to prepare for a difficult exam (and to complete it). I had to fly to the UK to take the end of course mathematics exam (a three hour beast), and along with the intense revision that came in the few days running up to the exam I had the misfortune of not sleeping so well the night before the big day. And then, once sat down and actually completing the paper, three hours felt like it went by in an instant.

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I guess I’m trying to make a number of points in this trip down Memory Lane – namely that by immersing ourselves in the ‘student experience’ we can, as teachers:

  • Regain, or enhance, our true understanding of just how many hurdles await our students on their race to the exam finish-line.
  • Learn new skills and concepts that can be applied to our roles as classroom managers, leaders and ‘purveyors’ of specialist knowledge.
  • Build self-discipline, and pass on the lessons learned to our students in our roles as mentors, homeroom teachers, form tutors and coaches.

One final point to stress is that, whilst we can study almost any subject we want via online platforms like EdX and Coursera these days, it’s also important that we take the time to thoroughly reflect on a regular basis. Keeping a journal of things we’ve done well, and things we messed up, can be a great way to have a written record to read over when we want to celebrate successes and remind ourselves of lessons we have learned on our journeys as educators. This video I made a few years ago goes into this in more detail:

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We welcome you to join the Richard James Rogers online community! Join us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates, giveaways of Richard’s books, special offers, upcoming events and news. 

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The Rogers’ Pedagogical Planner: A New Kind of Teacher’s Planner

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management). 

The Rogers’ Pedagogical Planner is finally published and ready after two-and-a-half years of painstaking work and research. It is, quite simply, the product of my mission to create the world’s most useful teacher’s planner.

I’m going to be completely honest with you – the aim of this blog post is to advertise The Rogers’ Pedagogical Planner and to inform teachers about how it can be used to make life easier for us. However, I’m also going to try and throw in some useful lesson-planning tips in here too, and links to other blog posts about lesson-planning will be given throughout this article. 

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Here’s a brief overview if you’re just looking for what the planner gives you, and where to buy it (but keep reading if you want some background and links to helpful articles and blog posts about planning and classroom management):

+ 45 weeks of double-page lesson planning templates for you to write all of your lesson plans on

+ A full A4 ‘notes’ page for every week of lesson planning

+ A full A4 ‘targets’ page for every week of lesson-planning

+ 45 pedagogical articles from this blog (richardjamesrogers.com) – one for each week of lessons

+ 578 pages

+ $22.99 and available globally on Amazon

Here are some extracts from the book, so you can see what the inside looks like:

Each week contains an article from my blog to provide insights into classroom management techniques, behavior management methods, active engagement strategies, tips for using technology in teaching and even advice on how to work with colleagues and parents:

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Each week comes with a full A4 ‘Pedagogical Targets’ page which is designed to help you formulate goals for your own continuous development:

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Two A4 pages of lesson-planning boxes/grids are provided for each week (45 weeks in total), giving you plenty of space to write your plans:

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A full A4 ‘Notes’ page is provided for each week of planning: great for recording the details of meetings, incidents that have happened, events that are coming up, notes from training sessions, reflections, etc:

Roger's Pedagogical Planner

The planner is available as a beautiful A4 paperback from Amazon here ($22.99). However, for those of you who like to use stylus devices (e.g. the iPad Pro) or who want to print the planner yourself, I am selling the pdf version for only $15.00. E-mail me at info@richardjamesrogers.com to request your instant copy (payments are made via PayPal). 

My story (briefly)

I graduated from Bangor University (UK) with a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology in 2005, and followed that up with a PGCE in Secondary Science Education (also from Bangor) in 2006. I taught at UK State Schools for two years, before meeting my lovely wife, Nicki, after she finished her master’s degree in 2007. She is Thai, and had to fly back to Thailand as soon her her student visa ran out. I followed her to Thailand in the new academic year of 2008 and I have been teaching at international schools in Thailand (plus a brief one-year stint in China) ever-since. 

My books, and why I started writing

To be honest, I always found teaching to be enjoyable and fun, even when dealing with the ‘problematic’ students (e.g. those who required the active adoption of behavior management techniques to handle). However, my boyish energy and hyper-enthusiasm led me to make a number of silly mistakes over the years: little things, usually, that caught me off-guard when I wasn’t paying attention, such as:

  • Not thinking about where students would sit at different points in the lesson.
  • Setting too much homework, and not having the time (or effective strategies) to mark it quickly and properly.
  • Not pacing my lessons to get all of the content finished on-time.
  • Focusing too much on short-term positive reinforcement, and not considering the long-term effects that consistent praise can have on a child’s life (see my blog post about subtle reinforcement for more on this).
  • How much I allowed myself to relax at staff-parties (often overlooked in teacher-training courses).
  • The effects of physiology and biochemistry on my ability to function during the day (waking up early, having breakfast, exercising, etc.).

I knew that I had to learn from my mistakes, but I realized that I could only do that if I remembered my mistakes. I’ve always had problems with remembering things, so I decided to write my first book (The Quick Guide to Classroom Management) as a no-holds-barred record/journal of the blunders I had made (and seen others make) during my then 10-years of teaching experience. My goal was to simply have a record for my own reference in book-form.

I was surprised, and happy, when that book hit the bestsellers’ list for classroom management (number 1 spot) on Amazon on no less than three occasions.

Conclusion

I hope I have provided you with a good overview of what The Rogers’ Pedagogical Planner is, and why I think it is a great tool for educators everywhere. If you do happen to purchase the book, then THANK YOU (and enjoy!).

Skip to the end for links to lesson-planning blog posts I have written

 

Lesson-planning blog posts (great advice for teachers):

The Importance of Planning

The Top 7 Strategies for Efficient Lesson Planning

My Top Three Tips for Teachers

Can Progress be ‘Engineered’ from the Start?

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We welcome you to join the Richard James Rogers online community! Join us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates, giveaways of Richard’s books, special offers, upcoming events and news. 

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