Welcome to Week 2
Welcome to Week 2 of Supporting Successful Learning in Secondary School. In this part of the course you’ll be turning your attention to how pupils learn. It’s very easy to …
Course: Supporting Successful Learning in Secondary School
Pupil’s view: My world
Pupils have to be physically and emotionally in the right place to learn, but that’s not to say they can’t have good and bad days, just like adults. We need …
Values, beliefs and attitudes
People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can …
What type of teacher?
In a paper entitled ‘Beginning teacher curriculum decision making, personal teaching metaphors, and teacher education’ (please note this article is behind a paywall), there’s a description of the metaphors two …
Why are metaphors useful in teaching?
Being a good educator is knowing who you are and understanding yourself. This very much applies to the staff who have supporting roles within schools too, and metaphors are a …
How can I overcome any unconscious biases in the classroom?
It’s difficult to change behaviour if you’re not aware of how you’re behaving. If you’re aware of what unconscious bias is, you can look at yourself more closely; you can …
Peer support exercise
Now that you know what’s required of a good listener, this peer coaching exercise will allow you to practice your listening skills, and empower others to try and work out …
Teacher’s view: Addressing bias in the classroom
In the previous Step you’ve looked at unconscious bias and how this way of thinking leads to making automatic and unintentional judgments. In the first of our round table discussions, …
Unconscious bias
There’s an aspect of your values, beliefs and attitudes system that helps you make decisions which is called the unconscious bias. Bias is a tendency to either lean towards or …
In conversation with Helen
In this Step, Helen Bilton was in conversation with the University of Reading’s Online Course Team. Hi Helen, thanks for taking the time to answer some of our questions today. …
Teacher’s view: Communication and language
In this video you hear again from Janine, Luke and Helen in our last round table discussion of the course. Janine and Luke discuss with Helen the skills pupils need …
How can I have a positive relationship with my pupils?
To have a good working atmosphere in your classroom, you need to have high quality relationships, to ensure effective use of language and work with a framework of principles. But what does this …
Planning effective questions
In Step 4.13 you’ve explored three types of question, and as mentioned in the Step 4.12 – the quality of an answer received is determined by the quality of the …
The importance of the right question
In the video ‘Questions’, Professor Ted Wragg, an educationalist and academic, discusses three types of questions, he discovered, were often asked in schools. Let’s break these down a little further: …
What’s in a question?
“If you want interesting answers, you’ve got to ask interesting questions.” – Ted Wragg, Professor of Education A question is an enquiry either spoken or written to find something out, …
These articles are from the online course:
Supporting Successful Learning in Secondary School