Unlock the power of research evidence in education to improve teaching and learning. Discover evidence-based strategies, innovative approaches, and actionable insights that can elevate teaching. These blogs explore new evidence, whilst exploring a range of research methods and practical approaches. Reflecting on research evidence use can help drive school and college improvement, so these blogs offer handy insights for that vital work.
Around one in four 15-year-olds spend 6 hours or more in their bedroom on a typical weekend day. Consider that for a moment. These teens, hidden away in their bedrooms, often tethered to the blue-light of dopamine spiking devices, have been labelled a ‘bedroom generation’. New research
"Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return… each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline." Oswald Spengler, The Decline of
Making positive changes to yourself is hard but to try and do it at a school, college, or even across a group of schools locally, and sustain that change, is doubly difficult. We know from lots of research evidence, and lived experience, that best laid plans can make a jump
Engagement matters to learning. Without it, students are unlikely to focus and invest in their learning. If teenage students in England are increasingly disengaged, we should want to know the causes and what can be done about it. In a recent large scale survey entitled, 'Mind the Engagement Gap:
What if your child struggles and falls behind their peers? When it comes to the topic of children struggling in school and education, parents can experience profound feelings of fear or worry, or hope and relief. Students can feel the same array of strong emotions whether they struggle or not.
There is a lot of warnings and worries when it comes to using AI in education. Teachers understandably worry that if ChatGPT, Gemini, and similar AI chatbots, do all the hard work and thinking, then students will opt out and learn less. The idea of 'cognitive offloading' each
There appears to be a problem with a lack of belonging from children in education. It makes sense then for schools and settings to prioritise belonging in their work. Belonging may be a valuable and important concept, and something schools want to improve, but it also hard to pin down.
Every teacher can recite awkward experiences from their teacher professional development past. Pleasing all the teachers all the time, with various approaches, is simply hard work! Years later, I can still remember my left/right brain training (twice - by the same trainer!), as well as undertaking coaching approaches, and a
Teaching a struggling reader, whether they are seven or seventeen, can be a gut-wrenching experience. It can make the typical tasks of a school day difficult and sap the enjoyment out of learning. It is no surprise then that every teacher, and parent, wants to get to the root
Are we in danger of making learning too simple? When it comes to students in the classroom, we can simplify an explanation of a concept into PPT where complex phrases become glossy icons. Books can become short booklets. Subjects become revision guides. Tricky topics can get distilled into knowledge organisers
Mindfulness is hugely popular across the world and there is a question to be asked about whether it could prove useful at scale in schools and colleges. It is clear that mental health referrals are up across young people, from around one in eight children and young people in 2017
Making change in education is hard. Making a change at scale is even harder. Whether it is a new secondary school, growing their departments and staff, or a school trust mushrooming in size, this type of scale up can easily suffer what has been termed a ‘voltage drop’. The book,