3-Read Friday #002

Attention, revision mistakes, and seminal studies

Here are three blog posts that I found interesting this week.

Oh, and if you missed my post earlier this week on student participation in lessons, you can read it here.

1. Attention First by Pete Foster

I’m obsessed with student attention in lessons, and Pete Foster’s post had me at the first line: All the tasks of the teacher will fail if students aren’t listening. Pete goes on to share super practical tips to help check and secure student attention throughout a lesson, including when giving instructions and when students are working independently. This is useful stuff for teachers of all levels of experience.

2. Masses of Mistakes: improving Y11 revision by Dani Quinn

Yay, one of my favourite thinkers and writers is back after her maternity leave! Dani returns with a lovely post about the potential pitfalls of a common teacher practice around exam time: giving students loads of printed revision material to take home. Dani explains the pitfalls and suggests what we might do instead. This might be too late for current Year 11s, but certainly not for our Year 10s!

3. The 10 most important Teaching & Learning studies of the last 50 years by Inner Drive

For a research geek like me, this post is heaven. The Inner Drive team reflect on 10 seminal studies that have something important to say about teaching and learning. We start with Miller’s 1956 study about the limits of working memory that laid the foundations for Cognitive Load Theory, and travel through time to Chen’s 2017 research into metacognition, calling in on studies about forgetting, resilience and mobile phones along the way.

If you found this edition of 5-Read Friday useful, feel free to share it with colleagues. Also, you can check out all the back issues of my Eedi newsletter and Tips for Teachers newsletter here. But, most importantly of all, have a great weekend.

Craig