In my last post, I declared myself a big fan of Barak Rosenshine. His writing is sharp and illuminates some interesting ideas around the murky educational debates between teaching skills versus knowledge, and the relative merits of teacher- and student-led activities. Rosenshine’s support for explicit teacher-led skills instruction shows why a binary split between ‘traditional’ […]
In 2014, the Department for Education published a consultation: ‘A world-class teaching profession’. It stated that ‘it is vital that serving teachers have access to on-going, high-quality opportunities to update and refresh their skills and knowledge’ and that ‘evidence-driven, career-long learning is the hallmark of top professions’; also identifying that ‘teachers report that far too […]
Seven words. ‘I was born into a Celtic family.’ Seven is the number of perfection. The words encapsulate what it means to be a supporter of Celtic Football Club – heritage, culture, and belonging. On 27 May 2017, standing on a rain-sodden Hampden turf, manager Brendan Rogers spoke these words after his “invincible” team had […]
Barak Rosenshine’s 1997 article, The Case for Explicit, Teacher-led, Cognitive Strategy Instruction, is only eight pages long, but it is an excellent companion to the long-standing educational debate around ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ approaches to teaching. If you read one thing about education before the new term, I would recommend it. For a start, the paper underlines that […]
Two years ago, I embarked on an action research project for my Master’s (MA) dissertation. I began by attempting to find out how effective Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices were at my school. Rudimentary practices like sharing learning intentions, exemplars and formulation of success criteria were used across the school, but how far were these […]
Research in the current climate is often focused on looking at precise, well-defined actions or initiatives, subjecting them to randomised controlled trials and then evaluating how far they can be proved to have impact. Actions are deemed to have impact if they perform well in these trials and can be proved to ‘work’ in a […]
The humble calculator, now both significantly ubiquitous and laughably convenient, is a technological advance that should have changed the face of mathematics education. Lagrange (2006), wrote: ‘Mathematics education has thus to reconsider the study of a domain, taking the obsolescence of traditional techniques into account, and to conceive new techniques as components of new praxeologies for this […]
Labelling and notions of fixed ability are prevalent in our education system. From the earliest stages of formal education, teachers are required to make predictions about future development based on present attainment, determining students’ academic ability. Dixon, 2002 The pygmalion controversy In their book, ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’, Rosenthal and Jacobsen (1968) reported that experimentally […]
Peer support is a common feature for effective continuous professional development and learning (CPDL). It can take many forms including shared planning, peer observation, collaborative work scrutiny, structured research lesson study and/or collaborative action research. It also contributes to the development of a culture of professional learning and a shared sense of purpose. The shared […]
Every student gets nervous about starting their secondary education: the prospect of a new school, new teachers and new friends looms large over the summer holidays. For children who struggle with literacy, the challenge ahead is even tougher. Of the roughly 570,000 students who will begin year 7 at a state secondary school in September […]
Practice is essential to learning new facts, but not all practice is equivalent. To help students retain knowledge in the long-term, teachers can interleave (alternate) practice of different types of content, and space practice over time, with content being reviewed over weeks or months. Why is this important? Maths is most often taught using blocked […]
You are playing a memory and learning game. Which of these conditions would you find most stressful? Option 1 – get any answers wrong and the game leader will give you an electric shock Option 2 – get any answers wrong and the game leader might give you an electric shock. If you chose […]
Assessment is an important part of any education system. Without assessment, we cannot be sure that students are learning anything, because, as many countries have found, the amount of time students spend in school is a poor guide to how much they have actually learned (Pritchett, 2013). However, assessment is often unpopular with key stakeholders […]
One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks facing teachers is the assessment of extended pieces of writing. This article will outline some of the challenges and trade-offs involved with the assessment of writing at the moment, and then consider whether comparative judgement offers an improvement on these traditional methods. In order to see why […]
Comparative judgement is not a new method of assessment. It was first proposed by LL Thurstone (1927) as a means of describing ‘the processes of human judgement that are not visible to the observer’. Thurstone suggested comparative judgement could be used to quantify the quality of things that are sometimes hard to measure holistically, such […]
In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the need to help young people develop their abilities to use spoken language effectively. Employers commonly say that members of their workforce, especially those engaged in creative activities and customer-related roles, need well-developed skills in communication and collaborative problem solving. They want people who can […]
What are tests and questioning good for? Jonathan Firth The ‘testing effect’, widely referred to now as ‘retrieval practice’, is a well-known psychological phenomenon whereby people remember things better if they are tested on them. The benefits don’t stem simply from getting feedback on right or wrong answers – although that can help too. It […]
Nothing polarises a staffroom discussion more than technology. The moment interactive whiteboards, virtual learning environments or mobile devices are brought into the fray,we’re revealed as either gimmicky evangelists of the new, or chalk-stained Luddites. While there is limited research to suggest that greater use of technology will unequivocally result in improved educational outcomes, there does […]
‘Smart is not something you are, smart is something you get’ (Wiliam, 2013a). What is formative assessment? There is more than 40 years’ research evidence to suggest that enhancing formative assessment within the classroom has a significant impact on student learning. Within the context of the UK, the term ‘formative assessment’ (also used interchangeably with […]
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) reported this year that 45 per cent of young teachers have concerns over their mental health and are considering leaving the profession, with 85 per cent citing workload as a factor (NUT, 2017). With the challenges of the new curriculum and assessment frameworks, there is a sense that the […]
