I was asked to deliver some CPD on planning for the online lesson environment. It was about how best to direct a student’s attention to the relevant areas. I made this powerpoint that illustrates the ideas with a few examples based on an old SoW I had for Alevel physics. This blog gives a little…
Category: teaching and learning
Demand characteristics: Why remote learning may allow us to finally see what actually happens in lessons.
Determining the quality of teaching in a department is a vital and challenging part of every school leader’s job. This has had a recent twist with the move towards remote education and live lessons. Quality assurance is a difficult thing to get right, we often put too much emphasis on metrics and not enough emphasis…
Sequencing in GCSE Biology: Teaching Evolution
I started to read The Ape that Understood the Universe by Steve Stewart-Williams and it got me thinking about the teaching of evolution. I posted a quick survey on twitter because it occurred to me that the sequencing of ecology and evolution is quite varied. In this blog I want to discuss the various ways…
Formative Forms
I’ve written this blog to share the strategy we are using to facilitate whole-class feedback and formative assessment for our students. Obviously this has a science context, but should be applicable to most subjects with long-answer questions. You might already be doing this, or your own version of it, but hopefully you’ll find some or…
Biology SLOP: The Next Generation
In lockdown I’ve tried to live by the mantra everything you do now, try to make sure it is of use when “normality” returns. With this in mind I have been going through the Biology SLOP booklets and made some changes to the originals Some changes that have been made are: Proof reading Slight reduction…
Building a teaching and learning policy from a single idea: The genius of Prof. Daniel Willingham
I’ve recently been reading “Why don’t children like school?” by the incredibly insightful Professor Daniel T. Willingham. It’s amazing! I wish I had read it years ago. While there are lots of ideas that I am now familiar with, through CogSciSci and reading other books and blogs, it’s great to read Professor Willingham’s perspective on…
All the Biology SLOP you need.
Here is where you will find all my Biology GCSE SLOP booklets. I’ve taken the excellent work done by a large group of biology teachers and updated them to include: More questions (over 100 in each booklet) More maths in biology (graphs, percentage increases, standard form etc..) More literacy support (refutation texts , graphic organisers)…
The goal-free approach: My talk from CogSciSci 2019
Here is a blog to share my presentation from Friday’s CogSciSci conference at The Westminster School. At the end you can get access to my presentation if you want to share the ideas within your department. The goal-free approach in some ways is the nucleation point of cognitive load theory. Whilst Sweller et al. published…
The follies of yoof: mistakes I made so you don’t have to.
During discussion with Bob Pritchard and Chris Baker about advice given to trainee teachers, I remembered a number of lesson ideas from way back that, through the lens of hindsight, now seem like a complete waste of time. Currently, there is lots of variation in what trainee teachers get told about what to prioritise in…
Customisable knowledge organisers: take, adapt, share.
I was contacted last week asking for an editable copy of the knowledge organisers for locked out learners. This made me pause for a second. A better person would quite happily have given them out, but I wanted to maintain control over them and keep my vision for them intact. It probably didn’t help it…
