By Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Let’s start with what we know: language matters. There. That’s it. Vocabulary is a huge predictor of how far children from any background will succeed at school and beyond. The words they know will help them to read, understand, gain new […]
Read moreJill Carter shares her advice for making the most out of quotations during this revision period. Students, teachers and parents worry about quotations or as they are now acceptably known quotes (in my day that was a verb…). ‘Eek – Macbeth – how can I learn a quote for every possible essay scenario?’ I […]
Read more The first Oxford Language Report finds evidence of a significant word gap in UK schools, a problem which is holding back children’s learning and which teachers believe is getting worse. Here Jane Harley, Strategy Director ED-UK at Oxford University Press, gives some background to the report and explains why closing the word gap matters. Why […]
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Wow, what a weekend! The variety of sessions over the two days of the Geographical Association Annual Conference allowed for an invaluable mix of teaching and learning ideas for the classroom, subject knowledge updates, and engagement with the wider discipline of geography. I took away far more from this conference than I’ll be able to […]
Read moreGraham Elsdon looks at ways literature students can usefully write about drama By the play’s final scene, Macbeth sees life as ‘a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. There is a metatheatrical quality to many of Shakespeare’s works, yet some students find it hard to write about plays as plays. […]
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As another long term draws to an end and the Easter holidays loom on the horizon, for many Geography teachers the Geographical Association Annual Conference is an exciting date in the diary! Despite having thrown myself into the wider geography community in the first few years of my career, this year will be my first […]
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I thought I’d write today about the framework of Singapore’s School Mathematics Curriculum. The framework is captured in a well-known diagram that I’ve attached above, and it provoked a lot of interest among teachers when I was last in the UK in November. This was great to see, because this diagram really is at the […]
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The release of Kathryn Bigelow’s movie Detroit in August 2017, which tells the story of major race riots in 1967 in USA, has recently re-awakened my own memories of the turmoil of the struggle for American civil rights which I was privileged to observe at first hand. I lived in the United States for a […]
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Every student of Psychology finds at least something difficult! It can be hard for teachers to put themselves ‘into the students’ shoes’ and understand their problems with ‘learning’. I got some insight into this when I spent several years at a local college doing a part-time course in a second language and taking GCSE and […]
Read moreJill Carter encourages teachers and students to spend time exploring and broadening vocabulary. Vocabulary is power. And, like a lot of power, it is hard won and easily lost. Students’ vocabulary is becoming increasingly limited in a world where it simply isn’t fashionable to exploit vocabulary for effect – in a world of posts, texts […]
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