This time last year, teachers up and down the country were looking forward to the second half of the school year after a restful festive season. Little did they know that their approach to teaching would have to change drastically towards working remotely.
It’s been a steep learning curve for teachers and students alike, with many struggling to adjust to our current COVID normal. But have we learnt anything about how best to teach remotely?
A new research paper has revealed that the type of recall task a teacher chooses can substantially influence the effects of learning by retrieval practice.
It matters how to recall – task differences in retrieval practice (Endres et al, November 2020) explores how 54 university students studied two expository texts, followed by retrieval practice tasks.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting health advice, lack of staff and social distancing measures, schools have had to adjust their class sizes accordingly. But does this mean that smaller class sizes are here to stay? And what’s better for the overall development of children?
Questioning and teacher scripts have immeasurable benefits as an assessment tool. They can help with retention, behaviour and self-regulation, not to mention the long-term impact on teacher workload both in and out of the classroom.
What’s more, dialogue in class can help students activate hard thinking, enabling them to elaborate on themes and topics:
“One way for students to shoulder the responsibility for learning is for them to be the readers, writers, speakers, listeners, and thinkers in the classroom through active engagement in social interaction with others,” (Alvermann & Phelps, 2005; Vacca, Vacca, & Mraz, 2011).
Weighing and measuring instead of growing and feeding is all well and good. But in several schools up and down the country, we are still seeing monitoring and evaluation schedules alongside quality assurance timetables.
The problem with this is that it focuses on judgement when we should be giving precedence to improving the quality of teaching and learning in school. Thankfully, there are ways in which you can switch your mindset and deliver truly great teaching.
For teachers up and down the country, 2020 has been an interesting year to say the least. The coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdown threw our education system into disarray, with millions of parents forced to tackle the challenge of home-schooling.
During this time, teachers themselves became key workers and had to provide pupils with schemes of work that could be delivered remotely. But now teachers must overcome a new obstacle – helping students catch up on work missed during the six-month stretch of school closures.
One thing that a huge number of teachers want and need the most isn’t actually available to them.
Unfortunately, time is a precious commodity that comes and goes all too quickly. Without sufficient time, many teachers struggle to fulfil all aspects of the role to the best of their ability.
In order to help schools, colleges and education leaders prepare for teaching in the coming months, the OECD and the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard University have collaborated on a new paper.
Schooling disrupted, schooling rethought – How the COVID-19 pandemic is changing education has collected data and analysed information on the education conditions faced in 59 countries.
There is a good chance you have heard the buzzwords ‘metacognition’ and ‘cognitive sciences’ banded around education circles over the past few years.
But how can teachers use them to their advantage and tangibly help students become more aware of their learning for better outcomes?
In the book How We Teach Now (2017), Carole L. Yue of Covenant College provides several valuable insights to teachers on improving learning metacognition and self-regulation.
The closure of schools during the coronavirus pandemic poses a significant threat to the ‘educational development of a generation of children’. That is the opinion of Francis Green, Professor of Work and Education Economics, UCL Institute of Education.
In a recent research paper, Green looks at whether schoolwork assigned during lockdown has resulted in educational poverty for students.