Ofsted Archives | Big Maths

The CLT-Driven Curriculum

10th May 201918th January 2020bm_tester

The CLT-Driven Curriculum

The implications of Cognitive Load Theory for teachers are becoming well established. However, the end result for busy teachers can end up looking like a list of ‘tips for teachers’ (‘remember not to have unnecessary animations in your powerpoint slides’, ‘remember to wait in silence while learners are processing new information before talking again’ etc.). This would be a serious watering down of the extensive research that has gone into CLT and the profound implications for teachers that has come out of that research. So, can CLT actually transform teaching in the way that it promises, and, if so, how?

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Adaptive Teaching is Alive!

15th March 201918th January 2020bm_tester

Adaptive Teaching is Alive!

In my previous post I noted that exploring adaptive teaching can lead schools into advancements with their curriculum design, quality of teaching, and, crucially, the joining of the two. Here, I present 2 basic features of curriculum design that spring out of adaptive teaching, and then 3 broad modes for approaching adapting teaching, and finally 3 classic implementation errors. Adaptive Teaching is Alive!

Curriculum Design: 2 Basic Features

There are two basic requirements of a curriculum designed for adaptive teaching (i.e. one that empowers the teacher to be constantly responding to learners in a purposeful way).

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The 5 Megatruths of Great Teaching

28th February 20199th February 2020Ben Harding

The 5 Megatruths of Great Teaching

How fantastically big is this question, ‘What makes great teaching?’.

It’s quite a scary question for an actual teacher… because it challenges you to answer it! At first it sounds rhetorical, and perhaps we would all feel safer if it was. The question seems to be asking you to explain your professional worth and even your professional qualification. If you are given a few moments to jot down some bullet point answers, then you may struggle. Why? Well, if we listen to John Sweller (the TES referred to him as the ‘Godfather of Cognitive Load Theory’), then we can’t even begin to know about great teaching until we know about how the brain learns. Sweller says, ‘Without knowledge of cognitive processes, instructional design is blind’. In other words, we need to know about the brain in order to teach. No wonder ‘great teaching’, then, is so elusive. The brain is, after all, the most complex structure known to humankind.

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Ofsted Research: Outstanding but Requires Improvement

30th January 20197th March 2019Ben Harding

Ofsted Research: Outstanding but Requires Improvement

Ofsted have recently issued their overview of educational research that underpins the draft inspection framework.

It is wonderful to see teaching and learning led by education research. As a young teacher studying school/teacher effectiveness under Professor David Reynolds at the University of Newcastle in the late 1990s that was not the case. Practice and research were separate worlds… never mind conjoined…never mind research leading practice! So, it is really a watershed moment; Ofsted taking the best educational research on the entire planet and using it to underpin their inspection framework. And they have done it incredibly well! Common sense always rises to the top and this approach just makes sense! I particularly like the way the research leads straight into the specific criteria used by inspectors to make judgements. As a former inspector for Ofsted I know how it feels to be making judgements using criteria that have come from ‘nowhere’.

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