1. I’ve been getting e-mails from JISC for ages, but I’ve only just learnt that JISC stands for – or used to stand for – Joint Information Systems Committee, which is/was a bit of a grey name. They’ve just published Principles of good assessment and feedback: how good learning, teaching and assessment can be applied to improving assessment and feedback practice, which offers a very useful tour of the assessment and feedback horizon https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/principles-of-good-assessment-and-feedback  You might find it helpful to click on the ‘view full guide as a single page’ link.

2. And another in a related field, the latest blog post from Alexandra Mihai, Thesis Supervision 101 https://educationalist.substack.com/p/thesis-supervision-101?s=r Thrown in the thesis supervision deep end herself this year, Alexandra has collected together with her customary thoroughness a wide range of resources on the topic to help “the many thesis supervisors who receive little to no guidance when getting started, and have to rely on their own experiences as a student, or their colleagues’ experiences”. Lots of stuff in there for those of us who don’t supervise theses as such, too.

3. What’s not to like in a MOOC called How to Plan a Great Lesson? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-english-great-lesson Free, unless you want a certificate, and available now, with educators providing online support for the next four weeks. Two hours a week for four weeks. Click on the ‘More Courses’ tab for other suggestions.

4. And, finally, possibly prompted in some strange way by the excellent talk I went to yesterday evening on Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle, Poems on the Underground, thirty-five years old now and still going strong www.poemsontheunderground.org The first poem on the homepage at present is You took away all the oceans and all the room by Osip Mandelstam, and this week’s Poem of the Week is a cracker by Choman Hardi https://poemsontheunderground.org/poem-of-the-week Judith Chernaik, who’s been running the scheme since it started, and her fellow editors, Imtiaz Dharker and George Szirtes, would welcome comments in support of their application for continued funding. Please send them to me to pass on.

5. This week’s phobia, claustrophobia, will not interfere with enjoyment of Poems on the Underground on their website – in situ on Underground trains might be a different matter.