There is now a good deal of evidence that developing self-regulated learning (SRL) and metacognition has a positive impact on student attainment, motivation and behaviour (Quigley et al., nd). Yet it is not always clear how different tasks and activities, including how teachers approach these, might enhance or hinder the opportunities to develop these skills. […]
When the curriculum lacks coherence, it is both harder to teach and harder for students to locate and place their new knowledge. The notion of curriculum coherence can be considered at three levels: the national level, the school level and the classroom level. Although all three have a profound impact on pupils’ learning, it is […]
Teachers are acutely aware of the literacy, communication and language challenges that some of their children face when they first enter the classroom. The link between disadvantage and low levels of language and communication in particular is well-researched; there are significant gaps in vocabulary between children from the least disadvantaged and most disadvantaged backgrounds (Save […]
I don’t need to tell you that teachers face a myriad of problems as they design a curriculum, develop a scheme of work or plan a lesson. The list of requirements is potentially endless, including the need to engage students, to incorporate effective collaboration, to develop mastery of content and subject-specific skills, to give effective feedback, […]
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 […]
Dan Willingham’s (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School? is the first thing that all staff who work at Willingham (name is a coincidence) Primary School are asked to read. It gives a great introduction to cognitive psychology and raises the question: ‘Why have we always done X this way?’ The answer, on far too many […]
This article is based on an original research article published in the International Journal of Early Years Education (Boyd, 2014a). The full article can be found here. This paper presents findings from a project completed within a collaborative practitioner research partnership between a nursery school and a primary school, and a university-based educational researcher. The […]
Since the introduction of the new National Curriculum in 2014, our school’s aim has been to design a curriculum that meets the needs of the students at our school, is broad and balanced, and is engaging for all. In order to do this we have carried out research by attending courses and reading widely around […]
Cognitive load theory has led to the development of many instructional techniques for enhancing learning that are designed to prevent learners from overloading their working memory by eliminating wasteful cognitive load that is not essential for learning. However, the effectiveness of a particular teaching technique depends on the relationship between the characteristics of learners’ cognitive […]
Public debate across the West is often polarised, angry and hysterical. Social media amplifies extreme and strident views. People tend to think the worst of their opponents and often believe or disbelieve things because it suits their preconceived ideas…’ This is the introduction to the BBC radio series Sweet Reason. Unfortunately, this description is all […]
Autism has traditionally been viewed as a condition predominantly affecting boys, and therefore autistic girls are not being sufficiently identified. Gould and Ashton-Smith (2011) recognise that autistic girls are broadly misdiagnosed and underdiagnosed, and although the male-to-female ratio has narrowed significantly over the years (currently 3:1), a recent meta-analysis of prevalence studies by Loomes et […]
Gloucester Road Primary School in Cheltenham has been on a considerable journey over the last 10 years. In 2008, it was in special measures. A new head and senior leadership team took up their posts four years ago, and in July 2017 the school received its very first Ofsted ‘outstanding’. The reasons for this success are many and varied, and include […]
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 study of multimodality, as explained by Bezemer (2012), ‘focuses on analysing and describing the full repertoire of meaning-making resources that people use (visual, spoken, gestural, written, three-dimensional, and others, depending on the domain of representation) in different contexts, and on developing means that show how these are organized to make meaning’. When I first […]
Michael Young and colleagues’ principle of ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young et al., 2014) reignited debate about how the school curriculum can be a tool for social justice. Based on my experience as a primary school teacher in a disadvantaged area, I reflect on what powerful knowledge is, why it is an important curriculum principle and how […]
The importance of the curriculum in effective teaching Walter Doyle’s seminal paper ‘Effective teaching’, written over thirty years ago (Doyle, 1985), argues that in order to assess the effectiveness of teaching, we have to take into account the curriculum and pedagogy. At a recent conference, Daniel Muijs, Ofsted’s Head of Research, made a similar point and […]
Reflection on one’s own lessons is typically viewed as a key aspect of professional development. Teachers are exhorted to be reflective practitioners, and this – it is assumed – will make them better at their job, a principle often seen as an instrument of system-wide improvement (e.g. Donaldson, 2011). But how accurate are such reflections? Can […]
The Rise – the first school to be opened by Ambitious about Autism Schools Trust, a multi-academy trust for students with an EHCP (education, health and care plan) for autism – is not alone in its quest to improve the coherence of our curriculum. However, as an all-through school, with a slightly shorter school day […]
Conflict of interest statement: This study was carried out by Sumdog, a company providing free and paid versions of their software to schools. The study design and planned analysis were reviewed by an independent academic and registered with the Open Science Framework prior to any data collection. The registration, along with associated documents, can be […]
In most biology departments, a spiral curriculum can be seen in schemes of work (SOW) and in the point order of exam board specifications. For good reason. A subject in which key concepts underpin more complex ideas, such as knowledge of protein structure and function being essential to understanding the selectively permeable nature of cell membranes, requires the teaching sequence to be carefully planned. There should be opportunities to revisit key concepts in different contexts. Typically, biology curricula are […]
