Feedback From Afar

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That is how we improve.” Bill Gates The EEF defines feedback as “information given to the learner or teacher about the learner’s performance relative to learning goals or outcomes.” As teachers, in our classrooms, there is a constant dialogue between students and teachers. We can use …

Filling the tool box (1)

Procedural Metacognitive Knowledge "If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail." Abraham Maslow How many of us have had students say, "I thought I understood it but then I couldn't do the exam question"?  This is often a result of the inability of a student to apply their knowledge …

A little better all the time

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” Confucius This autumn, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I improve my practice as a teacher. Literacy has been on my mind for a number of years, first as a member of a school literacy group and more recently after hearing Amada …

Helping Hansel

Part 2: Declarative metacognitive knowledge "Hansel said to Gretel, "We will find our way," but they did not find it." - Brother's Grimm Meet Hansel and Gretel... Hansel is a confident student. In lessons he feels like he understands the content and can answer the questions. At home he completes his homework and every so …

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

Part 1: An introduction to metacognition “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” Albert Camus What is metacognition? Metacognition is commonly divided into two components: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive reflections [Quigley 2018].  Metacognitive knowledge refers to what learners know about learning and this may be broken down further into knowledge of self, knowledge of …

7 Days in March

Sunday 15th March - 8 days before lockdown Mr Mountstevens, he of the elegant analogies to curriculum and leadership, Mini Mountstevens and I went for a walk. It was the longest walk that Mini had ever done and we were very proud of her. We were enjoying the sunshine and the signs of spring. We …

Curriculum: The why, the what and the when

"We ask questions about the world, and we make our answers, and we build and treasure our knowledge over generations." Ruth Walker [2019] A colleague recently asked me to recommend some articles for faculty leaders to read when planning their curriculum. I thought I would share it here, in case it was of interest to …

#CogSciSci 2019 to do list

Goal-free effect: Adam Robbins, @MrARobbins, https://reflectionsinscience.wordpress.com/ What is it? The goal of this problem might be to find the length of CB. A goal-free task would be to ask students to calculate as many of the unknowns as they could [Sweller 1998]. The goal-free approach reduces the amount of extraneous cognitive load from holding the …

CTeach and me

‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’ William Shakespeare I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on my Twitter feed in recent weeks about the Chartered College of Teaching and their professional qualification Chartered Teacher, or CTeach for short.  Now that the dust has settled from my time as part of …

Retrieval practice and the burden of homework

"..standing upon the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton For the uninitiated amongst us, retrieval practice is a learning strategy where the deliberate recall of information is used to improve long-term memory (Agarwal 2018). The effect of retrieval practice, also called the testing effect, has been studied in an educational setting (Roediger 2006).  Students used different …