Oracy is the skill of effective verbal communication and comprehension. It's crucial for children's learning and development. Explanatory talk, often led by teachers, aims to clarify concepts and ideas, enhancing knowledge acquisition. Conversely, exploratory talk, which is interactive, encourages children to express thoughts, ask questions, and develop reasoning skills.

Though both forms have distinct purposes, they work together in classrooms to bolster oracy. Explanatory talk imparts knowledge, while exploratory talk stimulates critical thinking and deeper understanding, thus crafting better communicators and engaged learners.

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The downloadable resource is a guide for teachers, offering an array of tactics to foster meaningful classroom discussions. It presents versatile strategies that educators can incorporate into their teaching repertoire to cultivate a more engaging dialogue. These tactics range from effectively framing questions, promoting active listening, to encouraging student-led discussions.

It provides educators with the tools to stimulate intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and active participation among students. By applying these methods, teachers can transform their classrooms into dynamic learning environments where discussions go beyond surface-level comprehension, leading to deeper understanding and retention of knowledge. The resource serves as a valuable tool for any educator committed to interactive and effective pedagogy.

"Talk Tactics" is a downloadable resource aimed to enhance classroom conversations and foster diverse perspectives. It involves children taking on various roles or personas, thereby enabling them to participate in discussions in ways they might not ordinarily do. The resource includes a set of printable and laminatable cards, each describing a different persona that guides students' contributions to discussions.

By promoting a variety of conversational roles, it encourages students to delve deeper into topics, cultivate empathy, and broaden their communication skills. This tool is highly versatile and can be utilized across various subjects, making classroom discussions more dynamic and enriching.

The Structural Learning Action Research Cycle is a visually engaging poster guide designed to facilitate curriculum enhancement via a four-stage action research method. The first stage, 'Design', involves understanding student learning challenges and defining actionable solutions. The 'Change' stage encompasses the implementation of these solutions and monitoring their immediate impacts. The 'Sustain' phase is about maintaining the effective practices, refining them based on continuous feedback.

Lastly, the 'Explore' stage encourages teachers to reflect on the effectiveness of their solutions and look for new areas of improvement. This cycle facilitates continuous improvement, fostering an ongoing evolution of best teaching practices for better learning outcomes.

The Lesson Design Canvas is a classroom action research worksheet for teachers, facilitating the design of classroom experiments. It encourages teachers to identify a learning need (1), propose an intervention (2), define desired academic outcomes (3), and determine the skills and behaviors to nurture (4). The canvas incorporates a selection of common learning difficulties, toolkits for intervention, academic outcomes, and wider educational progress expectations based on the skills framework.

This practical tool allows teachers to use structural learning tools and frameworks to address specific learning needs, predict improvements, and nurture broader educational development, thereby promoting classroom-based research and experimentation.

The Research into Practice Program is an innovative teacher professional development initiative that combines cognitive science and design thinking to tackle classroom challenges. It unpacks complex issues into actionable steps through a three-stage innovation process: Explore (understand and define learning challenges), Design (ideate and experiment solutions), and Change (reflect and implement practices).

This approach fosters a new mindset in teachers, encouraging openness, collaboration, optimism, bravery, and a deeper understanding of educational 'whys'. Outcomes of the program include changes in teacher perceptions, putting research into action, making staff learning purposeful, focusing staff meetings on learner needs, and celebrating achievements with the 'Cognition First' badge.

The Becoming an Independent Learner tool is an insightful self-assessment audit that helps students gauge their progression towards independent learning. Covering three core areas – Metacognition, Strategy Planning and Problem-Solving, and Reflection and Self-Regulation – the tool guides students through stages of awareness, understanding, application, evaluation, and fluency of various thinking actions and strategies. It aids students in recognising the importance of strategy selection, breaking down complex tasks, reflection, and self-improvement.

This tool encourages students to take strategic decisions in their learning, fostering a mindset of autonomy, resilience, and lifelong learning. It's an effective means for promoting self-regulated learning and metacognitive awareness.

The Developing Metacognition tool is a comprehensive self-audit for students to assess their knowledge of cognition and regulation of their own learning. It covers declarative, procedural, and conditional aspects of cognition, inviting students to reflect on their intellectual strengths, strategy usage, and motivation.

Additionally, it explores students' planning and information management skills, monitoring of their own learning, ability to correct errors (debugging), and evaluation of performance. This visual tool, focusing on study skills, aids students in identifying their current proficiency and areas needing improvement. It provides a valuable gauge for students to enhance their metacognitive awareness and self-directed learning.

The Metacognitive Awareness Checker is a self-assessment tool for students to gauge their own metacognitive skills and study habits. Comprising a set of 23 statements, it encourages students to reflect on their learning processes, focusing on aspects like time management, self-motivation, problem-solving strategies, and comprehension checks.

This questionnaire allows students to rate themselves across these areas, from needing improvement to consistently implementing. It fosters an environment of self-awareness, helping students identify their strengths and areas for growth. This downloadable tool can be frequently revisited, enabling students to track progress and enhance their learning autonomy and effectiveness.

The Learning Skills Framework also provides a downloadable, user-friendly spreadsheet designed to monitor students' progress in mastering the eight key skills. Teachers can allocate scores from 0 (beginning) to 4 (mastery) for each skill, depending on a student's progress. The total score indicates students' overall development and pinpoints areas needing further improvement.

This effective tool offers a clear, structured method to track not just academic progress, but also the development of crucial classroom skills, promoting an in-depth understanding of each student's learning journey and aiding the formulation of personalized teaching strategies.

The Learning Skills Framework emphasizes eight crucial skills that serve as badges: Learning Together and Communicating Clearly under Social Skills; Thinking It Through and Reflecting on My Learning under Cognitive Skills; Being Creative and Making Connections under Creative Skills; and Staying Engaged and Building Resilience under Personal Skills. These badges, which can be downloaded, printed or inserted into stickers or certificates, act as tangible recognitions of the mastery of specific learning skills and behaviors. Their use reinforces the adoption and application of these essential skills, thereby supporting learners' overall growth and development.

The Learning Skills Framework is a guide to fostering cognitive and behavioral attributes in students, pivotal for academic success and beyond. The framework identifies eight key skills organized into four thematic pairs: Social Skills (Learning Together, Communicating Clearly), Cognitive Skills (Thinking It Through, Reflecting on My Learning), Creative Skills (Being Creative, Making Connections), and Personal Skills (Staying Engaged, Building Resilience).

These skills are instrumental for curriculum delivery and subject knowledge, offering a roadmap for lifelong success. Assessment tools within this framework help monitor progress, and a badging system reinforces skill adoption. Scores are awarded and totalled to identify areas of strength and development, guiding future planning and progress tracking.

Visual learning strategies harness the power of imagery to enhance comprehension and memory. They tap into children's innate ability to process visual information, making complex concepts more accessible. Diagrams, charts, and pictures can simplify abstract ideas, fostering deeper understanding.

Moreover, visual aids can stimulate interest, encouraging active engagement in learning. This can be particularly beneficial for visual learners, who constitute a significant proportion of any classroom.

Oracy is the skill of effective verbal communication and comprehension. It's crucial for children's learning and development. Explanatory talk, often led by teachers, aims to clarify concepts and ideas, enhancing knowledge acquisition. Conversely, exploratory talk, which is interactive, encourages children to express thoughts, ask questions, and develop reasoning skills.

Though both forms have distinct purposes, they work together in classrooms to bolster oracy. Explanatory talk imparts knowledge, while exploratory talk stimulates critical thinking and deeper understanding, thus crafting better communicators and engaged learners.

Alex Quigley's top-level ideas for good teaching and learning include a focus on building strong relationships with students, providing clear and engaging instruction, promoting independent learning, using formative assessment to guide instruction, and creating a positive and inclusive classroom environment.

These ideas are presented in a downloadable poster format for educators to share and use as a starting point for evidence-informed teaching and learning policy.

Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction are a set of research-based principles that focus on the effectiveness of certain methods of teaching. They provide suggestions for the implementation of these principles in the classroom and are based on extensive research in education and cognitive science.

The principles are intended to bridge the gap between educational research and classroom practice and include examples of activities employed by "master teachers" whose students achieved the highest gains in achievement tests.

To become skilled at reading, we need to work on both the word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) and the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge).

These strands work together as we become accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. It takes instruction and practice over time to develop these skills.

To promote deeper learning outcomes in the classroom, teachers should focus on helping students make connections between the facts and procedures they are learning and the essential principles and enduring understandings within a discipline. This can be achieved through a variety of teaching strategies such as, asking open-ended questions that encourage critical thinking and discussion and providing opportunities for students to apply their knowledge in real-world contexts.

It is important to motivate learners because when they are motivated, they pay more attention, put in more effort, persist for longer, and are able to work more independently. On the other hand, unmotivated learners get distracted easily and do the bare minimum.

By motivating learners, teachers can help them achieve their full potential and become successful in their academic and personal lives. Motivation can also lead to a more positive and enjoyable learning experience for both the learners and the teachers.

Metacognitive instruction can be used to develop and facilitate the process of listening comprehension, reducing the complexity of listening comprehension for less-skilled listeners.

Metacognitive instruction can also help students become more effective readers. It involves teaching students to actively engage in the reading process by asking themselves questions about what they are reading. This helps them comprehend the material better, understand its main ideas, and recognize important details.

Metacognitive questioning is a technique used by teachers to help students actively reflect on their learning process. It involves asking students questions that encourage them to think about how they learn, what they already know, and what they need to do to improve their understanding of a topic.

Metacognitive questioning can help students develop metacognitive habits, which are essential for becoming self-sufficient learners. By reflecting on their learning process, students can identify gaps in their knowledge, solidify concepts, and develop strategies for learning new material more effectively.

Metacognitive strategies are techniques that assist students in becoming self-regulating learners and developing a strong sense of agency in their learning. These strategies empower students to think about their own thinking, which enhances their control over their own learning and personal capacity for self-regulation and managing motivation for learning.

Examples of metacognitive activities include planning how to approach learning tasks, identifying appropriate strategies to complete a task, evaluating progress, and monitoring comprehension.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory that organizes human needs into a hierarchy, ranging from basic physiological needs such as food and water to higher-level, abstract needs such as self-fulfillment. Maslow proposed that when a lower need is met, the next need on the hierarchy becomes our focus of attention.

The five categories of needs according to Maslow are physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs.

Schools can develop their curriculum by first establishing their curriculum principles, which should reflect the school's values, context, pedagogical approaches, and needs. They should then set out their pupil entitlement, which explains how they intend to broaden the curriculum with educational visits, extracurricular activities, and other curriculum enrichment experiences.

It is important to consider what pupils will experience as they move through school and to map these out for each year group. All of these steps should be discussed and defined with all stakeholders.

The fundamentals of learning are evidence-informed principles that focus on the attributes of the learner. These student behaviours are the cornerstone of learning anything and are indeed 'learnable'.

Simple verbs are used that even young children can understand. The list has purposefully moved away from teacher behaviours and placed attention on the attributes of the learner.

We can support dyslexic learners by creating a supportive and collaborative classroom culture, getting to know each learner as an individual, and encouraging them to get to know each other. Using multisensory input and activities can also be helpful in giving learners more than one way to make connections and learn concepts.

This can involve a combination of reading, listening, viewing, touching objects, moving physically around the space, or using gestures.

The principles of formative assessment include identifying and responding to the students' learning needs, making frequent and interactive assessments of student understanding, adjusting teaching to meet individual student needs, actively involving students in the process, and developing skills that enable students to learn better.

When used as a framework for teaching, formative assessment can change the way teachers interact with students, set up learning situations, guide students toward learning goals, and define student success.

Executive functioning skills are the skills involved in setting goals, planning, and getting things done. They include working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, which includes self-control. These skills are responsible for many abilities, such as paying attention, organizing, planning, prioritizing, starting tasks and staying focused on them to completion, understanding different points of view, regulating emotions, and self-monitoring.

These skills usually develop quickly in early childhood and continue to develop into the mid-20s.

Metacognitive skills refer to the ability to think about one's own thinking processes, to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes, and to plan and evaluate one's own learning. It involves being aware of one's own strengths and weaknesses, setting goals, and selecting strategies to achieve those goals.

Metacognitive skills are an important aspect of self-regulated learning and can be taught to students through specific strategies and interventions.

Teachers can use formative assessment to monitor students' learning by providing regular and timely feedback on what they've done well and what they need to improve on. It can take a variety of forms, from informal quizzes to verbal feedback on a piece of work. To be effective, formative assessment needs to take place on a daily basis during teaching and learning.

Formative assessment is used to help teachers decide how to further develop student understanding, identify gaps in the pupils' learning, and target those gaps by adjusting their planning sequences of learning to address those gaps.

Students can use dual coding by examining how words describe images and how images represent text, explaining images in their own words, and drawing an image based on words. Dual coding allows for two ways of understanding and remembering information by combining verbal material with visuals in teaching practice.

It is important to keep it simple and not combine more than two types of multimedia. Students can also be encouraged to draw something to aid in their understanding of the material.

Creative learning is a type of learning experience that encourages learners to engage deeply with process of problem-solving, critical thinking, risk-taking and curiosity. Through creative learning experiences, learners develop an increased sense of confidence as they are able to propose innovative ideas and resolutions while also feeling comfortable taking risks even when the result may not be successful.

Creative learning also helps foster a curious mindset by offering unconventional ways to learn, sparking curiosity and leading learners to interesting insights.

Block play is a form of Open-Ended Play where children learn through playing with blocks, which allows them to be imaginative or constructive. It is a useful and versatile learning technique during the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and is a great way to introduce toddlers to many concepts for the first time, such as transporting, building, representations, pattern-making, problem-solving, and much more.

As children get older, particularly between the ages of two and five, they’ll gradually build up more complex block play techniques and extend their learning. Block play aids children’s skills and development across the board.

Backward design is a method of designing an educational curriculum by setting goals before choosing instructional methods and forms of assessment. It typically involves identifying the desired results, determining acceptable levels of evidence to support those results, designing culminating assessment tasks and a range of assessment methods, and designing activities that will make the desired results happen.

The idea is to teach toward the "end point" or learning goals, which ensures that content taught remains focused and organized. This approach challenges traditional methods of curriculum planning where a list of content is created or selected before planning assessments and lessons.