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Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and
regeneration. He is the deity Mary Myatt and John Tomsett have
adopted as their god of the curriculum. Their Huh series of books
focuses on how practitioners design the curriculum for the young
people in their schools. The Huh project is founded on
conversations with colleagues doing great work across the education
sector. In SEND Huh, Mary Myatt and John Tomsett discuss curriculum
provision for pupils with additional needs with some of the leading
experts in the field. Mary and John interviewed pupils, parents,
teachers, headteachers, CEOs, educational consultants and
lecturers. They then edited the transcriptions of those interviews
to provide an ambitious, thoughtful, nuanced and challenging vision
of what the best possible provision looks like for children with
additional learning needs. The challenging conversations that
comprise SEND Huh paint an inspiring picture that is hugely hopeful
for the future of SEND curriculum provision in our schools.
Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and
regeneration. He is the deity Mary Myatt and John Tomsett have
adopted as their god of the school curriculum. Their first book in
the Huh series focused upon how school practitioners design the Key
Stage 3 curriculum. Its popularity prompted calls from many
quarters for a similar book on the primary curriculum. Supported by
their primary colleagues, Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma & Emma
Turner, Mary and John interviewed over 30 primary practitioners
about how they design the primary curriculum. Considering the
diverse nature of primary schools in this country, it's not
surprising that they were soon confronted with numerous
context-dependent curriculum complexities. Designing the curriculum
for small primary schools, for instance, means solving the
conundrum of teaching the same subject at the same time to three
different year groups in one class. The conversations confirmed
that shaping a primary school curriculum is a tricky business! The
wisdom gleaned from the genuine experts Mary and John interviewed
was limitless. The material was so important it meant that they had
too much for a single volume. Twenty-one of those thirty-plus
conversations comprise the book Primary Huh, which focused upon the
curriculum of each individual subject from EYFS to Year 6. In this
companion book, Primary Huh 2, Mary and John give a platform to
practitioners who lead on the broader issues of primary curriculum
design, including, amongst other things: shaping the curriculum for
mixed-age classes; designing and implementing a cross-MAT
curriculum; building the "cradle to career" curriculum;
timetabling; assessment; transition, and diversity. Primary Huh 2
is riven through with authentic voices grappling with the endless
challenge of providing our children with a rich, challenging,
ambitious, beautiful curriculum.
There's plenty to do when planning the curriculum in primary
schools. If it feels daunting, then one of the most helpful things
is to talk to other people about how they have developed the
curriculum for their particular subject or key stage. This is what
John Tomsett and Mary Myatt have done. After the secondary 'Huh:
Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders' was
published, they were flooded with requests to produce a primary
version. They enlisted the help of renowned primary specialists,
Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner to have
conversations with primary teachers and key stage co-ordinators who
are doing great curriculum development work. Each chapter provides
insights into the importance of individual subjects and the unique
contribution each makes to pupils' cognitive and personal
development. The subject chapters discuss the steps colleagues take
to ensure that there is a coherent thread across the year groups,
as the discrete subjects deliver, collectively, the primary
curriculum. These conversations show how the craft of creating a
rich, challenging curriculum for every subject is not a quick fix.
This is a nuanced piece of work, and there are many ways of
approaching it. Each chapter also contains links to subject
associations and helpful resources. Primary Huh has been written
for subject leaders and key stage co-ordinators; it has also been
written for senior leaders, as they prepare to have supportive
conversations with their colleagues who are responsible for
curriculum development. Primary Huh is offered as a prompt rather
than the last word. Informed debate is, as they say, the fuel of
curriculum development. And why have John and Mary called it 'Huh'?
Well, John discovered that Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness,
creativity, fertility and regeneration, and they thought that was a
pretty good metaphor for their work on the curriculum!
How many of your fishing trips can you recall in any real detail?
How often do you wish you had kept a note of what you caught, when
you caught it and exactly how much that huge carp weighed on the
scales? In his Angler's Journal, John Tomsett offers you the
opportunity to keep a record of your angling adventures whilst
being entertained by 52 tales from his fishing life. From watching
his dad hook a reluctant chub, to catching a trout with his own son
- via a near death experience trawling for tuna on the Indian Ocean
- Tomsett explores the thrills and disappointments of a lifetime
spent fishing. Tomsett's writing captures the camaraderie of
fishing with friends and the tranquillity of angling alone. His
tales brim with philosophical reflections and describe precisely
what it feels like when you're battling a decent fish intent on
throwing the hook. This is an absorbing, beautifully illustrated
book, which will ensure you can always remember what it felt like
on that day, long ago, when you struck into a fish bigger than you
could ever have imagined.
In 1991 Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum published
'Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible'. Nearly a
quarter of a century later John Tomsett encountered their paper and
since then, it has influenced his teaching immeasurably. Collins et
al. believed that 'domain (subject) knowledge ... provides
insufficient clues for many students about how to actually go about
solving problems and carrying out tasks in a domain'. They believed
that you had to make expert subject thinking visible to students.
Consequently, Tomsett developed a number of techniques which made
his expert subject thinking visible to his students, to great
effect. Beyond his own practice, the principles behind Collins et
al's paper have been woven throughout Huntington School in York,
where Tomsett is headteacher, a research school whose teachers are
committed to developing evidence-informed classroom practice. In
this book, a number of Huntington School teachers discuss, in a
series of brief essays, what they consider to be the expert thought
processes specific to their individual subject domains. They
explain in detail how they use cognitive apprenticeship techniques
'in action' to make their disciplinary thinking visible and help
their students learn those same expert thought processes. This book
is a priceless contribution to the current debate about the
curriculum and how it is taught in our schools.
Schools need to have purchase on the curriculum: why they teach the
subjects beyond preparation for examinations, what they are
intending to achieve with the curriculum, how well it is planned
and enacted in classrooms and how they know whether it's doing what
it's supposed to. Fundamental to this understanding are the
conversations between subject leaders and their line managers.
However, there is sometimes a mismatch between the subject
specialisms of senior leaders and those they line manage. If I
don't know the terrain and the importance of a particular subject,
how can I talk intelligently with colleagues who are specialists?
This book sets out to offer some tentative answers to these
questions. Each of the national curriculum subjects is discussed
with a subject leader and provides an insight into what they view
as the importance of the subject, how they go about ensuring that
knowledge, understanding and skills are developed over time, how
they talk about the quality of the schemes in their departments and
what they would welcome from senior leaders by way of support. We
have chosen this way of opening up the potentially difficult
terrain of expertise on one side and relative lack of expertise on
the other, by providing these case studies. They are suggested as
prompts rather than the last word. Informed debate is, after all,
the fuel of curriculum development. And why Huh? Well, 'Huh?' may
be John's first response when he walks into a Year 8 German class
but, in fact, we chose 'Huh' as the title of our book as he is the
Egyptian god of endlessness. As Claire Hill so eloquently comments
in her chapter, "Curriculum development is an ongoing process; it's
not going to be finished, ever." And we believe that 'Huh' captures
a healthy and expansive way of considering curriculum
conversations.
If we do not ensure, first and foremost, that our teachers are
feeling physically and mentally well, they cannot be their best for
their students. Consequently, a school which does not prioritise
staff wellbeing is disadvantaging its own students. 'Students
first' is a misplaced sentiment: the best thing for students is a
happy, healthy, motivated, well-trained, expert staff. By putting
staff first you are providing for students the one thing which will
help them make good progress in their learning: truly great
teaching. Whilst it is easy to say that schools would not exist if
it were not for the students, the glib converse is that without
truly great school staff, the students would not be taught. What we
need - as recruiting subject specialist teachers, school leaders
and specialist support staff becomes increasingly difficult - is a
revolution in how we treat our school staff. We have to put our
staff before our students because it is the only hope we have of
securing what our students need most: a world class education. The
longer our schools are populated with hypoxic adults, we imperial
all our futures. What follows is a blueprint for the school system
which puts our school staff before students.
Tomsett interweaves his formative and professional experience with
strategies for addressing students' mental health issues and
insights from his interviews with high profile thinkers on the
subject including Professor Tanya Byron, Natasha Devon, Norman
Lamb, Tom Bennett, Claire Fox and Dr Ken McLaughlin. The book is
replete with truths about the state of children's mental
well-being, about creating a school culture where everyone can
thrive and about living in the shadow of his mother's manic
depression. With his typical mixture of experience, wisdom and
research-based evidence, Tomsett explains how he manages the
pressure of modern day state school headship in a climate where you
are only as good as your last set of examination results, a
pressure which acutely affects staff and students too. He outlines
his strategies for mitigating this pressure and turning the tide of
students' mental health problems. The autobiographical narrative
modulates between self-effacing humour and heart-wrenching stories
of his mother's life, blighted by mental illness. His professional
reflections are a wisdom-filled blend of evidence-based policy and
decades of experience in teaching and school leadership. Tomsett
writes with genuine humility. His prose is beautiful in its seeming
simplicity. When you pick up one of his books you will find you
have read the first fifty pages before you have even noticed:
surely the hallmark of truly great writing. Topics covered include:
the real state of the nation's mental health, the perfect storm
that is precipitating a mental health crisis in schools, the
problems of loose terminology what do we really mean when we talk
about a mental health epidemic? and poor understanding of mental
health problems and mental illness, the disparity between mental
and physical health in public discourse, treatment and funding,
beginning the conversation about mental health, the philosophical
and psychological principles underpinning the debate, strategies to
support students in managing their own mental health better,
resilience, growth mindset, mindfulness, grit, failure and
mistakes, coping with pressure, York's school well-being workers
project, evidence-based strategies that have worked in Huntington
School, metacognitive strategies for improving exam performance,
interviews with professionals in the field, the reality of living
with a parent with a serious mental illness, self-concept and
achievement, perfectionism, the relationship between academic
rigour and therapeutic education and, significantly, what the
research says, what the experts say and what Tomsett's experience
says about averting a mental health crisis in schools. Suitable for
teachers, leaders and anyone with an interest in mental health in
schools. Also by John Tomsett: This Much I Know about Love Over
Fear ISBN 9781845909826.
Too many of our state schools have become scared, soulless places.
John Tomsett draws on his extensive experience and knowledge and
calls for all those involved in education to find the courage to
develop a leadership-wisdom which emphasises love over fear.
Creating a truly great school takes patience. Ultimately, truly
great schools don't suddenly exist. You grow great teachers first,
who, in turn, grow a truly great school. There is a huge fork in
the road for head teachers: one route leads to executive headship
across a number of schools and the other takes head teachers back
into the classroom to be the head teacher. John strongly believes
that if the head teacher is not teaching, or engaged in helping
others to improve their teaching, in their school, then they are
missing the point. The only thing head teachers need obsess
themselves with is improving the quality of teaching, both their
colleagues' and their own. This Much I Know about Love Over Fear is
an authentic personal narrative of teaching, leadership and
discovering what really matters. It gets to the heart of what is
valuable in education and offers advice for those working in
schools. Also by John Tomsett: This Much I Know about Mind Over
Matter, ISBN 9781785831683.
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