Reading time: 2 minutes
Fake news is everywhere and, if adults are susceptible, children are even more vulnerable to being hoodwinked by it.
A report delivered by the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills found that half of children are worried about being unable to spot fake news while only 2% of them have the critical literacy skills to assess whether a story is fake or not.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
With the advances in technology and the capabilities that the internet has introduced, many traditional learning tools and resources have started to decrease in popularity.
As students prefer to do online research from the comfort of their room, there is a noticeable difference in approach to studying and research methods compared to 20 years ago.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Between 1997 and 2007 parental involvement in schools sky rocketed. Over the course of a decade, more parents and guardians attended general meetings, had a meeting with a teacher, attended a school event or volunteered.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Exam season is difficult for everyone, and many students will find themselves feeling stressed as well as overwhelmed.
It can be hard to prepare them for the upcoming tests, but you can at least try to make it easier on them. Here are five simple strategies that you can use to help prepare students for exams.
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Reading time: 4 minutes
Confidence, logical reasoning, a power of persuasiveness – some of the positive strengths developed when practising debating skills – are critical to many career paths.
Yet introducing debating to the classroom (with all the chaos, and loud versus louder voices) does not always lead to a positive, well-reasoned and all-round constructive debate.
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Reading time: 4 minutes
Your students are ready to seek employment. After more than a decade of learning, their entire career could be influenced by the first job position they hold. There’s a lot riding on that interview – for which your pupils must be informed, calm and confident.
So how can you help them prepare for job interviews? Here are a few suggestions.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
In the current fiscal and political climate, school leaders must prepare themselves for budget freezes that represent a very real fall in funding.
With ever tighter budgets comes the need to conjure up some savings – which is where successful contract negotiations with your suppliers can help you manage budgetary restrictions.
Here are our five suggestions for cutting your costs, not your cloth.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Streamlining assignment management is an end goal for any teacher, however some find it far easier than others.
So, for those who don’t find it such a simple task, here are a few suggestions for managing assignments effectively.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Communicating effectively is an essential skill for teachers and a cornerstone of any classroom.
Clear and concise communication is even more important in the modern school system as classes may be larger than in previous years, and ESOL and SEND students in mainstream education must be given every chance of keeping pace with their peers.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
How easily do you manage your workload in school?
90% of teachers have seriously thought about abandoning their career due to their ever-increasing workload (NUT Survey, September 2014).
Even more concerning is the fact that as many as half of all teachers have reported that they’ve seen a doctor due to work-related mental or physical illness (BBC).
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Whilst office workers can slump behind their desks, vat of coffee to hand, and trudge through the toughest day of the week, teachers must face the day with vigour, determination and enthusiasm.
If you want to move from faking it, to gaining some semblance of enjoyment from the first day of the intimidating working week, here are five simple tips…
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Disruption in the classroom – it’s an issue that is as old as the teaching profession itself.
Disruptive behaviour is experienced by 47% of teachers on at least a weekly basis (Department for Education); even more concerning, is the fact that four in 10 teachers have been ‘attacked by students’ (BBC).
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Procrastination is often a tool of avoidance – something to block out our thoughts or need to address that painful task, intimidating challenge or mind-numbing chore. You already understand what you need to do and why, now is the time to do it.
46% of us who procrastinate report that it negatively impacts our life “very much” (46%) or “extremely” (18%) (Brandon Gaille). Whatever the facts of the matter, it’s clear that many of us waste our times on tasks that don’t matter.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
There has been much research on the topic of just what it is that makes for an effective reward system; despite extensive academic literature on the subject (and debates that rage on between topics such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation) rewards really needn’t represent a complex, time-consuming system that adds to your everyday pressures as a teacher.
Here are five ideas that work and require minimal effort on your part.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
More than 1.2 million children in the UK have dyslexia, a disability which results in difficulty reading and understanding the meaning of the words in front of them. Many children who have dyslexia have said that the words they see do not stay still. Instead, they move around the page, affecting their ability to read them.
Unsurprisingly, dyslexic students can find themselves falling behind others in the class, resulting in performance issues.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Marking its 30th anniversary in January, ChildLine warned that young people are “plagued by low self-esteem”, their confidence “destroyed by a constant onslaught from cyber-bullying, social media and the desire to copy celebrities as they strive to achieve the ‘perfect’ image.”
Indeed, in 2014-15 there were 35,244 counselling sessions for low self-esteem, up 9% on the previous year. Here’s how you can help.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Homework is something that the vast majority of student’s dread, and it is the least looked forward to at the end of the day. It can be equally frustrating for teachers as well, after all they want nothing more than to inspire students, and it is not often that homework does this.
However, there are ways that you can make homework that much more interesting for students, and these five tips will help you to discover how.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Coursework can be one of the most stressful parts of your education. You have a strict deadline, and a lot of work to do within that period of time. As a result, many students end up feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the workload.
Feeling overwhelmed often leads to procrastination and a lack of enthusiasm for your work. However, it does not have to be that way.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Behaviour on the corridors of school is just as important as behaviour inside the classroom.
It can be disruptive and challenging for teachers when they are trying to teach a class where there is activity taking place on the corridors and there are particular times of the day when the corridors can be noisy areas where incidences of unacceptable behaviour can occur.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Many teachers are guilty of ending lessons in a way that is less than inspiring (when not being observed!) – either still finishing the main content or by focusing on the detail of homework. But many personal experiences, alongside research, have shown that the end of a lesson can be as important as an appropriate starter or main activity. The right ending to the lesson can provide consolidation and an opportunity to provide an ending worthy of a lesson worth remembering.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Regardless of subject area, the key to success in any lesson is the level of engagement of the learners.
Students of all ages often determine this level of engagement within the opening 10-15 minutes of a lesson, meaning that the strategies used during this time are crucial in determining the attainment that day.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Creating safe spaces, perhaps manned by learning mentors, empathetic staff members or even older members of the student cohort can provide a place that feels safe and supportive for students who are about to ‘blow’.
A system can be agreed in advance with students likely to use such a resource to allow them to exit a lesson or situation that is proving triggering for them, on the understanding that work must be caught up and that consequences exist for the misuse.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Cyber bullying is a very real part of school life and sadly one that is on the rise.
With growing numbers reporting that they have been subjected to some kind of pain through the actions of a cyber bully, often with the added stress that they have no idea of who is carrying out the harassment due to the ease of remaining anonymous when making threats or defamatory comments, the school has a pivotal role to play in reducing this terrible form of treatment towards peers.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Active Learning has been defined in a number of different ways, varying from specialism to specialism. It has been related to several well-known educational theories and is based on research.
So what is it?
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Routines will help in so many ways. They reduce stress levels in pupils on the Autistic Spectrum. They provide containment and structure for pupils with ADHD or social issues. They speed up your planning because you will know what type of task you are doing and when ahead of time: everyone’s a winner!
You may choose to have specific types of lessons on specific days, or to have a bank of structures that you draw on, which can be signposted to the class either ahead of time or at the start of the lesson. Find the system that suits you and your group(s).
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Extension work is crucial to sustaining the rapid progress demanded by Ofsted and can often tip teachers over the edge.
Read these top tips and see if they help provide a solution for this common issue.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
As we have seen, the person-centred approach aims to deliver an inclusive method which we believe will be highly beneficial to pupils, parents and teaching staff alike.
This method provides a greater emphasis on pupil involvement, allowing pupils with special educational needs to gain increased control over their learning.
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Students who speak English as a second language can face multiple barriers to education. It is important that we strive to enable these pupils to have full access to the curriculum, allowing them to develop autonomy and achieve in mainstream education.
In order to do this, here are our top 5 strategies to support your ESOL pupils, which can be adapted to suit both group workshops and the mainstream classroom
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Reading time: 2 minutes
Reducing the number of exclusions within any school always serves as a key priority, with many different schools employing a wide ranging form of techniques to greater or lesser success.
Here we will be looking at 5 of the simplest strategies that serve as essential elements to the reduction of any school’s exclusion rates.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
With new Ofsted inspection guidelines published last month, we thought we would take a look at some tips on the ways you can show pupil progress made through your lessons.
It may seem like an obvious suggestion, but ensuring your lessons are well planned and that they effectively demonstrate your pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the topic is essential.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Alongside the standard revision advice we issue to our pupils which includes the importance of not cramming, using cue cards and mind maps, completing practice papers and dissecting the marking criteria, at EDLounge we believe there are great possibilities for utilising more technological methods for revision purposes.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
The correlation between attendance and attainment is hardly surprising, as The School Services Sourcebook identifies “Poor attendance means that students are not developing the knowledge and skills needed for later success” (Franklin et al, 2013).
With attendance being such an influential factor on a child’s education, we have put together our top strategies for improving school attendance…
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Reading time: 3 minutes
An article in The Telegraph at the beginning of January identified that 120,888 children are currently at risk of becoming NEETs because they “perform below national averages in the three-Rs” (The Telegraph, Jan 2014).
Statistics from June 2013 show that 15.5% of 16-24 year olds in England were NEETs (DFE, June 2013). With pupils now having to stay in education or training until the age of 17, moving to 18 in 2015, will this prove to be the magical solution for reducing unemployment for young people?
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Low-level behaviour issues are a daily occurrence in schools, with pupils causing disruptions through chair rocking, talking out of turn, note passing and pen tapping. One reason this behaviour should be taken seriously and intercepted is that ‘low-level disruption is what pupils do instead of learning’ (Bennett, 2009).
In the Continental Research Survey 2004, 71% of teachers and 62% of support staff identified constant low-level behaviour, such as chatting and leaving seats without permission, to be a factor that is most detrimental to a child’s learning. Here are our simple tips for managing this type of behaviour in the classroom.
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Reading time: 3 minutes
Over the past 4 years we have worked with over 300 schools that have incorporated numerous strategies into their alternative curriculum environments. The primary focus in all of these establishments is to raise overall standards by delivering a suitable and well-rounded provision to help raise the students’ A*-Cs attainment. Some of these strategies have been successful whilst the majority have failed due to lack of support, funding or expertise.
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Reading time: 4 minutes
The next generation BTEC brings new challenges for all our schools: externally assessed units and new rules regarding coursework feedback. It is no longer BTEC ‘as we know it’. It’s a completely different regime. The bar has been raised to add more rigour and credibility to the subject.
No longer can BTEC be thought of as a ‘sink’ option for those learners who don’t want to do certain subjects or who don’t seem to fit well anywhere else or for your alternative curriculum students.
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