EdBlogs

Where does she work?  Darling-Hammond is currently the Charles E Ducommun professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute. She began her career as a public school teacher in Pennsylvania, and has since gone on to become president of the American Educational Research As...

Any discussion among teachers about good practice will get around, at some point, to learning outcomes. Conversation will often turn to Bloom's Taxonomy and the attendant verbs connected to the "lower" and "higher" order "thinking skills". And then someone will raise the idea of SMART targets, which, in conjunction with Bloom's, enable us to develo...

When it was announced earlier this month that sex and relationships education (SRE) was to be made compulsory in England's schools, it was met with relief from many teachers, parents and other groups who have long campaigned for the move. Young people have also been crying out for a more coherent approach to SRE; a recent survey from Barnados found...

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...

What is it?  The use of rewards given to pupils who have not missed many days of school (often 98-100% attendance). The nature of these gifts varies from school to school; for some it is a certificate, while many other schools opt for pricier prizes such as iPads, bicycles and trips. Earlier this month, writer and mother Rachel Wright's b...