What is comparative judgement?
Find out what it is and form your own opinion on the trending topic comparative judgement. Also this week, keep your students focused and prepared for their exams this month and download our free resource to help you perform successful challenging behaviour interventions.
Top 5 blogs
- The 5 Minute Lesson Plan – An old favourite and a planning must-have.
- The Wrong Answer To The Wrong Question – Are teacher shortages a case of a wrong diagnosis and a wrong prescription?
- #1MinCPD: Differentiating Explanations – Do you class pick things up at different rates?
- Comparative Judgement – You Be The Judge – What is comparative judgement?
- 10 Things You Didn’t Know About School Leadership – What can we assume about some of our senior teachers working in schools?
Resource of the week
How can you work as a team to assess challenging behaviour in your school? The Iceberg Analysis is an intervention resource created by Special Educational Needs and Behaviour expert (and regular TT writer) Dr Helen Woodley.
When faced with a student’s observable challenging behaviours (ie, those visible above the waterline), teachers can work together to identify possible underlying causes for these behaviours (ie, those hidden below the waterline). The iceberg image supports the idea of conducting a functional behaviour assessment to recognise the communicative function or intent of a challenging behaviour.
Read about how to use it here and then download the template here.
CPD Spotlight: Exam Preparation
Just when children are starting to get distracted and over-excited about Christmas… exam season appears. To try and keep your students focused and performing to the best of their ability in their exams, here are our top exam preparation blogs:
- 8 Strategies To Be Exam Ready
- Revision and Examinations
- 3 Tips For Developing GCSE Exam Technique
- How To Improve A-Level Attainment
From elsewhere
- Bold beginnings, a new report by Ofsted, shows that a third of all 5 year olds are being failed by their reception experience.
- Global rankings from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) suggest that British teenagers perform better at working in groups to solve problems than they do in reading and maths. The results of Pisa’s collaborative problem-solving tests show that the UK came 15th with Singapore in first place. In every one of the 52 countries it carried out the tests, girls did better at problem-solving in teams than boys.
- Academies minister Lord Agnew says that the government will revise its guidance on home education to “help parents understand their responsibilities in delivering home education and make sure local authorities are clear on the action they can take”.
- Ofsted’s new chair Professor Julius Weinberg has told school governors it would be “helpful” if they pushed the inspectorate to carry out more inspections of “outstanding” schools.
- The incoming chair of the new watchdog Office for Students said students should be made to feel “uncomfortable” so they can learn. Sir Michael Barber said that the new higher education regulator would adopt “the widest possible definition of freedom of speech: namely anything within the law”.
- The NAHT warn that too many teachers are leaving the profession prematurely – The Leaky Pipeline survey of more than 800 school leaders finds that recruitment in schools is a significant problem for the fourth consecutive year saying:
The teacher recruitment pipeline is leaking: government is failing to secure a sufficient supply of new teachers while simultaneously failing to stem the flow of teachers and school leaders leaving the profession for other careers.
