Eleonora Crovato revels in those lightbulb moments when students make connections with their previous learning. In this unusual year for year 6 to year 7 transition, Elenora shares what she will be doing to prepare for September. Every September I ask my new batch of year 7s the same question: what kind of science experiments […]
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Most practical work in UK secondary schools follows a recipe-based formulaic approach which fails to teach students how to work independently or investigatively.
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Practical work is integral to the National Curriculum yet it is likely to be the aspect most disrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The first of a series of blogs exploring aspects of teaching and learning in the future post-covid classroom, Eleonora Crovato reflects on the role of practicals and asks: Are practicals a thing of the past? I work in a school with excellent resources and truly knowledgeable technicians – I don’t know how I would do […]
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Many of the students in my examination classes are struggling to engage in online learning and need ways to boost their motivation. They are unsure of the merit of spending time learning new content and practicing examination questions, as they feel that their grades will be generated from data that has already been collected. It […]
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A game of snakes and ladders – that is how my 9-year-old son describes lockdown. This piqued my interest, and I was drawn away from my online virtual marking and gazed at him across the kitchen table to ask him to explain his metaphor. Zac is in Year 5 in an expanding multiphase academy, where […]
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In my experience over the past few years of researching metacognition and delivering CPD to teachers, it seems the biggest issue teachers have with metacognition is not the theory itself, or even the strategies for applying it in the classroom, but rather the barriers to successful implementation. With the best will in the world, and […]
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Public examinations are another casualty of the pandemic. The 2020 cohort saw centre assessed grades generated, by using the full range of available evidence to generate a fair and objective judgement of the grade each student would have got if the exams had been sat, along with a rank order of students [1]. This information […]
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So, we are now in July, and according to the government, we are through the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic and life is beginning to break out of lockdown. We have had about a quarter of the calendar year and more than ten teaching weeks away from our classrooms and we are starting to welcome […]
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I’m on the “coronacoaster”: one minute I’m up and the next I’m down – it’s an emotional rollercoaster. Most of the time, I feel like it’s all fine and we are just in a new normal, but in the blink of an eye, I’m flying by the seat of my pants, heading down with the […]
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