Letting an essay assignment get to the head is common with students, so teachers are always looking at methods to reduce this problem. Innovate My School newcomer James Harlan discusses the suggestions he gives to students.. Writing your essay could be a task that hangs over your head like a dark cloud. Like a forthcoming rain, the deadline approaches so fast while you are being paralysed by the doom and ...

Having students identify for themselves where they think they need to improve and then comparing this to their performance on a task will give an accurate insight into which parts of the criteria they do not understand how to satisfy. The teacher can then point this out and explain how it can be achieved. A good method to conduct this is by using 'predictive grids': Too often, students see the ...

‘Reading pictures can be as easy or difficult as reading printed text.’ Gomez-Reino, 1996 My research into how to teach young children explicit inference skills began in 2001 when I observed that there was a discrepancy in my school between many of our fluent reader's ability to read and their overall comprehension. Evidence worryingly showed that an emphasis placed on phonics was producing readers who could decode the words but often had ...

In his latest blog post, English teacher Adam Lewis describes an innovative yet stunningly simple method students can use to ensure they are improving in the actual areas where they need to improve. The so-called 'scaffolds' that Adam writes about are the tools a student may or may not need to answer a question and can 'bet' on, such as working with a partner, but there's a catch - each ...

I was wondering how useful your schools' marking policy was to you as a teacher and, of course, to your pupils. Marking policies are there to help teachers have a common framework by which they can regularly assess their pupils; this is useful enough and many have a timeframe attached.  For example, they may state that marking must be carried out every three weeks. Clearly, the idea is that pupils ...

This is always challenging, isn't it? Finding evidence that students have learned what you taught, that they can apply their knowledge to complex problems. How do you do this? Rubrics? Group projects? Posters? None sound worthy of the Common Core educational environ - and too often, students have figured out how to deliver within these guidelines while on auto-pilot. Where can we find authentic assessments that are measurable yet student-centered, ...

The Christmas holidays should be a time for mulling wine and pulling crackers. But many teachers will spend at least some of the festive period wondering - and worrying about - how well their pupils are preparing for January exams. To assuage the anxiety, here are six YouTube videos that should help your pupils maximise their memories.   1. The “Method of Loci” or memory palace In this video, Andi Bell demonstrates ...

It is great to know that peer assessment can be a time saving, effective form of feed forward. However, we cannot expect our pupils to complete all of our marking… can we? Teachers hate marking books! I have never met a teacher that said: “I have a lovely big pile of books waiting to be marked on my desk; I can’t wait to get started!” Marking takes time that ...

I thought I would revisit Wikispaces with my Year 9 class this week. We have internal examinations next week so it was a revision lesson on Unit 1 AQA GCSE Physics. I thought, wouldn’t it be good to set up a wiki of revision notes in an hour? I set up a page for each section of the specification, which corresponded to a double page spread in their text book. I ...

I tried this out today with a Year 7 group of students. I am sure you remember using one of these when you were at school to predict who would be your next girlfriend or boyfriend! Here is a giant one some students made today. What did we do? Instead of predicting your future love interest, we replaced the names with science revision questions, then each student tested each other using ...