What teaching ideas would you bin?
Happy New Year! This year we share an old planning favourite and exciting details of how you could blog for us and become and member of the TT team in 2018! Also, all the news from the last couple of weeks whilst you’ve probably been hibernating!
Top 5 blogs
- The Teacher and the OFSTED Inspection
- 9 Teaching Ideas To Bin in 2018
- 12 Educational Research Myths
- We Need To Pop The Differentiation Bubble
- 20 Years Of Educational Fads
Resource of the week
As it’s back to school again this week, we feature the very popular planning resource as our resource of the week: The 5 minute lesson plan. It continues to be the most downloaded resource on Teacher Toolkit and we hope a fresh look at it this January will help you to get back into the swing of planning and teaching after the Christmas break.
CPD Spotlight: Blogging
Do you ever blog about your experiences as a teacher, the resources you use in the classroom or the teaching and planning techniques you use? It’s a great form of CPD – you can build up a network of teachers to share ideas with and solve problems with. It can be difficult to know where to start though – that’s where we come in! A week ago we shared a post asking for teachers who are interested in blogging for us to get in touch. Have a read and do follow the instructions for taking part if you’d like to become a member of the TT team in 2018.
From elsewhere
- School children are to be given compulsory lessons on civil partnerships according to DfE proposals. See the Briefing Paper by Robert Long, Sex and Relationships Education in Schools (England).
- According to academics from North Carolina State University and the University of Missouri, pupils excel when teachers are the same sex and race as themselves. See the paper The Effects of Teacher Match on Students’ Academic Perceptions and Attitudes by Anna Egalite and Brian Kisida.
- Read about a new plan that puts education at the heart of the Welsh Government’s ambition to achieve a million Welsh speakers by 2050. Also, read about why ‘urgent action’ is needed on new school curriculum rollout.
- Amanda Spielman receives ‘venomous’ threats from “a mixture of Islamic extremists and the hard left” after raising concerns about faith schools.
- What are the challenges of safeguarding children who are not attending school? Read this social care commentary about ‘hidden children’.
- Is the UK still educating different classes for different functions in society? Diane Reay, Visiting Professor of Sociology at the LSE and Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge thinks so. She says “Another disturbing trend is the disrespect with which working class children are treated in some super-strict schools. Some academies operate on the principle that working class families are chaotic and children need school to impose control. There’s lots of lining up in silence, standing to attention when an adult comes into the room, and chanting mantras.”
- Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) trials have demonstrated that, when they are well-trained and used in structured settings with high-quality support and training, TAs can make a noticeable positive impact on pupil learning.
- Behaviour in Scottish Schools Research 2016 shows that “primary support staff report that they have experienced slightly higher levels of general verbal abuse, physical aggression and physical violence towards them personally.”
- Research shows that infants make more attempts to achieve a goal when they see adults persist.
