I like to preface my teaching of Wuthering Heights with a compulsory screening of Kate Bush crying ‘Heathcliff! It’s me, it’s Cathy I’ve come home now!’ and prancing on the moors in a billowy dress while she moans musically about the sad effects of being outdoors in not much more than a nightie. The reaction…
I first came across Oliver Caviglioli on the pedagogical goldmine that is Twitter. To be honest, I was ‘drawn’ to the graphics he posted on his feed (see what I did there?) and the fact that he thinks the free Waitrose weekend newspaper is a model of sensible and user-friendly design. In his book, Dual…
Everyone has been affected by this hard financial crisis, creating a massive impact for schools and teachers. No longer do we just teach our specialised areas imparting outstanding subject knowledge onto our students, but we are now faced with teaching second subjects. This challenge may seem daunting but I am sure it’s a challenge that…
Three simple ways iPads can help to support accessibility in the classroom and beyond.
Blog Posts – focus on recall As ever, there is a huge amount being written on how we can make educational research work for us in the classroom. Here is just a taste of what is out there at the moment. Tom Sherrington’s post on creating a deeper understanding and better recall talks through the…
With the Coronavirus closing schools around the world we are now seeing more and more about remote learning and the changes this will lead to. Some people are throwing out everything they know about effective instruction and deciding that remote learning changes everything. However, I think it is worth taking a breath and remembering that…
In December 2018 there was an excellent article in the journal Teaching History in which a history teacher had investigated how the writing of historic fiction helped students to construct a better, deeper understanding of the medieval past. In the article, the teacher had carefully structured a series of lessons to help students write their…
Research Focus – Curriculum and Knowledge The new OFSTED framework, with its new method of “deep-diving” a department to question its teachers, has led to a new found interest in curriculum intent. After years of focusing on how we teach, a new focus on what we teach and why is probably not unwelcome but it…
I have recently been reading ‘Love to Teach’ by Kate Jones. It is always refreshing to spend time reading and reminding yourself of key successes within lessons. I often try to think of innovative ways to ensure that I can introduce a new topic effectively. Whilst thinking and researching about how to deliver new topics…
This academic year we are paying particular attention to understanding the principles of Cognitive Load Theory (that emerged from the work of John Sweller) and are carefully considering how this can be applied in the classroom to maximise students’ learning. Drawing on the NSW’s Cognitive Load in Practice in particular, members of the Ped Team…
Research focus – Metacognition ‘These learners are proactive in their efforts to learn because they are aware of their strengths and limitations and because they are guided by personally set goals and task-related strategies, such as using an arithmetic addition strategy to check the accuracy of solutions to subtraction problems. These learners monitor their behavior…
Research Focus – Curriculum and Progress Curriculum has been a topic of increasing interest in the education community over the past few years; reflecting a concern that a focus on generic pedagogy (how we learn) was drawing focus from the subject itself (what we learn). One interesting idea that has been bouncing around concerns the…
A blog about history teaching and other matters
Collating some of the excellent practice shared on Twitter
Finding & sharing teaching 'bright spots'
Teaching what works
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