Blog of the Week: 27 November 2020 – Making a good impression

Matthew Evans

When I think of my experience of learning French at school, I have particular memories and a general feeling of negativity. I remember one French teacher more than others: her high pitched voice, her tendency to become irritated easily, her inability to look you in the eye. She was one of those people who closes their eyes when they speak – her eyelids fluttering nervously – a habit we would cruelly imitate when her back was turned. I didn’t enjoy the subject. I was a poor student, and to this day I define myself as being ‘bad at languages’.

I have tried to overcome both my inability to learn another language and my poor self-image as a linguist, but to no avail. I suffered the same problem in relation to PE, a subject I truly loathed and avoided at all costs (usually by faking an asthma attack – don’t do…

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Blog of the Week: 20 November 2020 – Connection Cues

Kat Howard

I’ve been thinking about how I use retrieval in the classroom, and how over time, this has become a much more responsive process, with a sense of automaticity that was certainly not there in the earlier years of my teaching practice. I thought it might be useful to share my thinking on how to set about the task of using retrieval in an organic way that pushes beyond substantive recall, and looks to achieve perhaps a little more than that at a conceptual level to aid delivery of the curriculum.

I wanted to explore the core components of the way in which I use retrieval in my explanation and questioning with students, as opposed to an isolated event at the start or close of the lesson. To be able to ascertain the process, I sought to first establish the stumbling blocks of why, whilst retrieval to engage students is effective…

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Blog of the Week: 13 November 2020 – One Sentence at a Time

The Need for Explicit Instruction in Teaching Students to Write Well

By Judith C. Hochman, Natalie Wexler

When Monica entered high school, her writing skills were minimal. After repeating first grade and getting more than 100 hours of tutoring in elementary school, she’d managed to learn to read well enough to get by, and she was comfortable with math. But writing seemed beyond her reach.

During her freshman year at New Dorp High School, a historically low-performing school on Staten Island in New York City, Monica’s history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders,” Monica wrote. Her entire response consisted of six simple sentences, one of …

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Blog of the Week: CLT 2.0 – The Teacher Scaffolding Effects

@LeadingLearner

Cognitive Load Theory is increasingly impacting on teachers. Its latest inclusion being in the Early Career Framework.  Alongside its wider impact on policy, it is featuring in professional development programmes, influencing people’s thinking and hopefully their approach to teaching.  At its heart, it is a theory about instructional (teaching) design. 

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