Welcome to the CUREE Website

Personalising CPD

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Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Improve teaching and learning in FE through practitioner enquiry Click here for more information on FREE support

Here at CUREE we welcome the announcement that Frank McLoughlin is to lead a commission looking at adult vocational pedagogy in the Learning and Skills Sector. Our knowledge in this country of effective pedagogies in the schools' system has developed by leaps and bounds in the last 10 - 15 years and we can now say with some confidence that we know what works in teaching learning. CUREE is proud to have contributed to that knowledge base and, even more, to have made it accessible in practical forms to teachers in classrooms.

We can't yet say the same thing in further education or in work based education which has, been less well served by the research community (or the people who fund it). This is not just an English phenomenon. The biggest education research convention in the world (AERA) rarely discusses FE and pedagogy. A tiny fraction of the research presented there will be about the post-16 system and an even smaller amount will explore teaching and learning. So we hope the Commission will both examine the evidence base and will have some resources to get some more.

Happily, at the level of individual providers and practitioners, there is a real interest in the Sector for improving teaching and learning and in using evidence to support that process. We've been working with enthusiasts in BMET, Farnborough XIth Form and Loughborough College (to name just a few) to help practitioners strengthen their teaching and learning via their research-informed communities of practice. Other welcome developments include AoC's Teaching and Learning Conference and LSIS continuing to support research informed practice in a number of ways.

You can see more about this and other related resources through our revamped Learning and Skills pages here on our website (this is still work in progress).

And here's an offer you can't refuse! LSIS are funding an extension of the Laboratory Site project begun last year. Through this, CUREE will support a group of your lecturers/trainers or other practitioners to experiment with some different approaches in teaching and learning or other ways of supporting your learners. Click here or on the banner above for more information or you can email or phone Paul Crisp on 024 7652 4036.

Philippa Cordingley

Constructing challenge - and other hard things

Try our new guided routemaps. These take you on a journey through the essential evidence about key aspects of developing your curriculum. Included on the journey are engaging summaries of the research and everything you need to run successful workshops with colleagues (in departmental meetings, twilight INSET sessions, or as part of a full INSET day). Constucting challenge and Creating effective curriculum experiences are currently available with more to follow.

Expansive Education

CUREE is pleased to have been asked to be an Expansive Education pioneer because of the extent to which Expansive Education, the brainchild of Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton, is committed to teacher research and enquiry. This taster is a resource that we have contributed to their bank and helps you explore your students’ experience of independent learning through collaborative enquiry. If you would like to find out more about using tasters and other CUREE resources to improve practice in your school please contact Rebecca Raybould at rebecca.raybould@curee.co.uk. For more information about Expansive Education see www.expansiveeducation.net/pages/resources/ee-pioneers-resources

Find your way to success!

For many years, CUREE has been developing different ways of helping school leaders and practitioners find and make use of evidence. We sift, sort and select the evidence that can actually make a difference to teaching and learning. We group and we summarise so you can find and read the stuff of use to you quickly and efficiently.

We have found a helpful and eye-grabbing metaphor in the route map, a collection of different research based resources organised around one or more key themes. From our starting point, the generic route map which pointed the way to teacher-focussed resources, we have diversified into a a range of different focuses and formats.

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Effective Professional Development in Schools

We are very pleased to bring you news of a new service we have launched for schools building on CUREE's expertise in professional learning and the curriculum

Skein is a new service to enable you to drive forward effective professional learning. It will:

give you good information at whole school level about what your colleagues' development needs are;
get you the evidence you need to target and track progress by creating a really effective environment for professional learning; and
connect you with a network of like minded schools to compare notes and share ideas and practices

For more information:

visit the Skein website
download a printable outline of the Skein service
View a video summary of Skein

CUREE works at the leading edge of research and evidence-informed educational policy and practice. Our mission centres on promoting and supporting the use of evidence by building bridges between academic research and professional practice. We support practice-driven action research, develop tools for Continuing Professional Development and Learning (CPDL), for organisational leadership and for teaching and learning. We believe in modelling good practice in everything we do and our work in consultancy, advice, development and training in the use of research and evidence is consistently informed by the principles underpinning effective mentoring and coaching in education.

We have tried to include a lot of resources on our site of use to practitioners, leaders and policy makers. We have also included links to lots of relevant stuff in other places (much of which we made too). I hope you find it useful. If so, please let us know.

Philippa Cordingley

A thought for our times - taken from a different one

"Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word. Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave . . . . It is not teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness and by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise,-but above all - by example". The Crown of Wild Olive - J Ruskin MA

By going through our simple registration process, you'll unlock an ever increasing set of resources that will help you get the most from the site. Click here for more information about the benefits of registering