EdBlogs

While the summer holidays are much-needed respite for weary students, research suggests that the long break can do more harm than good to their brains. This seems to be especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who often return to school after the summer holidays having fallen behind compared with their wealthier peers. This need...

​He was a kid I'd barely noticed. I'd been teaching the class for just a few weeks and, as is always the case, certain heads had raised themselves above the parapet: the defaulters, the jokers, the forgetful and the attention-seekers. But this lad had been quietly going about his own business. He always gets the work done; he rarely forgets to...

Like most teachers, I did well at school. I messed about a bit – nothing massive, just chatting and doing that FLAMES thing where you worked out your "love percentage" with someone. Of course there were subjects that I was less keen on (I'm looking at you, geography), but I liked learning and it generally came pretty easily to me. Fast forward thro...

Intuitively, it seems obvious that reducing the number of pupils in a class will improve the quality of teaching and learning, for example, by increasing the amount of high quality feedback or one-to-one attention learners receive. There is no doubt that parents like small class sizes. However, Professor John Hattie in his book, Visible Learning: a...

Optimism: it's all about whether the glass half full or half empty, right? Wrong. It turns out that most people have the wrong idea of optimism. So what exactly is it? How important is it? And, most crucially, can you learn to be optimistic? Let's start with a quick test. You can choose only one answer per question. 1) You get lost driving to a fri...