A Learner's Toolkit’s Post

The A Learner's Toolkit team initially pitched this program as a simple, low-cost, online professional learning course in response to growing queries from our partner school network about teacher professional development. A Learner's Toolkit for Teachers has already achieved its initial goals and is now delving deeper into how teachers use their practitioner evidence to enhance their expertise. This involves integrating the Science of Learning (SoL) theory with their existing practices and adapting it to their unique contexts, subjects, and students. In our earlier post, we highlighted the tremendous growth of teachers beyond the traditional SoL subjects of Maths and Science, as they enact dynamic and responsive practices. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gr2sSUK8

As human/AI hybrid writing seems inevitable in higher ed, Martin Compton, Claire Gordon PFHEA and colleagues introduce a manifesto to revitalise the essay as an integral form of assessment https://lnkd.in/gHh-ukWu

Normalising persistent problems and craving more time and more fixes = Toolbox Reality. Having clarity, control and agency = Reflective Reality. Not all challenges in mathematics teaching require immediate solutions. Addressing the lack of clarity is a critical step forward. Fresh off the press (and Open Access!): Our new article about how effective PD could result in seeing the lack of clarity as the problem, not the lack of time. Thanks Scarlett Li-Williams and Samantha Gooch for co-authoring! https://lnkd.in/gu5YQTPM

From building reading stamina to hybrid annotation techniques, these strategies are designed to help students navigate and analyze texts more effectively.

Barrett’s Taxonomy is a guide with five levels that helps teachers create questions to improve students’ reading comprehension. It encourages students to recall ideas, explain them, analyze them, organize them in sequence, and create their own interpretations, which the teacher then appreciates to support their emotional and psychological growth. The five levels are: 1. Literal Comprehension 2. Reorganization 3. Inferential Comprehension 4. Evaluation 5. Appreciation Recommended Activities to Develop Comprehension Skills: 1. Literal Comprehension: • Activity: Ask students to answer direct “who, what, when, where” questions about a text. • Example: “What happened at the end of the story?” 2. Reorganization: • Activity: Provide students with mixed-up story events and ask them to put them in the correct order. • Example: “Arrange these events in the order they happened.” 3. Inferential Comprehension: • Activity: Have students guess a character’s feelings or predict what might happen next based on clues in the text. • Example: “Why do you think the character acted this way?” 4. Evaluation: • Activity: Encourage students to share their opinions about a story and justify their thoughts. • Example: “Do you agree with the character’s decision? Why or why not?” 5. Appreciation: • Activity: Ask students to write or draw how the story made them feel or which part they liked the most. • Example: “What message do you think the story is trying to share?”

Paper vs. screen: an excellent summary of the research. I also enjoyed the elegant turn of phrase ‘cartographic clues’, referring to the placement of an idea on the page. Paper helps build the mental schema by ensuring contextual information is spatially related which supports memory. #fightforgetting #EdTech #Learning

Reminder: the distinction between tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary is not just academic; it shapes our teaching and student understanding. When I properly leveraged vocabulary instruction in my classroom, I noticed a significant shift in my students' comprehension. Words like 'misanthropic' become more than definitions; they evolve into deeper insights when placed in context, such as in "A Christmas Carol." As part of a Bedrock Mapper Disciplinary Literacy CPD session I unpicked the intricacies of a top tier history essay from the AQA website and it was littered with discourse markers functioning in a very subject specific domain. We need to fuse these simple markers together with deep subject knowledge application. We must recognise that tier 2 and tier 3 language coexist across disciplines. Blog here: https://lnkd.in/euX2PKej And here: https://lnkd.in/eCFhqDnP Pod here: https://lnkd.in/ertczFb9 And here: https://lnkd.in/eJC8Xy3F #staffdevelopment #disciplinaryliteracy #edtech #pedtech

Learning A-Z has more of the Science of Reading-aligned essentials teachers need. Get resources for learning everything from A-Z, including decoding, fluency, grammar, phonics, vocabulary, writing, and more.

Learning A-Z has more of the Science of Reading-aligned essentials teachers need. Get resources for learning everything from A-Z, including decoding, fluency, grammar, phonics, vocabulary, writing, and more.

A great teacher is still a great teacher. This week I had the privilege of having a brainstorming session with Paul Erb. He is a dedicated teacher, dedicated to both his students and his subject. Literature doesn't grab every young person the way film and media can. Together we designed a lesson where students first talk about a favourite movie, and then their favourite scene in that movie. Why is that scene engaging? What does the director do to make it more engaging? After looking at techniques employed to bring in the viewers, the students are then challenged to rewrite the scene as a text. How do film techniques translate to rhetorical devices? What power does an author have that a director doesn't? How about vice versa? This was an engaging lesson, that would bring students in, and help them build a stronger understanding of literary and film techniques, while also challenging them to develop their skills with the pen (or keyboard). That was used AI to scale this wasn't significant. The technology may facilitate, but... A great teacher is a great teacher. As always, you can have a play here (this is an early experiment and can definitely be finetuned). https://lnkd.in/ghd5qTjH