Category: Professional Development
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Research into practice: from blueprint to jigsaw
This blog reflects on the recent work and thinking of Dr Tom Perry, author of the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF’s) Cognitive Science in the Classroom (Perry et al., 2021). The EEF review explored what happens when cognitive science is applied in realistic classroom conditions. While concluding that cognitive science shows great promise and recommending that…
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Professional development: from answers to problems
I’ve worked as a teacher educator now for almost 7 years. Here’s an account of how my mental model of training teachers has developed over that time, peppered with italicised realisations I wish I’d known sooner. Answers I started coaching teachers who were new to the profession. These teachers (like me when I trained) were…
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A learning-first approach to improving your teaching
How do you decide what to improve in your teaching? What knowledge do you use to make the decision? What’s your decision-making process? In this blog I’ll take you through a model that could help you diagnose what to improve in your teaching. I call it the learning-first approach.* It relies on the teacher having…
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No more teaching tips and tricks
What tip/trick are you going to learn from this post that you can use on Monday morning? Absolutely nothing. And, guess what? You’re going to be happy you didn’t. When I started teaching, I thought professional development meant picking up the next shiny thing to do in my classroom. Only once I’d gathered a critical…
Evidence for Educators 