Students want to learn, but sometimes they don’t know how to; if it gets too hard or too intense too quickly then they give up, fade out or disengage – the same can be said of staff. There has been a lot of interest recently in cognitive load theory (CLT) and its application; Dylan William […]
“As teacher training in the UK becomes increasingly school-based, largely as a result of government requirements, the question of whether and in what sense there is a useful place for ‘theory’ in initial teacher education remains a source of tension and confusion.” Although this observation could have been made in response to the introduction and […]
Many students find the transition to A-level study challenging. In our most recent cohort of chemistry students, those with low prior attainment made less progress than their peers. Observing the underperforming students offers two reasons for this: 1) poor study habits in terms of the type of activities undertaken as independent work, and 2) overestimating […]
The context of modern languages teaching It is easy to argue that modern language teaching in English-speaking countries is in crisis. In England, the supply of advanced-level linguists has dwindled rapidly since the 1990s, university language departments have closed and less than half of all secondary students take a language at GCSE (Tinsley and Doležal, […]
The best way to teach values is to provide a culture embodying the values to be learned, in which students become habituated into ways of life that develop characters possessive of such values. Values education is, therefore, best approached by embedding values within a school’s culture. This is not a cognitive exercise; rather, character traits […]
Curriculum is all about power. Decisions about what knowledge to teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What we choose to teach confers or denies power. To say that pupils should learn ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is never adequate. Start the conversation, and questions abound: ‘Whose […]
If used effectively, peer assessment – a formative assessment strategy that encourages students to comment on the work of their peers – can improve students’ understanding of success criteria, help them to become more engaged in learning and develop their interpersonal skills (Black et al., 2003; Topping, 2017), as well as potentially even reducing teacher […]
What is the purpose of education? If a button were pressed, and you found yourself with a blank slate for deciding what would be educationally worthwhile to teach, how would you go about deciding? The essential place to start would be through gaining clarity on exactly what the ‘purpose of education’ is. However, once you start researching such a thing, you rapidly realise that there is wide disagreement […]
One of the most frequent comments that students make after I teach them about memory (and about why some strategies are much more powerful than others) is ‘Why didn’t we learn this sooner?’. Teaching students about memory seems like a no-brainer. Students are only human after all. As humans, we are programmed to look for […]
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 […]
As a classroom teacher and school leader, I have experienced the positive impact of a school-wide application of a cognitive science-driven pedagogy. I have witnessed real change in student and teacher thinking, and have celebrated the positive impact on student outcomes. This perspective focuses on a key contributor for driving such change: the benefits of deliberate and […]
It is little surprise that, with so much riding on the recruitment and quality of new teachers, the nature and content of Postgraduate Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes continues to be the source of significant debate and often polarised opinion within the education community. ITE in England has experienced significant change over the last decade, […]
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 […]
Religious education (RE) has been described as ‘an uneasy coalition of several disciplines in undisciplined competition with each other’ (Chater and Erricker, 2012). It has been criticised in recent years for a lack of clear purpose, for confused and confusing curriculum design, and for a student experience identifiable by its lack of parity across the […]
The Westminster School, Sandwell, is a specialist provision for pupils with moderate learning difficulties (MLD) aged 7-19. Over the last few years, the school has started to see a change in its cohort with an increased number of pupils with severe learning difficulties (SLD) and complex learning difficulties and disabilities (CLDD). This group now represents […]
An instant formative assessment tool allowing teachers to engage with the thinking, understanding and progress of all students at once. What does it mean? Coupled with erasable pens, mini whiteboards are simple and effective learning tools. They allow students to record and share their thinking, and teachers to instantly check for understanding. They are most […]
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 […]
Like many other secondary schools, at Thornleigh Salesian College we face lots of challenges around ensuring a smooth and successful transition from key stage 2 to 3 (KS2 and KS3). Back in September 2015, Ofsted took a close look at transition. Their report, Key stage 3: the wasted years?, found a variety of issues around […]
Bloom’s Taxonomy is not a triangle with ‘regurgitating facts’ at the bottom and ‘creativity’ at the top. What does it mean? Bloom’s taxonomy is a way of identifying different modes of learning. The significance of placing ‘remembering’ or ‘knowledge’ at the bottom is that this is the foundation on which all the others are built […]
