Teaching and Learning Books

A number of books have recently been purchased by the school library which are quite influential in Teaching and Learning at the moment.

Do take a look at these:

Mark. Plan. Teach.

With teachers' workload at record levels and teacher recruitment and retention the number one issue in education, ideas that really work and will help teachers not only survive but thrive in the classroom are in demand. Every idea in Mark. Plan. Teach. can be implemented by all primary and secondary teachers at any stage of their career and will genuinely improve practice. The ideas have been tried and tested and are supported by evidence that explains why they work, including current educational research and psychological insights from Dr Tim O'Brien, leading psychologist and Visiting Fellow at UCL Institute of Education.

Mark. Plan. Teach. will enable all teachers to maximise the impact of their teaching and, in doing so, save time, reduce workload and take back control of the classroom.

Making Good Progress

Making Good Progress? is a research-informed examination of formative assessment practices that analyses the impact Assessment for Learning has had in our classrooms. Making Good Progress? outlines practical recommendations and support that Primary and Secondary teachers can follow in order to achieve the most effective classroom-based approach to ongoing assessment. 

Written by Daisy Christodoulou, Head of Assessment at Ark Academy, Making Good Progress? offers clear, up-to-date advice to help develop and extend best practice for any teacher assessing pupils in the wake of life beyond levels.

The Learning Rainforest

The Learning Rainforest captures different elements of our understanding and experience of the art and science of teaching. It is a celebration of great teaching and the intellectual and personal rewards that it brings. It’s aimed at all teachers; busy people working in complex environments with little time to spare. The core of the book is a guide to making teaching both effective and manageable using a three-part structure: establishing conditions; building knowledge; exploring possibilities. It provides an accessible summary of key contemporary evidence-based ideas about teaching, curriculum and assessment and the debates that all teachers should be engaging in. It’s packed with strategies for making great teaching attainable in the context of real schools.

What does this look like in the classroom?

In this thorough, enlightening and comprehensive book, Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson ask 18 of today's leading educational thinkers to distill the most up-to-date research into effective classroom practice in 10 of the most important areas of teaching. The result is a fascinating manual that will benefit every single teacher in every single school, in all four corners of the globe.

Using questionnaires to better understand our students’ learning

Google Forms provide a good way of using questionnaires with our students. There is a blog post this week on doing just that to better understand our students learning.

Full post here: https://classteaching.wordpress.com/2018/02/07/using-questionnaires-to-better-understand-our-students-learning/

Conclusion:

Takeaways for all teachers

Sam’s study reminds us that we should find every way we can to ‘get inside’ the thinking of our students. By doing this, we can find new and novel types of assessment data – alongside more conventional teacher assessments – to sharpen and enrich our understanding of where our students are and where to take them next. Canvassing our students’ thoughts also shows them how much we value their learning. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that as practitioners we are the ‘experts’ and that student responses like these are only one part of the whole.

Teaching to the Top

A post today regarding pitching of lessons. If we typically 'teach to the middle' and then have add-ons to differentiate for the most able, then this makes interesting reading as it proposes that we should raise the bar and teach for the top. He takes some ideas from the book 'The Learning Rainforest' by Tom Sherrington which is should be in the school library soon.

http://www.slowteaching.co.uk/2018/01/26/teaching-top-challenge-collection/