In case you missed the announcement last week, ‘selfie’ is the Oxford Dictionaries‘ new WOTY (word of the year). Apparently, given its ubiquity, the decision was almost unanimous. Since its rise in popularity, it has also spawned a host of bizarre derivatives: ‘helfie’, ‘belfie’, ‘welfie’, as well as ‘legsie’! Last year Oxford Dictionaries went for ‘omnishambles’, though… Continue reading WOTY 2013
I’m reading what I think is by far and away one of the best written books I’ve come across in many a year: Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn by John Hattie and Gregory Yates. One of the most obvious assets of the book is that it is enormously accessible to teaching… Continue reading Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn
All this talk about nonsense words! In the words of Alison Clarke of Spelfabet, they’re simply words we haven’t yet come across. Now, if you should happen to be lucky enough to visit the beautiful city of Perth in Western Australia, and you should take a walk through King’s Park very close to the King’s… Continue reading Nyoongar words
This posting is a plug for the latest issue of Scientific American Mind magazine (September/October 2013 issue) because it is chock full of pieces all teachers need to be cognisant of. The list includes: an article on consciousness in infants; a very thoughtful piece entitled ‘Letting go of self-esteem’, their cover story; a special report… Continue reading Hands help us to see!
In this final posting on the teaching and learning values of Barak Rosenshine, I shall be looking at his fifth and sixth principles of direct instruction. The fifth principle is providing enough opportunity to engage in independent practice. In regard to the teaching of literacy in the early years, I believe that many programmes, such… Continue reading Barak Rosenshine’s principles of direct instruction 3
Moving on from yesterday’s posting, Rosenshine’s third principle focuses on establishing connections between what is currently being learnt and what has been learnt before. In conjunction with reformulating, summarising, elaborating and so on, constantly making connections with prior learning has been shown to aid later retrieval greatly. Carefully scaffolded presentations, followed by plenty of opportunity to… Continue reading Barack Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of direct instruction’ – 2
While in Australia, I managed to get hold of the DSF(Dyslexia -SPELD Foundation) Bulletin (Vol 46) extolling the virtues of John Hattie and Barak Rosenshine. In her piece in the Bulletin ‘Improving achievement … What does the research tell us?’ Mandy Nayton quotes from Rosenshine’s article ‘Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All teachers Should… Continue reading Barak Rosenshine’s principles of direct instruction
Someone called Robert has added a comment to my post ‘Masha Bell rings the wrong note on reading’. In it, he is objecting to the emphasis I made on the fact that many teachers say that letters ‘make’ sounds when they do no such thing. He thinks that this detracted from my argument in the posting… Continue reading Why letters don’t ‘make’ sounds.
This week’s New Scientist has an opinion piece by Tom Bennett on the subject of neuromyths that ‘badly need debunking’. First up for unmasking is the idea that people are right or left-brained. This belief has been around since Robert Sperry of CalTec noticed when treating epileptics that, if the two hemispheres of the brain… Continue reading Neuromyths debunked
I’m not long back from Perth in Australia, where I’ve been running two back-to-back courses with Mary Gladstone (see below), our resident Sounds-Write trainer based in Lismore, near Brisbane. And, apart from training trainees new to Sounds-Write, we were also training three new Sounds-Write trainers from DFS. We had a terrific time with our super-animated trainees.… Continue reading Sounds-Write trainings in Perth, Western Australia