Parental engagement with learning at home is a vital part of young people’s educational journeys. We’ve known this for more than 20 years, but now more than ever we need to support parents to support learning. ‘Parent’ here means any adult with a significant caring responsibility for the young person – it might be a […]
In small schools across the country, many children are taught in mixed-age classes. It is not uncommon to find four year groups being taught in one class, and sometimes the mixture of ages is even greater. While there is some evidence that this type of grouping benefits children’s pro-social behaviours (Lindström and Lindahl, 2011) this […]
I work for the Chartered College as a Research and Learning Specialist and I’m also a mum to three sons aged 1, 7 and 10. Up until last Autumn, I’d been a teacher and Assistant Headteacher in Primary schools for 15 years but I recently left my job in school to start a part-time PhD. […]
Find all open access Impact articles, by theme for your reading groups, here. Reading groups usually bring together a group of interested professionals on a regular basis to discuss different articles and how their findings relate to their own practice. They can be an excellent way to keep in touch with the latest research in […]
This selected reading list is one of three put together relating to the current COVID-19 outbreak. You might also be interested in the list on the the impact of school closures or the list of some free home learning resources. This selected reading list includes resources relating to online, blended, remote and home learning, including […]
The Early Career Framework (ECF) reforms set out a new requirement for a two-year programme of support and development for new teachers after they complete initial teacher training. The ECF was released in January 2019, and became available to new teachers in early roll-out regions and to a select number of other schools from September […]
An understanding of the thinking processes that pupils go through is helpful, from planning lessons to delivery. Literacy tasks, by their very nature, demand focus. Therefore, a consideration of working memory capacity and cognitive load can help you to plan tasks with improved accessibility for all pupils. Retention and recall rely on understanding the information […]
What’s the idea? This compact guide is concerned with explicit teaching to support vocabulary development in learners. Essentially, we are looking at what steps we can take in order to expand the functional vocabulary that learners use in lessons (and life). We are looking to empower learners so that they can draw on a rich […]
The purpose of reading is to understand text – to construct meaning from the written word. Metacognition is a well-evidenced, key component in enabling pupils to do this effectively (Baker and Beall, 2009; Zabrucky et al., 2015). What does it mean? Metacognition is comprised of two main elements: Metacognitive knowledge: knowing about your cognitive abilities, […]
According to leading academic Professor Maggie Snowling, ‘Strong foundations in oral language are the key to educational success globally’. (Snowling, n.d.) Without good spoken language, children can struggle to read and write. Supporting reading comprehension through the development of spoken language skills can ensure that children have an in-depth understanding of what they have read. […]
We know that the use of phonics is hugely important, but passing the phonics check does not automatically lead to great scores in reading. Learners also need to develop skills in comprehension and inference. So, how do we move on from decoding so that learners can understand the text, picking up on what is happening […]
Failure to develop efficient and legible handwriting in primary school can have negative consequences for academic achievement and students’ self-esteem (Feder and Majnemer, 2007). The physical demands of writing increase as children progress through school, making it essential that children learn effective habits to increase or maintain legibility and speed. Teachers can support students to […]
There are strong links between language and writing, with oral language skills being a foundation element of good written language (Bishop and Snowling, 2004). Developing oral narratives can help support children’s written narratives. What does it mean? There really is no panacea for developing writing. It is a hugely complex task dependent not only […]
The 250+ graphemes used to spell words in English mean that children need to be taught a variety of techniques to be able to spell accurately, with specific techniques required to recall spellings of highly irregular high-frequency words. Word study is one approach to teaching reading which is built upon the finding that our brains […]
Knowing how to structure ideas is hard for many learners, especially those with literacy difficulties. Scaffolding a task before they begin to work on it can help learners to develop the depth of their writing. What does it mean? Scaffolding support for pupils that find writing difficult increases the opportunity for them to become […]
Education technology is a huge industry, with schools spending large amounts of money on everything from infrastructure to devices, management systems and a wide range of software. However, there remains debate over the value of technology use in the classroom, as well as potential unintended consequences. This page includes links to a range of articles, […]
Chartered College of Teaching ¬∑ Volunteering to teach Having recently qualified to teach English as a foreign language and being unable to teach abroad due to travel restrictions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, I volunteered my services to Action West London, a charity who have been providing English language courses since 1998 for members […]
Chartered College of Teaching ¬∑ Confident by design: professional development through the lens of self-efficacy History is littered with references to the importance of confidence and the transformative power of positive self-belief. From the Roman Poet Virgil’s ‘They can because they think they can’ to Henry Ford’s ‘If you think you can or think […]
Chartered College of Teaching ¬∑ What are schools for? Rethinking accountability and policy development Like many headteachers in the UK, I am grappling with a new norm in my school on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. However, unlike most headteachers, I have just completed a doctoral research project involving teachers and senior leaders […]
