The sun is shining and the holidays are just around the corner, so what better excuse to roll out a list of recommended reads to see you through the summer. Here’s my pick of the top five reads for ten to thirteen-year-olds. Scavengers by Darren Simpson If you like stories where things aren’t quite what they […]
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Successful comprehension is what allows children to acquire and apply new knowledge, to communicate successfully, and ultimately, to be academically successful. However, good comprehension is more than simply processing single words or sentences; it’s the reader having a coherent understanding of the meaning of the text as a whole. To do this, they need to […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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In my first blog I wrote about how my headteacher had wanted to create a ‘culture of reading’ at my school. This time last year, in quiet moments, I worried that it would be impossible. I forgot that creating cultures is something teachers do all the time. Whether it be a culture of neatly presented […]
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It is a strange time of year if you teach in FE, a Sixth Form or have A-Level classes on your timetable. Second year students have sat their exams, and have flown the nest. Many of them you will miss in some way; the occasional one evokes Greg Davies’s speech to his Sixth Formers in […]
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If you are an AQA Psychology centre, you may recently have found out that there are a few changes to the specification. We’d like to reassure you that our authors and the rest of our Complete Companions team are already on it. Here is a summary of the changes and any implications for The Complete […]
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We asked Rebecca Nobes, Head of Spanish and #MFLchat on twitter to share her reflections on this year’s AQA GCSE Spanish exams. We’d love to hear your thoughts too, so please share your thoughts in the comments below. The general consensus The general consensus among the MFL teaching community seems to be that this year’s […]
Read moreConsistent use of images supports the understanding of mathematical structures. The outstanding examples of this in mathematics have become ‘canonical’, that is part of the mathematical canon. At school level these canonical images are: number line; function graphs (thankyou Descartes); 2-dimensional combination grids (thankyou Omar Khayyam and Cayley); Venn diagrams (thankyou Cantor and Charles Dodgson). […]
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It’s been almost a month since the Historical Association Conference, and I am still feeling as high as a kite. I arrived in Chester on the Friday afternoon and after a walk round the Cathedral my daughter and I headed to the conference to have a nosy. I could not believe how many people were […]
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