Inclusive education is no longer a theoretical ambition but a real and pressing goal in classrooms worldwide. Schools are working to create environments where students with varying abilities and backgrounds can learn together, but achieving success in inclusive settings requires… Read More »5 Steps to an Inclusive School: How Teacher Beliefs Influence Student Well-being
Metacognition, often known as ‘thinking about thinking’, is on the radar of more and more schools. And why wouldn’t it be? Sitting at the top of the EEF leaderboard for most effective teaching pedagogies. With a reported 7-month increase in… Read More »What Do Students Need to Know About Metacognition?
This is the third and final part of a series in which we have taken a research-informed look at feedback. In part one, we explored the feedback loop, where it occurs during the learning cycle and why feedback sometimes does… Read More »The Role of Feedback in the Story of Learning: A Guide For Teachers (Part 3)
This is part two of a three-blog series taking a close look at feedback: exploring why it matters, what it looks like, and when it can go wrong. We offer some guiding principles and practical strategies to help teachers optimise… Read More »The Role of Feedback in the Story of Learning: A Guide For Teachers (Part 2)
Before we begin, it should be clear that what follows is not a feedback policy. The frequency, type and delivery of feedback will differ in different subjects. How often, how much and how it is delivered should be influenced by… Read More »The Role of Feedback in the Story of Learning: A Guide For Teachers (Part 1)
To say teaching is a complex activity is something of an understatement. Teachers make 1000s of decisions every day. These decisions are influenced by various factors such as beliefs about what to teach, how to teach it, how to manage… Read More »Eight Essential Ingredients for Transformative CPD
How would you define knowledge? What is learning? Before going any further, I would like to start by defining knowledge as everything that we know (or can do) which is stored in our long-term memory. This allows us to define… Read More »Why Learning Mathematics Is Hard… and What We Can Do To Help.
We’ve known for a long time that mathematics is a series of interconnected ideas. At its simplest, this means that different mathematical concepts are related to each other in different ways. For example, the concept of multiplication is related to… Read More »Harness the Power of Number Bonds
As teachers and professionals, we continually reflect on how we can improve the outcomes for our students. However, when coping with a full curriculum, a packed school calendar and the many additional requirements of being a teacher, finding time to… Read More »Thinking About Learning: Cognitive Science for Teachers (Part 1)
Previously on ALTA Blog: Last time out we explored both the perilous nature of engaging with the research into the use of concrete resources and established our first guiding principle: The more salient a resource, the less likely transfer becomes.… Read More »Old Yellow Bricks: Developing an Evidence Informed Approach to Concrete Resources in the Mathematics Classroom (Part 2)
In the January of 2021, Christopher Such and I were, as I’m sure everyone does from time to time, casually discussing the validity of claims made in a paper about the use of digital manipulatives. And while I cannot remember… Read More »Old Yellow Bricks: Developing an Evidence Informed Approach to Concrete Resources in the Mathematics Classroom (Part 1)