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Attention, meaning & consolidation: matching technique to purpose

Jan 12, 2024 | Category: English

It's become increasingly clear to me that training teachers on how to use pedagogical techniques is of limited use. Over the past year or so I've lost count of the times I've watched a teacher act on...

#Tom Sherrington #Mary Kennedy

OAT English curriculum project

Feb 26, 2023 | Category: English

Since January 2020 I've been working for Omiston Academies Trust as their Senior Lead for English. Over that time I and the amazing team of lead practitioners I lead have created what we think is a fa...

#English #curriculum

When retrieval practice goes wrong (and how to get it right)

Jan 28, 2023 | Category: English

Whenever a practice becomes mandated there seems to be a tendency for it to lethally mutate. When I first started writing about retrieval practice (or the testing effect as we used to call it) many pe...

#Robert Bjork #retrieval practice

Using mini whiteboards in English

Oct 09, 2022 | Category: English

According to TeacherTapp, 72% primary and 45% secondary teachers use mini whiteboards (MWBs.) There are big variations between different subjects in secondaries with 69% of MFL and 57% science teacher...

#mini whiteboards #MWBs

Implementing English: five useful teaching strategies

Oct 09, 2022 | Category: English

Working across 43 schools means I get to see a lot of English lessons and talk to a fair number of English teachers. In oder to support our teachers we've been working on identifying what we think are...

Flat packed curriculum

Sep 25, 2022 | Category: English

“It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.”Thomas Sowell Why do we buy so much flat pack furniture? First, it's many times more affo...

Embedding reading fluency in the KS3 English curriculum

May 29, 2022 | Category: English

Last year I wrote about 'echo reading': ...last week I ... watched English teacher Rhys Williams do something I’d never seen before. He was teaching The Tempest to a low prior attaining Year 8 class a...

#echo reading #reading fluency

Come work with me...

Mar 04, 2022 | Category: English

Since January 2021 I've been working for Ormiston Academies Trust as Senior Lead Practitioner for English. I had no idea when I started how much I'd love working for OAT or how much I'd relish the rol...

Using tenor, vehicle and ground to analyse metaphors

Feb 02, 2022 | Category: English

It's vanishingly rare to encounter a student in secondary school who doesn't know what a metaphor is. That said, it's equally rare to find students who are able to define what a metaphor actually is....

#metaphor #tenor vehicle & ground

How should we teach students to interpret texts?

Dec 12, 2021 | Category: English

The default approach to so much English teaching is to present students with a text and then say some version of, "What do you think of this?" If you're fortunate enough to teach in a selective settin...

#cognitive load theory #Michael Oakeshott #IA Richards