As the old adage goes, ‘if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is‘. Now, you can often turn this sceptical spotlight onto many headlines that you read in the news, on the internet, or see on television. Under more intense scrutiny, most assertions that find five
I don’t think there are many English teachers who haven’t asked the following question in the last year: ‘how do I help my class better remember quotations?’ It is an age-old question, but it is a very good one. It is not about producing unthinking parrots that squawk
And the evidence says… Feedback is the answer! It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a teaching wanting to help their students learn effectively must give lots of feedback. Marking, lots of it, should get to the root of many of our problems. We just need more of it, right?
Sometimes a research study comes along and confirms what you suspected all along. The ‘Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis‘ does just that trick for me. Now, ‘Green Eggs and Ham‘ is famously a very short and funny story by Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel). The ‘Green Eggs and
(Image credit: Jonathan Kim – https://www.flickr.com/photos/jkim1/452830868) If a student can’t write, all eyes turn to the English department. Whether it is a brief in an Art lesson or a write up of a science experiment, if the writing isn’t up to standard then
Sometimes we are offered a simple solution to help us succeed in life. Amy Cuddy, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School offered us just that: the power pose. Her joint research showed that adopting a power pose for a short time could increase testosterone and improve performance at job interviews.
We can all imagine our own personal hell of terminal exams, stacked on top of one another, with acres of knowledge to remember. It is the stuff of sleepless nights, for teachers and for our students. And yet, if we teach with memory in mind all the time, we can
Some aspects of education are devilishly complex: take many school tracking systems, our army of acronyms, or behaviour management on a windy Wednesday. And yet, some thing are very simple. As I sat and read this short article on the TES – entitled ‘Cut Teaching Hours to Ease the Recruitment Crisis,
(Image credit: Kyle Flood – Creative Commons License – ‘Waah!’) Nothing prepares you to be a parent. Nothing. No parenting class gives you every answer to the mystery, particularly in the haze of a sleep-deprived dawn. No crying doll can ever captures the searing pain of your babe crying in your arms.
Illustrated by Ronald Searle, in Life Magazine, 1960. Reading a classic novella like ‘A Christmas Carol’ is tricky for our teenage students. Yes, they have likely heard of Scrooge and seen a film adaptation or three, but when faced with the actual text and the world of the story, with
Just under a quarter of a century ago, I failed the 11+. I’ll admit, the experience was less than cataclysmic for my skinny pre-teen self. I remember being asked by my school teacher if I wanted to sit the exam, with my ‘yes vote’ being cast when my best
(Image sourced from Flickr and courtesy of City of York Council) “It [Confidence] is the single most important attribute any child can have. I truly wish there were classes to focus on it…With confidence comes personality. With personality comes a form of charm, wit and wisdom. These can camouflage