In this issue
- How to get evidence from your learners
- Support staff support one another
- Collaborative CPD
- In other news
Welcome to the CUREE newsletter
The approaching summer break might provide a brief opportunity to reflect on the momentous changes of the past few weeks. A new government, new financial position and, importantly for us, a new regime in the Departments for Education (as it is renamed) and of Business, Information and Skills. The new Education Secretary got to work very quickly to strip away some of the institutions which he believes waste money and get in the way of schools and colleges meeting the needs of their students. It will be a while before we all understand and feel the outcomes of this root and branch dismantling of the infrastructure but we can be fairly certain that, for good or ill, schools (and other providers in the education system) will find that much of the support they have become used to will no longer be there.
Here at CUREE we like to think that we have done our little bit to support you and, with this newsletter, we try to introduce other things we can offer. Alongside a refreshing of the format, and a new frequency (roughly bi-monthly) we have refocused the content to provide you with less ‘news’ and more useful tools and resources. These stick close to our core mission, which is improving teaching and learning, and to our principle objective which is to provide you with the evidence about what works in teaching and learning which you can use to improve it where you are.
We hope you find these resources useful. If you do, please let us know. If you have any suggestions about this newsletter and how we might improve it, let us know. If you think a friend or colleague would find this useful, we’d be very happy to email him/her a personal copy. For all these things, contact us at newsletter@curee.co.uk
We will be working hard over the summer to figure out how the ways of accessing research that we have been able to create, can continue in new forms geared to informing local choices. I hope you manage some time off over the summer – I don’t think it’s going to be a relaxing autumn!
Philippa Cordingley
How to get evidence from your learners
Gathering evidence from learners in a way that they find interesting and makes them think deeply can be a tricky feat. CUREE has been working on some innovative tools and fun surveys that have helped schools look at the impact of their initiatives and curriculum changes in new ways.
Support staff support one another
Informed, competent and motivated support staff play an important role in assisting teaching and learning within and beyond the classroom. Three schools in Hartlepool are extending the coaching programme their Heads attended and tailoring it to professionally grow those in support roles.
Click here to read more, and for schools with similar needs there are cost effective routes to creating these development opportunities so contact Lisa Bradbury at lisa.bradbury@curee.co.uk
Collaborative CPD
Informed, competent and motivated support staff play an important role in assisting teaching and learning within and beyond the classroom. Three schools in Hartlepool are extending the coaching programme their Heads attended and tailoring it to professionally grow those in support roles.
Click here to read more, and for schools with similar needs there are cost effective routes to creating these development opportunities so contact Lisa Bradbury at lisa.bradbury@curee.co.uk
In other news...
Participation and challenge in the classroom
Share how teachers increase participation and engagement in their classes or reflect on how you might construct challenge by designing teaching and learning to elicit your students' best efforts. Click here to see our petal diagram offering you a window to helpful reports on curriculum design.
Use research to improve your practice
If you want easy to digest access to all sorts of pedagogical, subject and curriculum research to help improve your practice click here. Everything from independent learning to giving praise, the key stage 3 to effective pre-schools, history and maths to writing skills.
Stepping Stones, Bridges and Scaffolding
Delivered at the American Research Conference AERA you can download the paper or watch Philippa’s presentation on how research based tools and processes can be used to make educational research more accessible and have greater impact. Click here.
Put faces to the CUREE team
CUREE is a team built on collaborative working and strong values. The skills of our colleagues allows us to bring valuable resources to you. Click here to find out more about the CUREE team.