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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Christian Bokhove Evidence explained Imagine you are designing a textbook and only at the end you decide to evaluate its effectiveness. This would be a risky thing to do, as it would mean making an enormous investment, without any inkling of ‘whether it works’. This would not be money well spent. During the whole design […]
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By now you are probably acutely aware of the fact that GCSE Psychology is changing and I’m sure many of you are busy planning and preparing for teaching the new specifications when your students return in September. So while you are working hard on writing your new schemes of work, planning lessons and developing resources, […]
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Psychology is an amazing subject to teach. Whether you are teaching GCSE or supervising a PhD, we are lucky enough to spend our days understanding how people think, feel and behave. Psychology is a popular subject with students, and it is easy to engage them in understanding how mental health conditions are treated, or how […]
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First, a bit of theory about learning. In 1980, Shlomo Vinner, an Israeli mathematics educator, coined the terms ‘concept image’ and ‘concept definition’ to highlight the difference between what students actually know about a concept and the formal meaning of the concept. David Tall, an English mathematician and educator, is credited with promulgating the term […]
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I met Professor Bruce Hood at the Independent Schools Association conference more than a year ago, where he spoke about the prevailing mythology surrounding the neuroscience of learning. His desire to debunk those myths was matched by his enthusiasm for getting university researchers into schools to share latest research findings in all areas of learning. He has established […]
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One of the easiest things to lose sight of in education is the original target you were trying to achieve. What are we trying to teach them, and how best should this be done? There are many reasons why this becomes marginalised: we assume it is obvious; inspectoral demands replace our objectives with visible metrics […]
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Some students relish the opportunity to hold forth to a captive audience, whereas others may be more reticent or suffer from serious performance anxiety. Either way, I think all students should be encouraged to give regular presentations in their A Level lessons. Why? Giving presentations is an essential life skill that our students will need […]
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We were delighted to join over 300 teachers and 40 guest speakers at the University of Oxford’s Mathematical Institute in June for researchED Maths and Science. researchED is an organization with aims that very much complement our own. We therefore jumped at the opportunity to join forces to host a conference that would help to […]
Read moreLast month, I was lucky enough to speak at OUP’s For the Love of Reading: Passing on the Passion conference. It was a wonderful occasion that brought teachers, authors and researchers together to talk about reading. I left with my brain fizzing with ideas, inspired to try the raft of new things I’d learnt from […]
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