In my previous blog ‘ Four Stages of Reimagining the Classroom’ , I presented the fictional Hammerhill Academy’s English Department and their journey to setting up a virtual learning provision. Since then it would be fair to say that Hammerhill – like all real schools across the U.K – would have gone through a rapidly transformational voyage of virtual learning discovery. The most […]
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It is almost impossible to read about the pandemic in the UK news without coming across some reference to concern regarding pupils’ mental health as a result of lockdown. Whether or not you believe the accuracy of the scale of the reported issue there is no doubt that, as with adults, young people have found […]
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If you had said a year ago that working from home was possible for a teacher, the idea would have been unthinkable. We can’t teach from home! We need to be with our pupils – seeing what they’re doing, motivating them, watching out for their behaviour and making sure they’re focused. How would we mark […]
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Super authors, super accessible, simply super-readable fiction for KS3/11-14 Written by award-winning authors and developed in partnership with Barrington Stoke, the experts in producing accessible fiction, Super-Readable Rollercoasters aim to encourage less-confident readers and support them to become life-long readers. With findings from the latest Word Gap report by Oxford University Press showing that pupils may have read less widely for pleasure during lockdown, these new titles […]
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Metacognition is about pupils’ ability to monitor and direct their own learning. The concept of metacognition has been around for a long time, but seems to be having a revival recently, perhaps in part owing to some of the challenges presented by lockdown. Beyond the nightmare navigation of zooms, screen sharing and behaviour management from […]
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If you’re new to the role of literacy lead, or just have an interest in approaching Literacy across the school I’d strongly advise beginning your journey with vocabulary – I have written two blogs on this (links below). It makes sense that before students can access texts, we teach them how to access words, and […]
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Lionel Bolton, Head of English, Languages and Humanities, Oxford University Press Read the report What have we discovered? Our new report, Bridging the Word Gap at Transition, builds on our previous report from 3 years ago, Why Closing the Word Gap Matters. In that first report we highlighted that nearly half of the children in Year 1 and […]
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Jane Harley, Policy and Partnership Director, Oxford University Press Read the Oxford Language Report OUP has a deeply rooted commitment to young people’s language development – it sits at the heart of education. We seek to drive positive change in educational outcomes through our publishing and nowhere can be more important than the area of language and literacy. Through our Oxford Children’s Corpus we monitor closely the […]
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Sarah Eggleton: Continuing from the previous blog – ‘Closing the word gap – introducing a whole school approach’ this blog will explain how we moved from staff delivering key words in lessons to enabling teachers and students to engage with and interrogate vocabulary to get a genuine deep understanding of it. What we wanted to […]
Read more Sarah Eggleton: Following on from my previous two posts regarding developing a consistent approach to closing the word gap in the English classroom, I’m pleased to share how we moved from English to a whole school approach to explicit vocabulary teaching. Experience has taught me that when moving to implement a Literacy strategy the overwhelming […]
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