Hands Up - The Lollipop Experiment

According to Dylan Wiliams If you allow your students to put their hands up to volunteer an answer you are making the achievement gap bigger.

Do Schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity

Teaching with Twitter

This Academic year 2011/12 i will be piloting the use of twitter with the HND Professional golf students. Amongst other things students will be able to do the following:

• Post real time feedback, send questions and input to the feed which will end up projected during the class
• Answer question via twitter - this also allows them to refer back using the #HNDProgolf hash tag
• Follow certain industry professionals and ask them to tweet a response during open discussions
• Take notes

For more ideas of how twitter can be used in the classroom check out 28 Creative Ideas for Teaching with Twitter

Ending the tyranny of the Lecture

Here Eric Mazur revaels how he uses peer instruction to make learning more dynamic. This article is about how people learn new skills and what WE NEED TO DO to make sure INFORMATION STICKS

Curriculum Mapping

As a new academic year approach this article looks at curriculum mapping and how the listening to the voices of students' should be an integral part of this process

Why 'Action Research'?

Action research is not a ‘method’ or a ‘procedure’ for research but a series of commitments to observe and problematize through practice a series of principles for conducting social enquiry’. McNiff (1993) sets out familiar action research model: identifying a problem, devising, implementing and evaluating a solution and modifying practice. The implementation and evaluation of the solution should be a collaborative effort involving all active agents involved in the project (teachers/students/managers etc)  

Characteristically Action research is:

• Democratic, enabling the participation of all people.
• Equitable, acknowledging people’s equality of worth.
• Liberating, providing freedom from oppressive, debilitating conditions.
• Life enhancing, enabling the expression of people’s full human potential.

(Stringer 1999: 9-10)