It’s difficult to decide if CPD has been useful or not, until you reflect on what it is that you will take away from it. Sometimes that manifests itself in things you can instantly use in the classroom, but it can be much subtler than this. Conversations with other delegates, being with a professional community […]
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For non-specialists teaching RE, there are a number of challenges, the greatest being how to cope with the extensive body of subject knowledge needed to teach and assess RE confidently and well. I’m the Series Editor on Living Faiths and set out to create a set of resources that would help meet some of the challenges outlined […]
Read more In Religious Education, we look to encourage students to develop by giving them time to ask their own questions, and evaluate the different answers offered by faiths to the questions they are investigating. Tasks need to be challenging enough to get students thinking about the religious experiences and concepts they have learned. When you prepare […]
Read more As an RE teacher trainer, I often visit schools and observe lessons, and what I find is that at the heart of all good learning is making sure that each lesson enables students to make progress. That progress is greatly improved when the lesson builds on what students already know, and when they have opportunities […]
Read more I’ve been reflecting on reflection, meta-reflection I think it’s called. In particular, the nature of reflection in both professional and personal contexts – my own and those of the trainee teachers I’m working with. They are required as part of their course to keep a journal throughout their PGCE year, recording regular written reflections every […]
Read moreby Ann Clucas How do you teach about the abstract and symbolic to those who may be most comfortable with the concrete and literal? How can you explain wildly varying opinions of what is true (and what truth itself means) to those who may struggle to see more than one point of view? Each person […]
Read moreby Rachael Jackson-Royal A team of Religious Education teachers, who are members of NATRE (National Association of Teachers of Religious Education), have combined forces with researchers at Bristol University to start work on a project to identify the best ways of promoting community relations in RE, with a particular focus on ‘contact theory’. This idea, […]
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