teacher training | Schools Week

Why introverts make good school leaders

Introverted teachers have five key skills that will help them flourish as school leaders, an assistant headteacher told delegates. Iesha Small (pictured), of Kings Langley school in Hertfordshire, delivered one of the final festival sessions on Friday when she took delegates through five different qualities she believed introverts — which she said was her personality […]

Experienced teachers: why confidence can be a problem

Experienced teachers have been warned against using their intuition because it could lead to them making “unreliable” judgments when it comes to student outcomes. David Didau (pictured), an education consultant and former teacher, urged attendees at a packed-out Festival of Education session to think carefully about when to trust their “gut instincts”. He said: “As […]

Schools must hold together even if everything else tears apart

It’s an odd week to go for a positive start. But I can’t do any more negativity. So here it is. The best thing about schools is that they are packed with humans. Funny, challenging, stroppy, coquettish, amazing humans. But the most extraordinary thing about humans is our ability for utter kindness and complete cruelty. […]

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 […]