Earlier this year, Paul Warwick from Oracy Cambridge and Beccy Earnshaw from Voice21 gave a ‘double-header’ presentation for The Brilliant Club at the UCL Institute of Education in London. Especially secondary schools and colleges desiring students to engage more with education and life alike, this is a must read. I have taken the liberty here of retrofitting… Continue Reading →
Mrs Naomi Hennah (@MrsHennah) of Northampton School for Boys has created a clear and concise “visual summary of the complexity of chemical discourse” to boost oracy skills and language acquisition in chemistry. (Link at the end of the page). Teachers from other subjects should not be put off, however. This post should hopefully make Mrs Hennah’s considerations relevant not only to… Continue Reading →
We are an enterprise educator and a Cooperative Learning specialist developing a set of ‘confidence and resilience’ building activities for a Higher Education Progression Partnership. This post shares our experiences with putting the concept of “Possible Selves” to work for the Widening Participation agenda. [5 minute read] Since embarking on our work for HeppSY+, Catherine… Continue Reading →
A big thank you to the National Director for taking the time to see me yesterday at Ofsted’s Birmingham HQ, where he helped formulate the two key challenges to a Participatory Budgeting programme in schools. This is the answer to his first question on the puzzle of mapping PB to the curriculum. [4 minutes to read]… Continue Reading →
Something as true-to-life as Participatory Budgeting in schools will invariably need to include some Project-Based Learning components across multiple work-groups simultaneously – So, how does that measure up to Barak Rosenshine’s principles of instruction? Here’s a take on how Cooperative Learning helps us cut through that discussion, using Tom Sherrington’s booklet. On 20 May this… Continue Reading →
This is the second one-minute read on the outcomes of Monday’s workshop Empowering KS2-5 Learners through Participatory Budgeting. How do we up-skill learners to generate, present and vote for proposals on the school budget in harmony with the 2019 inspection framework? Certainly not in a vacuum. As any English teacher will tell you, there is… Continue Reading →
This series of very brief articles recaps salient points from the workshop for the benefit of delegates and those unfortunates who missed it. [3 minutes to read] The five planned articles in this series correspond to the headlines of the workshop and are planned as roughly three-minute reads each: What is Cooperative Learning What is retrieval practice? What is spaced retrieval practice?… Continue Reading →
At first glance, Participatory Budgeting would seem to fit snugly into the left-wing, child-empowering, progressive fold. At second glance, you might say that it sits equally well with the competition-driven Dragon’s Den of standard neo-liberal Enterprise Education. But, like Katharine Birbalsingh, Participatory Budgeting defies categorisation and, as such, could open a liminal space for a… Continue Reading →
Pertinent to the profound themes of last month’s VNET Conference, you are now invited to join exceptional colleagues to explore how manageable civic engagement can be aligned with the new Ofsted framework. [5 mins read] Every school today faces an insurmountable impasse: A recent report by the RSA shows that 84% of young people desire to make… Continue Reading →
Risk assessment: Why the Chartered College’s CPD Quality Assurance project might have a negative effect on the value and variety of CPD available to schools. [5 minutes to read] Any quality assurance scheme in education faces a number of serious challenges before even getting off the ground which, if left untackled, could inadvertently lead to… Continue Reading →
