There is plenty of talk in teaching regarding mastery and ensuring pupils develop their understanding of new concepts, but it is essential not to forget the role that rote learning plays in education.
Repetition allows pupils to rehearse knowledge, retrieve facts and practice their understanding. It enables the brain to develop automaticity, which is vital for many aspects of mastery, e.g. times tables.
Lesson planning involves many aspects of teaching and learning. One of the vital components is ensuring that pupils have an opportunity to practice retrieval to help them consolidate new information.
You may well use more formal tests at the end of units, but there should also be opportunities for pupils to demonstrate and rehearse their learning more frequently.
In this guide, we will explore some ideas to help you use quizzes more effectively in the classroom.
Maybe you are one of the teachers who love curriculum planning, or perhaps you find it daunting.
Whatever your feelings, we can all agree that it can be a time-consuming and often confusing process.
The best way to make curriculum planning creative and fun is to reduce the impact on workload so you do not lose evenings and weekends to the task.
Here are some of our best ideas for making curriculum planning easier.
The summer term may bring teachers one step nearer to the summer break, but first, there is the onerous task of completing report writing.
Every school will have a different format for their reports, but whatever the system used, it is often a long-winded chore. Indeed, many teachers spend their evenings and weekends preparing detailed reports that accurately show each pupil’s progress over the year.
There will be very few teachers who have not heard of ChatGPT. This new release of artificial intelligence (AI) uses text-based language to generate human-type responses.
The main issue for school leaders and teachers is that using ChatGPT in schools raises some ethical questions.
In this article, we will examine some of the primary concerns and advantages of using ChatGPT in schools.
The connection between neuroscience and education is undeniable, yet there has been very little progress towards applying neuroscience directly in the classroom.
The main barrier to incorporating neuroscience is that there has been very little development in applying it to pedagogy and classroom support.
Many experts now think that neuroeducation should focus on helping teachers to learn more about brain development and functions.
Education should always include time to improve pupil communication as it is a vital life skill. Academic achievements alone are not enough for future success.
Teachers already understand that effective communication is essential and are well-positioned to help develop these skills in pupils. In this guide, we will share some ideas that can help improve pupil communication in your school.
Over the last few years, there has been an enormous paradigm shift on how observations can add value to improving teaching. The movement from grading observations to using them as a tool for development is crucial to ensuring feedback has a positive effect.
However, one of the barriers to optimising the observation process is the lack of training for school leaders to get the most out of observations.
Budget restraints often mean schools are reducing the size of their senior leadership teams, which inevitably pushes additional responsibilities down onto middle leaders.
Middle leaders have a key role in influencing the standard of education within a school that is laid out in the new EIF
Your middle leaders are likely to be made up of the head of departments by subject or key stages. These colleagues should come together as a middle leadership team that can drive the school’s vision and improvement plan forward.
Most teachers will be aware of schemas and how they operate as patterns of learning that eventually form into concepts. But what about priming?
Priming is defined as the triggers that are associated with memories to help them be accessed.
For example, if you are asked about a time from your past, you will associate it with certain smells, music, sounds, and feelings. It’s not something we do consciously; instead, it happens at a synaptic level.
So what does priming mean for teachers when they want their students to recall learning?
