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groupwork

Should teachers do what children want?

2018-01-05T23:32:17+00:00May 19th, 2017|behaviour, leadership|

Every weekday morning, my daughters both moan about having to get up for school. They moan about their teachers and they moan about homework. Given free rein, they would spend all day every day watching BuzzFeed video channels, making Spotify playlists, watching Netflix and taking online quizzes. It's not that they're lazy, it's just that they'd really rather not have to learn maths, science and geography. They're both moderately conscientious, reasonably hardworking girls who never put a foot wrong in school. On parents' evenings, we're regaled with tales of how good their attitude to school is and how much progress they're [...]

Why (the hell) should students work in groups?

2018-09-23T15:17:12+01:00February 11th, 2015|Featured|

In a recent TES article James Mannion and Neil Mercer make the following claim: In not using group work, students are denied the chance to develop skills that can not only help them perform better in schools, but which are also vital for their future employment prospects – not to mention the realisation of a more fully participatory democracy. First, let me state that I see nothing inherently wrong with pupils working collaboratively. Like any method of working, it has its time and place. But I was led to believe that unless a lesson contained an element of groupwork it could not [...]

Effective group work

2013-11-27T19:42:46+00:00January 12th, 2013|behaviour, Featured, learning|

Just another example of effective groupwork OK. I have 3 points to make: Group work does not make us more creative and it does not make us work harder. Learning is social and effective group work (apparently) doubles the speed of students' learning. Almost all teaching in schools depends on a teacher's ability to create effective groups because, wait for it, classes are just large groups. Let's deal with each of these in a bit more detail. Firstly, as I've discussed before, when we try to work together to work towards a collective goal we get, what is known [...]

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