ABSTRACT
Brilliant teachers differentiate as a matter of habit and differentiated teaching provides a range of access routes to learning. In any classroom where a child is talking and twenty-five children are listening, the teacher's attention needs to be focused not on the speaker, but on the listeners. Literacy teaching is every teacher's responsibility, and conversation is part of literacy. It's an essential tool for learning. Brilliant class management comes through the work. It recognises that, high-energy teacher performance is unsustainable and counter-productive, punishments are something of a bluff, and the best rewards lie within the work, not only in the deployment of a discrete set of 'management skills'. One of the most common planning errors for new teachers is pitching work too high, and this is an area where people should seek advice. All subjects without exception need pair and group discussion, prediction, the expression of opinion, the sharing of concepts and the collaborative defining of new ideas.
