Choke points and Pitfalls- reflections from a virtual day at ResearchEd Warrington

We are proud to welcome Dr Sarah Benskin– Assistant Principal: Curriculum, T&L and CPD; Science teacher and lover of educational research to the world of blogging. Here she has a great run down of the virtual offer fro rED Warrington. I am a big fan of ResearchEd and have attended several events, both in person

Disciplinary Knowledge – Intent

By Ryan Badham At the very end of the previous academic year, we were joined by a team of Ofsted inspectors whom corroborated our own opinions of the strengths and weaknesses of our department and curriculum, namely great retention of substantive knowledge by our students but a weaker retention of disciplinary knowledge by our students.

HoDSciSci’s advice to new HoDs

We asked the members of the HoDSciSci staff room slack channel what advice they would give new Heads of Department. Here are some of their gems. If you are a new HoD and want to join over 300 others in the staff room just DM @HoDSciSci on twitter. Mike writes: When planning your days as

HoDSciSci January Roundtable: The Quality Assurance of Remote Learning.

We kick off the first HoDSciSci post with a remote learning roundtable. Here a few willing HoDs have answered questions focussed on the quality assurance of remote learning.   In today’s post we have Darren Walkerdine, Ryan Badham, Nik Rorke and Chris Smith. All four have their students learning via live lessons, which appears to be

An Open Letter to NQT Mentors and School Leaders about Science Teacher retention

Dom Shibli is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire for Secondary Science (@ShibliDom) This is usually an exciting time of year for me as the student teachers complete their training and start thinking about their ‘proper jobs’ in July or September. I derive a huge amount of satisfaction knowing that they are in

Guest post: Completing a #CogSciSci module (and lesson planning)

Abby Camilleri (@CamilleriMiss) is a Physics teacher at St Anne’s Academy in Middleton. She’s recently completed the (totally free!) CogSciSci Introduction to Cognitive Science module. Having submitted her end of module task (“Describe how you have used the characteristics of Long Term Memory and Working Memory to plan a lesson”) we asked Abby if she’d be

Embedding Retrieval Throughout Your Teaching

This is the fourth blog in the CogSciSci symposium on retrieval practice in the classroom, following on from contibutions from Adam Boxer (How to not screw up retrieval practice) and Damien Benney (Retrieval practice, retrieval roulette, schema, spacing and even a nod to Rosenshine) You should read the introduction to this symposium here before reading this

Retrieval practice in the classroom: a CogSciSci symposium

It’s pretty easy to get things wrong in education. Brain gym, learning styles, pyramids and more: history is replete with schools and teachers running with ideas that never had any kind of empirical basis to suggest they were worth pursuing. Unfortunately, even when an idea or intervention has evidence behind it we don’t always get

Explicit Instruction with Choral Response, Think-Pair-Share, and Quizzing

Kevin Fulton, Elementary Science Department Head at Taipei Fuhsing Private School (@Fultonofscience) has been integrating a number of cogsci strategies into his teaching. In this fascinating blog post he examines the impact that explicit instruction, choral response, think-pair-share and low-stakes quizzing has had on his pupils. -cogscisci editor —————— Explicit instruction is a teaching framework

Appositives as retrieval practice

Birmingham based NQT Austin Dwyer (@AustinDDwyer) was inspired by a blog post on using appositives by CogSciSci editor Tom Chillimamp and has had a go himself. The sentences produced by his pupils led him to experiment in using appositives as a structure for retrieval practice. This seems a great idea and is something I’m now