Immerse yourself in the art and science of teaching and learning with a comprehensive range of blogs. Explore dynamic topics such as effective feedback strategies, impactful explanations, the art of questioning, and more. Gain valuable insights into pedagogical techniques informed by research evidence, along with an array of practical tips. These blogs are useful for teachers, leaders and everyone interested in education.
Year after the year, the same pressures attend exam revision. Each year teachers try the old favourites, alongside a few new revision strategies to keep our students interested. Happily, we now have a wealth of evidence to support some revision strategies over others as we approach the revision stretch. We
We have all been there… You are being observed by a senior member of staff. Your hands are clammy as you grit your teeth through every minute of this crucial lesson observation. This one hour may determine months of hard work. You are speaking to a small group of students,
What if we were faced with uncomfortable questions about some of our brightest and best teaching and learning ideas? It would be uncomfortable and challenging, no doubt. Perhaps, though, such reflection on the potential of unintended consequences and unforeseen failures could prove both revealing and instructive? With this thought experiment
Like any self-respecting English teacher, I like to tell stories to my students. One such story is the embodiment of a flourishing, confident learner. It is the story of a little girl from North Carolina, USA. A real-life story that shines a light on the amazing capacity of young people
Since 2012, I have written numerous posts about feedback and marking. This is no surprise given our school system has been seemingly addicted to making ‘progress’ visible, with feedback becoming a quick fix for all our ills. Of course, feedback is richly complex, like most things in the classroom, so
Since I have been writing this blog in 2012, no subject has interested me more than the nuanced, complicated staple of teaching: questioning. As a teacher of nearly 15 years, I have attempted annual to crack the code for asking great questions. I am working on it. Happily, I have
Each year we are all faced with the nerve-shredding, tolerance-stretching spell that is revision. It never seems to get any easier. Each group of students proves a unique, gnarly challenge as we go about training, convincing, supporting, and more. It has proven a consistent topic for me to write about,
It is that time of year again. Nerves fray, students and teachers (probably parents too) as we arm our students with the obligatory revision strategies, resources, wall plans, flashcards, apps, highlighters, revision guides, and whatever else we can get our hands on, in the flimsy hope that some of it
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?
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,