Approaches to improve creativity and innovation; ways to marry the intuitive and the cognitive

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Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. But it’s all too easy to think of any creative genius as resulting from humanity touched by divine lightning. All too easy, and not really that helpful to any of us as educators or learners. Our interest tends to be far more pragmatic...

How can teachers encourage student independence?

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Don’t unconsciously prejudge outcomes or define the parameters of inquiry. Often it is only by letting our students off the lead that we find out what they are capable of achieving...

Perfecting attention - The case for poetry

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Engaging the intellect and the heart are not two mutually exclusive aims. One informs the other and together they create what Seamus Heaney calls a fluid movement between the reader’s innermost mind and what they think about on the surface. The surface shows us craft and technique. Identifying and naming techniques adds to the student’s linguistic universe.

The power of literature to drive learning

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Knowing things, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, allows us to open the universe a little more. Imparting contextual knowledge through literature is highly significant. We can’t give learners shortcuts to cultural capital, but we can teach them how to invest in a world lived differently.

Books - The way we navigate the ground between school and the real world

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The characters and situations we meet through reading teach us how we might think and live – and adapt - in the modern world. If stories are the engine, reading and books are the route; absorption, talk and writing are the destination. Reading is much more than a ‘decoding’ exercise used to access knowledge in a mechanical way. Instead it is the means to explore shades of meaning, to reach a place where students can interpret the words as well as read them?

Knowledge versus thinking skills: the debate over Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum

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The breadth-versus-depth problem in education is perennial and real, as is that of the integration of knowledge. Breadth is not the enemy of depth. Knowledge is not the death of skills. If pupils already know something about a subject, they are far more in control of the acquisition of new understanding and are able to better contextualise what they find out when they do look it up.

Creating a culture of excellence: five strategies

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If we want learners to achieve their full potential and access the highest grades, we need to establish a culture which promotes excellence. But what are the characteristics of an excellence culture? Here are five principles for starters, based on insights I’ve drawn from my work with schools.

Rich Tasks

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Rich tasks cover basic areas of learning but also allow for extension far beyond them. Based on genuine exploration, intellectual excitement and challenge, making sure that the tasks you set in class are rich expands your options and makes the learning more enjoyable for both pupil and teacher.

Use these 10 key principles for identifying and setting rich tasks to make your lessons more stimulating for all pupils.

Task differentiation

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For a lot of teachers, differentiation can mean endlessly tailored versions of different worksheets. A richer and more straightforward differentiation sets tasks that avoid the rigidity of tiering your class.

Use these 10 approaches to task differentiation to spice up your planning.

Subject specific criteria for the identification of most able students (alongside some of the main problems encountered by schools with regards to the achievement of the top grades per subject).

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The following Subject Specific Criteria for the identification of the more able came from a programme with many state and independent schools. They are certainly not a final list, but they are useful provocations to spark a debate within departments. It focuses the conversation on what skills are important to teach and focus on within a subject. It is here alongside some of the main problems encountered by these schools in achieving top grades in these subjects.

There are no last page conclusions to learning

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Too often we seek a false consensual certainty, simply because it is acceptable or reassuring. It’s important to reject this compulsive cramping ideal and to choose to live with complexity; our ability to hold doubt, suspend judgement and accumulate additional information allows growth. We need to accept that when it looks as though we have the answer, we may well only have frozen the evolution of our understanding into a static order.

Ways to take learners into texts

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A really powerful way to begin a new text can happen through the way you prepare the classroom for the first encounter with the text: bring the learners into the world of the text, rather than bring the text into the world of your classroom.