For a long time now I have been reading about vocabulary development. After teaching English Language and English Literature for over a decade and a half (including child language acquisition), I came to the stark realisation that I didn’t know enough about how children not only learnt to read, but went on to read to …
It is decades since Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam opened up the ‘Black Box’ to reveal the crucial importance of assessment as learning, but it would appear the messages from said box were not heeded. In each decade since, the topic of assessment has been consumed by the fiery debate of high stakes testing, accountability …
If the path of repeated deliberate practice makes something like perfect, then imitating good models of writing provides solid foundations for the pursuit of writing excellence. ‘Shared writing‘ is one specific strategy that models writing in a highly effective way and is one of my favourite and most effective teaching strategies. ‘Shared writing’ begins with …
