Dialogic questioning is about focusing closely on one student during questioning to explore a particular concept or set of ideas in depth. What does it mean? While question-spreading is useful to encourage participation, sometimes it is valuable to spend some time engaged in extended teacher-student dialogue with one student. This exchange can be significant for […]
Cold calling is a technique that creates an expectation that all students are ready to answer every question. This promotes attention, engagement and participation. What does it mean? Developed by Doug Lemov in Teach Like A Champion, ‘Cold Calling’ is designed to promote active thinking during whole-class questioning. Rather than asking for a volunteer, the […]
Teachers ask students to reframe answers using well-constructed sentences, technical vocabulary and more developed responses. This promotes deeper learning and high expectations for verbal answers. What does it mean? It’s normal for first responses to be half-formed as students think aloud and formulate ideas. It’s important to encourage students to give strong answers, but not […]
Used part way through a learning sequence, multiple-choice questions are an efficient and effective way of gauging understanding and checking for misconceptions before moving on. What does it mean? The ‘hinge’ is a moment of diagnosis, the point when a teacher must decide whether a key concept has been understood well enough to move on […]
Seeking regular opportunities to formatively assess students’ understanding and using this to inform what happens next in the lesson. What does it mean? Teachers need to know exactly where students are in their learning at all times (as far as that is possible) to best support mastery of a skill or concept. There are two […]
In 2017, the Department for Education published a report that examined the progress of evidenced-informed teaching in England. The findings suggest that despite limited direct application of research in teachers’ practice, evidence was valued and did inform teacher thinking (Coldwell et al., 2017). Alongside this report, there were other developments that showed that evidence-informed teaching […]
Writing about curriculum development in 1975, Lawrence Stenhouse (Stenhouse, 1975) noted that the task of educational institutions is to make ‘available to the young a selection of society’s intellectual, emotional and technical capital’. Educators must introduce students to a series of ‘public traditions’, including knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours. Nearly 50 years later, Stenhouse’s words feel particularly apt for anyone approaching curriculum […]
The aim of our CPD packs is to support members in further exploring the themes raised in an issue of our journal, Impact. CPD packs provide guidance and resources to help facilitate staff CPD based on key articles from each issue. This pack is related to the following articles: ‘What is a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum?‘, written by […]
The aim of our CPD packs is to support members in further exploring the themes raised in an issue of our journal, Impact. CPD packs provide guidance and resources to help facilitate staff CPD based on key articles from each issue. This pack is related to the article, ‘Taking curriculum seriously‘, written by Christine Counsell. […]
The aim of our CPD packs is to support members in further exploring the themes raised in an issue of our journal, Impact. CPD packs provide guidance and resources to help facilitate staff CPD based on key articles from each issue. This pack is related to the article, ‘Organising knowledge: The purpose and pedagogy of […]
We live in exciting times for educational research. Research on learning and cognition is developing rapidly. The findings from this research are increasingly making their way into classroom practice. A range of organisations and people in education (the Chartered College of Teaching very much among them) are working to test how we can use the […]
This study reports on a national, government-funded teacher professional development project in England under the title ‘Teaching for Neurodiversity’. The aim was to provide a better understanding of diversity in learning and a basic ‘toolkit’ of strategies to develop in-service teachers’ confidence and skills in meeting the diverse range of student learning needs found in […]
The breakthrough in my thinking about the curriculum came when I tried to answer the question that I now think every generation should ask: ‘what are schools for?’ (Young, 2011). I was deeply dissatisfied with most of the answers that my discipline, the sociology of education, gave; they were almost invariably trapped by one kind […]
Memory is strengthened by retrieval practice. What does it mean? According to psychologists such as Robert and Elizabeth Bjork and Yana Weinstein (one of the Learning Scientists), our capacity to remember things in the long-term is strengthened by practising the process of retrieving information from our long-term memory into our working memory. The more we […]
Headley Park Primary School is a two-form entry community primary school, with 468 pupils including a 52-place nursery. It’s located in a little-known area of Bristol with a static population of largely white working-class families. Despite relatively low income levels, deprivation indicators (and Pupil Premium funding) are low (11%) as only a small percentage rely […]
Learning is most effective when cognitive load is optimised. What does it mean? Our working memory is limited in capacity. This has two main consequences: The limit creates a form of bottleneck that restricts the flow of knowledge into our long-term memory. We need to break down new learning into small chunks that can be […]
The optimal success rate for learning is high – possibly 80% – but not 100%. What does it mean? Successful learning stems from early success and applying effort to effective strategies. This requires a degree of motivation, which is supported by having a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset. This helps students to […]
Learning builds in schemas; knowledge allows you to accrue more knowledge. What does it mean? As we learn, we arrange information into sets of ideas (schemas) that help us make sense of the world. This makes future recall easier because whole sets of ideas can be recalled together. This is why knowledge builds on knowledge. […]
Teaching is a two-way interactive process; teachers and students need feedback from each other about how the learning process is going. What does it mean? This is one part of ‘formative assessment’. Classroom research indicates that effective teachers ask more questions to more students, in a more in-depth way, checking for understanding across all students. […]
Direct instruction is important with novice learners, especially those with weak prior knowledge and low confidence. What does it mean? Research from Clark, Kirschner and Sweller suggests that direct forms of instruction are much more effective than approaches that rely on students finding things out for themselves and that novice learners cannot simply copy the […]
