Belonging isn’t separate from academic teaching. Strategies that build knowledge - when done correctly -also build belonging.

Most schools live with a quiet tension between what’s written in policy and what actually happens in lessons. Getting to grips with this tension is at the heart of creating an improved school culture.

Why guidance, not premature independence, is the real foundation of freedom

How self-talk can develop metacognition and self-regulation

A Slice of Primary Leadership

Educational Psychology Review - How do learners make sense of what they are learning? In this article, I present a new framework of sense-making based on research investigating the benefits and...

Apply metacognitive strategies in the classroom.

A new study from the Education Policy Institute (EPI), funded by the Nuffield Foundation, highlights significant inconsistencies in how children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) ...

What kind domains, wicked traps and school culture mean for improvement

With the new Ofsted inspection toolkit removing subject deep dives, it’s now harder for leaders to demonstrate the quality of education through traditional triangulation.

How important are relationships on learning? Depends on what you mean by relationship.

Government pledges changes to subject make-up of league table measure - despite review calling for no changes

How do we address the gap in attainment between the most advantaged and disadvantaged students in the UK? Pioneering research, led by the University of Bristol, reveals the reforms most likely to equa...

Why Powerful Knowledge Needs a Pedagogy to Match

Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories that predict a unidirectional process where memories are first supported by the hippocampus and then the neocortex. Here, I propose a 3D state space for episodic memories. The first two dimensions relate to whether episodic retrieval is driven by the hippocampus and the neocortex, critically allowing for independent and additive contributions from both regions. The third dimension relates to the episodic specificity of retrieval. Memories can be located at any point in this state space and move to any other location. The state space captures the dynamic nature of episodic memory and broadens the search space of possible memory states and transformations across time.

Why the distinction between “schemas” and “mental models” tell us more more about our language than our minds.

Why Simplistic Narratives Miss the Point

I’ve been teaching secondary school students for over a decade, and in that time, I’ve dived deep into many aspects of teaching.