teacher training | Schools Week

Rewards, rather than punishments, help teenagers learn

What have you been working on? We used a combination of lab-based computer tasks and computational learning models to compare how adolescents and adults learn to make choices, based on different types of feedback. Adolescent and adult volunteers played a computer task, in which they saw different pairs of abstract symbols on a computer screen, […]

The battle for informal learning

What have you been working on? I’ve been talking to teachers who are working to provide informal science teaching for students in extra-curricular clubs. I wanted to understand their motivation and their struggle. From a broader perspective, my aim is to look at education policy and try to find how it plays out in teachers’ […]

How politicians and policy makers can raise the confidence of the teaching profession

Nearly half of teachers leave the profession within the first five years of teaching. Depressing isn’t it? Teachers are being worn perilously thin, so there is no doubt that politicians and policy makers need to work hard to recover the confidence of the teaching profession. I have some ideas that, in teacherly fashion, I’ve boiled […]

Are we heading towards a HExit?

Six months or six years before qualification? The end of university PGCEs? Kiran Gill sifts through the white paper’s proposals on initial teacher training Speculation and punditry are de rigueur in the run-up to the referendum on Europe. Initial teacher training (ITT) is a less debated topic, so this week, I’m throwing my euro-cent’s worth […]

My change of heart about coaching

After joining Schools Week as deputy editor, Cath Murray was sent to mingle with readers at a training event – and bring back her observations. I approached the “coaching” day for education professionals with trepidation. Faye Kilgour, our trainer and lead coach for Graydin, a professional development organisation, had signed her preliminary email, “With heart”. […]

What school leaders can do to improve mental health provision

As many as three pupils in each class may be struggling with mental health problems, but many of their teachers say they feel ill-equipped to respond. Cuts are decimating statutory services, Ellie Mulcahy says, moving the onus on to school leaders to put improved support in place Teachers and schools need the skills to spot […]

How you can evaluate the impact of your decisions

With the government increasingly asking for evidence that initiatives have had “impact”, Stuart Kime writes a step-by-step guide for creating those documents Professor John Hattie’s entreaty for teachers to “know thy impact” is a laudable and important one. But knowing is hard. How can a teacher or school leader know what impact their choices had […]

How to make teacher training more attractive

Many subjects devalued by Progress 8 are undersubscribed in this year’s training intake. To boost recruitment, Oliver Beach suggests, schools should use new entrants’ skills beyond the classroom We’d all like to see graduates running down university corridors to bag a place in schools. Imagine: economics grads stomping down corridors, carrying Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations […]

Skills or knowledge: which is more important?

Skills and knowledge are often viewed as separate ingredients of the learning cake, like eggs and flour, added in different proportions depending on the recipe. But, says Heather Fearn, you need one, then the other becomes possible I have a question. When planning what to teach do you: A – Aim to teach mainly knowledge B – […]