Tom Sherrington

4 days ago | teacherhead.com | Tom Sherrington

I’m often struck by just how deeply embedded some ineffective teacher habits are.  I see it as a collective more than an individual problem. Faced with the inherent challenges that teaching presents, there are lots of very common shortcuts enacted every day where teachers resort to hoping learning is happening rather than ensuring that it is.

4 weeks ago | teacherhead.com | Tom Sherrington

Encoding is a key concept in our theory of learning but I continually find that it is under-emphasised in the ‘how we learn’ discourse  and in the practice that this translates into in classrooms.   I’ve explored this before in various guises.  In particular, this post that references the work of Efrat Furst, explains that encoding needs to happen right at the start of a learning process – before connecting to prior knowledge and way before we consider retrieval practice.

2 months ago | teacherhead.com | Tom Sherrington

I find the concept of schema-building incredibly useful when thinking about curriculum design and teaching. It’s a really a spatial metaphor more than anything physical/concrete – but it has fantastic explanatory power and can help teachers consider the whole process of securing each student’s understanding of a set of ideas. I”ve written about this before – there’s lots of overlap in these posts – but a good idea is always worth revisiting so here’s the Five Ways version.

2 months ago | teacherhead.com | Tom Sherrington

Earlier this week I got sucked into a stupid ‘debate’ about subject knowledge after making some comments on X and replying to some other posts. It seemed to me that various people – at least five, separate people – were posting about how important subject knowledge is and how it’s more important than generic teaching techniques.

2 months ago | teacherhead.com | Tom Sherrington

There are SO MANY issues that teachers have to think about every lesson just to run the room and work through the curriculum – and there are SO MANY concepts and ideas from research and the world of cognitive science to explore ….it’s just a bit overwhelming! Realistically you can only work on so many fronts so it helps to have some headline ideas to keep to the top of the pile – things to pay attention to in preparing for lessons and when they’re in full flow.