“In order for teachers to develop the confidence to deliver a mastery curriculum we need to empower them to take risks in the classroom.” Rebecca Hamburger explains how to go from teacher to master: All too often when I am delivering whole school CPD, I ask the question: “Who loves maths?” and only a few […]
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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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A numbers expert declares he’ll sum up everything he knows about analyzing statistics on the back of a postcard. Could any TOK teacher NOT instantly spring to the alert? He’s inspired me to attempt my own lean summary: a single page mini-guide on (dis)trusting statistics, useful in our own educational context of Theory of Knowledge. […]
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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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Is spelling really that important any more? Especially in the modern world where children are growing up using onscreen documents, emails, texts, all with autocorrect? Unfortunately, as Jerrold Zar illustrates in his poem ‘An Ode to a Spellchecker’, we can’t always trust the computer to spot the ‘Miss steaks aye kin knot sea’. The truth […]
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It’s fair to say that technology has opened up a world of possibilities for educators and learners alike, and there is still ongoing conversation around just how much it impacts learning outcomes. Edtech caters for a wide range of different learning modalities and can offer an exciting and immersive experience. However, there’s an equally valid […]
Read more Vanessa Pittard shares expert advice on how to build firm foundations with mastery. I’d like to suggest that one of the benefits of mastery is the avoidance of misery. I’ll focus on primary maths, but what I write here applies as much at KS4/GCSE as to Key Stage 2. What’s the point of introducing mastery […]
Read moreAuthor Pete Ellison explores the motivation and approach taken by the Catapult team during the development of the new Catapult resources. At a time when the demands of external assessment at KS2 and GCSE have never been higher, we know that many young people are not regularly reading for pleasure (recent research by the […]
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For the first few years of my teaching career, I would set revision lessons without much expectation. If you were going to do a test, you should at least give some chance of success by providing the lesson before for ‘revision’. I would often provide a list of suggested activities that students could pick from: […]
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