School Education & Teaching

Thinking about teaching English, but don’t know where to start?

Pick up a copy of The Ultimate ESL Teaching Manual and discover a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life.

What people are saying about The Ultimate ESL Manual on the Amazon.

‘What a great book! Andromeda’s knowledge and experience shines through. She gets straight to the point, gives very clear grammar explanations and loads of practical help,’ Sheila Longden.

‘This is a one-stop shop for preparing powerful classes that throws out the need for costly and confusing text books. Priceless!’ Amazon Customer.

‘Great book, saved me hours of prep! Each grammar point comes with its own speaking activity so you won’t run out of ideas about what to teach your students,’ TeacherA24.

The Ultimate Teaching ESL Manual is a complete English teaching system designed so that any native speaker (with TEFL experience or not) can pick up the book and start teaching.

With this book you will have the power to:

o Start teaching English online or in the classroom now with a step-by-step guide on how to teach every grammar point in the English language.
o Teach vocabulary with over 60 lexical sets covering beginner, intermediate, advanced to super-advanced levels.
o Keep your students engaged with follow-on activities for every lesson including role plays, games and problem solving activities.
o Cut down on preparation time with lesson plans for all language points.
o Add interest to your classes with an appendix full of illustrated worksheets which manual owners can download in high resolution from the book’s website.
o Travel light and save money on expensive textbooks with everything you need to teach English in one book.
o Provide students with fantastic lessons they want with a methodology focused on language learning through speaking practice.

The Manual teaches a methodology whereby students learn through speaking activities (rather than traditional textbooks) mimicking how we learnt our native language as children.

Students make rapid progress with the constant speaking practice, while for the teacher, lessons are creative and rewarding, giving you the power to decide what to teach and how.

Classes are simple, effective and take less time to prepare as there are no handouts to worry about, exercises to mark or any of the other work that comes with traditional ESL teaching.

The Manual includes lesson plans, drills and speaking activities for every grammar point as well as methodology, games, vocabulary sets and a whole host of other stuff to make your classes special.

Dive in and discover a skill for life.

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A book full of practical tips, ideas and guidance for embedding high quality Music lessons into Primary Curriculum teaching. This book has been written specifically for teachers without a Musical background, however, teachers with musical training will also benefit from the array of ideas within. Lessons have been designed without the need for musical instruments to ensure that even the classrooms with minimal resources can still access the learning, even so, using the instruments available to you is highly encouraged.

Content can be extended and adapted easily to ensure a high quality music education that can last the academic year. Lesson ideas are scaffolded to suit every year group, ensuring that all students are challenged, or supported, throughout.

Suitable for new teachers & experienced teachers, non-musicians & musicians.

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This book is for new or aspiring computer science teachers wishing to improve their subject knowledge and gain confidence in the classroom. And it’s for experienced computer science teachers who wish to hone their practice, in particular in the areas of explicit instruction, tackling misconceptions and exploring pedagogical content knowledge.

You will read some of the backstory to our subject – the “hinterland” – those fascinating journeys into history that make the subject come alive and place it in historical context. These stories will help you to enrich your lessons, cement core knowledge, develop cultural capital and help you excite a life-long love for the subject. We will go beyond the mark scheme to explore the subject knowledge behind the answers, giving you the confidence to discuss the field in greater depth, enabling you to use explicit instruction methods: presenting skills and concepts clearly and directly enabling student mastery.

We will explore misconceptions that arise when teaching our subject, so you can “head them off at the pass”. And we will look at teaching ideas – the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) – exploring the helpful analogies, questions and activities that work for each topic: practices that can be lifted and dropped straight into the classroom to immediately enhance your teaching.

Trainee or pre-service teachers, NQTs and early-career teachers will find this book invaluable, experienced teachers will find it inspiring, and all will benefit from a fresh look at the hinterland and subject pedagogy that makes computer science a fascinating subject to teach.

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‘This is a book that all teachers, not just biology teachers should read.’
—Ben Strathearn-Burrows, Head of Biology, Emanuel School

Introduction
I’ve been motivated to discover what biology is to us as humans. What it means to understand biology, and how I could make it meaningful for my students. I’ve read as much as I could and reflected, I’ve discussed and listened, I’ve taught and observed. This book is about sharing what I’ve learnt with my secondary-school mixed-attainment biology classes.

‘Not only is this book likely to change how you teach biology but also how you perceive yourself within the living world.’
—Dr Alex Sinclair, Institute of Education, St Mary’s University, Twickenham

What you’ll find inside:

• A vision for an integrated and meaningful biology education.
• A framework for teaching for meaning-making, which cuts planning time.
• Ways of creating a unified narrative across disparate topics.
• A taxonomy of understanding that unlocks problem-solving with minimal workload.
• Tried and tested examples from mixed-attainment biology classrooms.

Chapter 1: Meaningful biology relates principally to organisms:
This sets the scene for the whole book. It brings together many threads to define what I see as most meaningful to secondary biology students. And therefore what we could do about it when designing our lessons & curricula and thinking about how students progress through their biology education. Planning for meaning-making has vastly enhanced interest and motivation to learn in my classroom.

Chapters 2 & 3: Teaching for meaning using variation theory:
Next I introduce a powerful—relatively unknown and often misunderstood—pedagogical theory. Variation theory. In these chapters I set out to show how useful it is—and easy to use—in the secondary biology classroom, with many examples.

Chapter 4: How to integrate organisms, ecology & evolution:
Now I pull together the previous chapters to present a new framework for teaching for meaning-making that cuts planning time & focuses on biology.

‘An excellent text demanding we think not just about what we teach but also why and how.’
—Dr Paul Ganderton, Consultant and researcher

Chapter 5: Concepts of the organism that unite a biology course:
Here I discuss two concepts that I think can unify all the topics on the curriculum.
1. Seeing biology through thermodynamic systems lens and
2. Seeing biology through an ecological-evolutionary lens via the concept of life strategies. I lay out the reasons why and discuss how I’ve introduced these ideas with students.

Chapter 6: Teaching systems thinking to help students see interconnectedness:
I show how stock and flow diagrams are very useful for the biology classroom and give examples. Next, I introduce a new taxonomy of understanding biological systems that unlocks problem-solving in biology.

Chapter 7: Establishing a thinking classroom:
This chapter is focused on the whys and hows of embedding the taxonomy into biology curricula. I give examples of how I use it and examples of my students answers from lower and upper secondary courses.

Chapter 8: Navigating classroom and biological complexity:
This chapter rounds up the book by considering the complexity of our subject and the classroom.

‘Biology Made Real comes with an education health warning—be prepared to have your beliefs challenged.’
—Dr Alex Sinclair

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Smashing Glass Ceilings is the book to help elevate and excite women across the education sector to become confident, successful and fulfilled in their careers. Empowerment can look and feel different for everyone, and this book is designed to show every woman how you can succeed in the education sector.

In addition to providing a wealth of advice about leadership progression, bestselling author and presenter Kate Jones shares guidance on alternative options to leadership for women in education. Have you ever thought about launching and hosting your own podcast about teaching and learning? Are you keen to lead professional development training internally and/or externally? Are you a keen writer but not sure how to set up a website to blog or how to get published? Helpful tips and suggestions for these routes and more are presented alongside a wide range of diverse case studies and interviews that shine a spotlight on innovative women, from school leaders to entrepreneurs in education. The book also contains advice for male colleagues so that they too can help empower women in education.

This book will provide advice, guidance and inspiration for all women in education regardless of age, role or experience.

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