Francois Walker, Headteacher from Model School Whiteknights Primary shares his experience of the impact of the resources from Read Write Inc. After a term of implementing Read Write Inc. Phonics we saw an impact! Children were starting to read out of Oxford Reading Tree books and they’d never done that before. They were also able to […]
Read moreLines, squares or plain? The pages of maths exercise books, I mean. For years I have insisted that pages have to have squares. Without vertical lines as well as horizontal ones how could my students possibly draw all the right-angled triangles and bearing North lines and coordinate axes and so on that I would tell […]
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As History teachers, we are just about to embark on ‘exam madness’ season. We have precious little time left with our exam classes. We will be prepping and delivering extra revision sessions on top of completing all of the other tasks that are part and parcel of our profession. So it is no surprise that […]
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Today, it’s time to lighten up – with a TOK cartoon, and a smile. In recent months, we’ve been heavy on a cluster of inter-connected topics: confirmation bias, fake news (variously defined), fact-checking, “pushback” to opposing views, and class activities for self-awareness of cognitive resistance to changing our minds. But today – as May exams […]
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Where to start? I’m someone who likes to keep mixing things up to see if new combinations of ingredients result in surprising and delicious outcomes, like Heston Blumenthal’s egg and bacon ice cream. Enjoying the freedom of being able to teach topics in any order, I can’t resist tweaking the Scheme of Work to see […]
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This month we’re delighted to be welcoming back David Shanks with his second post about preparing for GCSE 9-1. Have an effective and organised general approach Measuring what works in education is a notoriously tricky business with so many variables acting upon the learning process. However, advances in the world of cognitive science and educational […]
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By Jean Gross CBE, formerly the government’s Communication Champion for children and young people. Oxford University Press recently published the Oxford Language Report – a study into the effects of the word gap on children’s learning and what we can do to combat this. Here, Jean Gross CBE, offers some practical suggestions about how we […]
Read more 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 more Here’s a challenge for your students. Are they open to changing their opinions if faced with contrary facts? Today we offer a class exercise – ready for you to download, to use directly or to customize – whose goal is student self-awareness. It demands reflection, research, and discussion, and should raise discussion on facts, feelings, […]
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 […]
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