I'm so good at teaching.

I gave up a whole lesson to merely writing today. My years 8s bottomish set had just finished a statistical investigation into a football match, had made posters and written and report about the game in addition to collecting and recording the data themselves.

Well today, after a good competitive starter about writing out their 3.5 times tables ('just think of it as repeated addition was a controversial thing I told them) we had a class conversation about what went wrong, what went right and how we would change the investigation if we had to it all over again. After than they wrote up their thoughts in silence. I thought it was a great exercise for them, it was evaluative, not really teacher led, it asked for higher order thinking skills, they had to justify their decisions and explain why they thought what they did. If was meaningful self assessment. As I pointed out to them these were skills which could be used in any classroom, and more importantly, in any situation after.

It was a great way to end off a project and, amazingly, there wasn't one person who muttered 'why are we doing this...this is English'. They were making links between topics and understood why we were doing the task.

Great lesson.