My advice for teachers thinking about moving from secondary to primary? Make sure you like slime

My varied teaching career so far has seen me teach two- and three-year-olds in a bilingual nursery setting, and secondary English and humanities in an international school. This latter placement was what I really enjoyed doing, and where I spent the majority of my career so far. Despite imperfections with the school (and no school is perfect), I re...

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What is pedagogy and why does it matter?

 The quality of the teaching workforce and the teaching practice in classrooms is one of the biggest levers we have for improving student outcomes. Even after accounting for prior student learning and family background, research suggests that teacher quality is an important factor in student achievement. So, it follows, that energy, resources ...

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A beginner’s guide to Professor Sugata Mitra

Best known for: In 1999 Mitra carried out a series of Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiments about children's learning. The first experiment involved children being given free access to a computer embedded in a wall between his office and a Delhi slum. The experiment aimed to prove that children could easily learn from computers without any formal trai...

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A beginner’s guide to David Didau

Best known for: Since its launch The Learning Spy has had over a million visitors and won a number of awards. Didau writes about ordinary teachers' constraints and irritations, exploring his own successes and failures from his years of teaching, as well as the latest education research and cognitive psychology. He has also written four books explor...

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Do good teachers always make effective school leaders?

Have you known excellent classroom practitioners who have failed to make the transition to successful school leadership – as middle leaders, senior leaders, or headteachers? Have you known indifferent teachers go on to be skilful and effective leaders? I've been thinking about the relationship between teaching and leading in education recently. It ...

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