Daisy Christodoulou’s new book, Teachers vs Tech? is all about how we can use technology to improve learning. In this blog post she considers the benefit of spaced repetition algorithms in helping students retain knowledge. Recently, I started flicking through a book I’d read about ten years ago, Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties: An Intimate History. […]
Read more
We recently held a small event in our Oxford offices to talk to primary and secondary school teachers about vocabulary and the Word Gap in their school. Lots of interesting, practical ideas were shared and discussed and we have summarised some of them here: Give key vocabulary at the start of each lesson. Encourage students […]
Read more
What do really exceptional teachers do, that good teachers don’t? This is a very under-researched question but we are beginning to get some answers. What makes brilliant teachers brilliant is not who they are, but what they do in the classroom, and some of the techniques they use anyone could adopt. Doug Lemov works in […]
Read more
By Sam Holyman Are you concentrating at the end of term? At school we are getting ready for the new academic year, sorting labs, stock taking and making sure everything is labelled. And concentration has become the hot topic of debate! We use the term concentration all the time, and in everyday life this gets […]
Read more
Andy Chandler-Grevatt Back to School. The end of the summer break and the new term. New students, new timetable, new you? What will you do differently this school year? An often neglected part of our ambitions, planning and targets is looking after ourselves. How are you going to look after yourself this year? Teachers are […]
Read more
Professor Chris Kyriacou I have spent more than 30 years teaching about and doing research on what constitutes ‘effective’ teaching. Over the years I have become more and more convinced that the key to being a successful teacher, both in terms of the quality of learning you promote, and in terms of maintaining your own […]
Read more
We’ve taken a closer look at the new Ofsted Education Inspection Framework and the School Inspection Handbook that will apply from September 2019 and have pulled out the key things that inspectors will be looking for in relation to the new judgements that are particularly relevant to secondary schools. You can find out more about […]
Read more
For the first few years of my teaching career, I would set revision lessons without much expectation. If you were going to do a test, you should at least give some chance of success by providing the lesson before for ‘revision’. I would often provide a list of suggested activities that students could pick from: […]
Read more
A petition has recently been published on Change.org about the number of nature words in the Oxford Junior Dictionary. We take customer feedback very seriously and have addressed the most commonly raised concerns below. Like you, we feel strongly that nature is essential to children’s lives and are encouraged to see that this is such […]
Read more