How to Be a Brilliant Teacher, Sep/2008

This cheerful and accessible book is packed with direct and practical advice drawn from the author’s extensive and successful personal experience as teacher-trainer, teacher and examiner. It sets out clear and practical guidelines to support and enhance your teaching skills.

How to Be a Brilliant Teacher is aimed at teachers who want to develop their careers, or just be better teachers, by monitoring their own improvement. In order to do this, they may need to re-connect with theory, to consider their own practice explicitly, and to begin to see themselves as researchers. This book suggests how to get started. It is anecdotal and readable, and may be dipped into for innovative lesson ideas or read from cover-to-cover as a short, enjoyable course which discovers exciting principles in successful, practical experience.

Although a practical book, at its heart lie essential values about good teaching and learning. In particular it will seek to re-introduce teacher initiative and creativity and to reconcile these with the growing number of preformed strategies that the teacher has to work with. In exploring the issues faced by teachers it addresses many common anxieties and offers focussed solutions to them. Chapters cover:

1. creative planning
2. managing learning, managing classrooms
3. issues in literacy
4. the paradox of inspirational teaching
5. differentiation
6. career planning and development.

If How to be a Brilliant Trainee Teacher helped you during your training, this book will continue to provide valuable support to you as you move forward in the profession.