Teaching creativity: An international perspective on studying art in the UK
SEUNGAH LEE, ART & DESIGN TEACHER, NO FRAME ART & EDUCATION, SOUTH KOREA LOUISA HORNER, LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT LEAD, CATS GLOBAL SCHOOLS, UK Studying art can be a culture shock. In fact, it should be a culture shock. Art students in the UK are faced with expectations to create original artwork and not imitate, but […]
Dialogic teaching: The power of classroom talk to increase student engagement
GRAHAM CHISNELL FCCT, EDUCATION CONSULTANT AND AUTHOR, UK Classroom talk that engages students in dialogue to stimulate and extend thinking, knowing and understanding can have a powerful and positive impact on student learning (Alexander, 2020). In this reflective piece, I examine how embedding a culture of dialogic teaching in school impacts on teacher engagement and student […]
Student mindset and the art of receiving feedback
EMOKE MIHALY, THE ENGLISH MODERN SCHOOL WAKRA, DOHA, QATAR Introduction In my decade-long journey as a primary school teacher within international school settings, I have explored the different aspects of providing effective feedback to young students in order to improve their learning. Building on Hattie’s (2009) influential meta-analysis, which underlines the impact of feedback on […]
The social impact on approaches to assessment
MOHAMMED JAMILI, FCCT MED, HEAD OF LEARNING, WAAD ACADEMY, JEDDAH, KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA As an educator with over a decade of experience in the UK education system, and currently serving in a senior leadership role in an international school based in Saudi Arabia, the journey of assessment practices has been both enlightening and challenging. […]
Effective formative assessment for inclusive classrooms
Rachel Eaton, Teacher of Geography and Lead Practitioner for Teaching and Learning, Whalley Range High School, UK The synthesis of inclusive education, social justice and mobility The concept of education as a form of social justice (DfE, 2017) is an incredibly broad brush stroke, which must consider many factors without idealism. When we think of […]
Single point rubrics: A useful tool in formative assessment
Teacher of Physics, Frankfurt International School I was introduced to single point rubrics (SPRs) a few years ago, initially trialling them before dismissing them as a useful tool. My introduction was an assessment rubric levelled for a mid-level student that ‘could be used for any/every student’. Assessing every student against a single statement felt like […]
Building a strong foundation: A new head of department’s perspective on professional development for a diverse team of PSHE Educators
Lydia Roberts, Head of PSHE, Broadland High Ormiston Academy, UK As a teacher, stepping into leading and advising peers can feel intimidating. In a way, teachers are always leading – leading a classroom, leading learners and pastorally leading our tutor groups – and yet when we gear up to lead colleagues, we feel a distinct […]
Celebrating our school community: Creating an anti-racism inclusion group
JAMES LEIGH, HEAD OF YEAR 12, HEAD OF FUTURES AND HISTORY TEACHER, READING BLUE COAT, UK I trust that I am not alone in believing there to be intricacies inherent in the necessity for staff to actively celebrate diversity in school communities, while also actively enforcing anti-racism. Indeed, since 2022, Keeping Children Safe in Education requirements […]
Developing an awareness of the impact of pedagogy on social justice within primary mathematics
LAURA KING, INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF DERBY, UK Conducting practitioner research as a teacher in primary education has led me to consider the way in which social justice is enacted through pedagogy in primary mathematics. Social justice is regularly linked with the attainment gap and disadvantaged children, but the actual impact on children of […]
Developing self-regulated Learners: Supporting a culture of lifelong learning through metacognition, cognition and motivation in the classroom
WILLIAM EDWARDS, ASHWOOD SPENCER ACADEMY, UK Introduction As a primary school classroom teacher, I have aimed to develop my teaching through training and literature to better support self-regulation for learning. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2021) define self-regulated learning as the culmination of a learner’s cognition, metacognition and motivation. Evaluating and reflecting on each of […]
Teaching revision explicitly
Dave Tushingham, Lead Practitioner Mathematics, The Greenshaw Learning Trust For revision to be impactful, students need to know how to revise well. In this reflection, I discuss how, by implementing structured models of explicit teaching for revision, we can equip our students with the metacognitive skills required to revise independently with success when making sense […]
Interconnecting worlds: Reflections on the contextualisation of the maths curriculum in my classroom and its impact on pupil engagement and voice
ANDY CROFT, MATHS LEAD, SNOWFIELDS ACADEMY, UK This article is about the different worlds in which we live, and how providing spaces for dialogues can help students to develop a feeling of relatedness towards the curriculum. Amid the demands of school life, listening selectively for cues often becomes essential to steer lessons forward, anticipating misconceptions, […]
Communities of practice, collaboration and the dissemination of knowledge
GEETIKA SAWHNEY, SENIOR IT TEACHER, INDIA LYN HAYNES, PART-TIME ITE SENIOR LECTURER, CANTERBURY CHRIST CHURCH UNIVERSITY, UK Context As an educationalist, Lyn was asked to volunteer in an educational institution catering for age three to post-Masters in rural Punjab, India, comprising four distinct communities of practice. Her remit was to engage with students from across […]
A case study of teachers’ evidence-based decision-making with regard to silent eating during the COVID-19 pandemic
TOSHIRO MORI, TEACHER, TOBU JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL; DOCTORAL STUDENT, NAGOYA UNIVERSITY, JAPAN This article is a reflection report suggesting that evidence-based education (EBE) (Haynes et al., 2002) was helpful in difficult decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2020, Prime Minister Abe called for the closure of classes in Japan nationwide. As a result, 98 […]
A metacognitive approach to developing creativity
Dr Jonathan Firth, University of Strathclyde, UK Dr Claire Badger, The Godolphin and Latymer School, UK Background Creativity is widely considered to be a vital skill in education. It sits at the pinnacle of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy of skills (Anderson et al., 2001) and has been recognised as important across all curriculum areas (van […]
Modelling examples under the visualiser
DAVE TUSHINGHAM, LEAD PRACTITIONER MATHEMATICS, THE GREENSHAW LEARNING TRUST, UK Teaching in the pandemic In March 2020, immediate and urgent change to our pedagogical approaches was needed as the world went into lockdown. For most students, learning now largely took place online. For teachers like myself, live ‘performance’ in the classroom was replaced with practice […]
Using faded worked examples in Chemistry to reduce extraneous cognitive load
DEEPIKA NARULA, ST ALBANS SCHOOL,UK Worked examples play a vital role between the teacher instruction and independent practice, and serve the purpose of scaffolding for students to experience guided practice. Since learning more about Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), I realised the A-level Chemistry course has many areas where the intrinsic load or the number of elements […]
How effective is retrieval practice as an intervention in Key Stage 4 Geography?
JULIAN CARRERA, HEAD OF GEOGRAPHY, THE JOHN LYON SCHOOL, UK What is so special about retrieval practice? If ‘Memory is the residue of thought’ (Willingham, 2009, cited in Sherrington, 2021), then retrieval practice must be at the heart of teaching and learning. Coe (2019) commented that ‘Retrieval practice is strongly supported by over 100 years […]
Diverse language proficiencies: Applying evidence-informed pedagogical practices to support students in achieving success
Annie-Jane Finch-Johnson, Teacher of Physical Education, Harrow International School Appi A brand-new school, where you get to be part of a founding department and start your own curriculum from scratch – sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Over this past year, the reality of this has at times been as idyllically sounding as you may think; nevertheless, […]
Promoting thinking out loud through questioning
HANNA BEECH, REGIONAL LEAD PRACTITIONER, THE KEMNAL ACADEMIES TRUST, UK We know that thinking is an internal process. As a result, we cannot be certain that students’ thoughts are directly related to our teaching. We aim to provide the most relevant content in the most explicit and engaging way, and we hope that this leads […]