It is the time of year when well-meaning parents pay for a legion of revision guides and they sit atop all the book charts.
The sobering truth is that the purchase is both optimistic and likely lacking in the specific supports and guidance required to use it well.
There is lots to know about the brilliantly complex act of teaching and learning. Here is my list of 10 things to know in the plainest terms possible: 1. Pupils knowing stuff helps them to learn more stuff (background knowledge). 2. It is effective and efficient to explicitly teach pupils the stuff (explicit instruction). 3. …
In a couple of weeks, year 6 pupils will be sitting down to SATs examinations and in secondary schools, A Level and GCSE exams will start in earnest. Teachers everywhere are concentrating upon supporting our pupils to do their very best in challenging circumstances. Every teacher knows that the seeds of examination success are sown …
Year after the year, the same pressures attend exam revision. Each year teachers try the old favourites, alongside a few new revision strategies to keep our students interested. Happily, we now have a wealth of evidence to support some revision strategies over others as we approach the revision stretch. We know that students are not the …
This article on revision strategies was written for Teach Secondary magazine – to subscribe to the magazine look HERE. The new school year stretches out like one of those American roads that extend far beyond the horizon. As the long weeks begin, the summer term, with all of those critical terminal examinations for our students, …
I don’t think there are many English teachers who haven’t asked the following question in the last year: ‘how do I help my class better remember quotations?’ It is an age-old question, but it is a very good one. It is not about producing unthinking parrots that squawk out quotations and exhibit little understanding of …
(Apologies if you we’re expecting an album full of images that have students leaping holding their GCSE certificates – I think we have had enough of those this week!) In the midst of the media melee about exam standards, results fervour and what is seemingly an unwinnable battle for teachers and school leaders to succeed …
