Education Practices

For your pupils who have just received their A-Level results, the news will have either been brilliant or upsetting. Either way, they are going to have some decisions to make about their futures, and their A-Level results will certainly affect this. As their teacher, you are in the perfect position to advise and offer students some wisdom.

If your students had good results, then they will be off to university of college if they applied. The difficulty comes if they did better than expected, and they find themselves potentially wanting to do something else. Remind them that there is no rush to make a decision, and they should make it in a calm and collected way.

For students who didn’t do as well, the conversation may focus on whether it is worth resitting. You can also steer them towards clearing, where they can look at available university places to see if any of them are suitable.

A tendency that is growing in prevalence among universities from around the world is the general trend of investing in facilities above improvements to educational standards. It is important that we understand this issue for a number of reasons, but primarily because it is closely related to the increasing cost of university education.

Getting a degree from anywhere in the western world can cost you a significant amount of money, and this has resulted in significant indebtedness for a large number of newly minted graduates. If we can lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of university officials spending their budget on pointless vanity projects rather than on improving the standard of education being provided students so that they are adequately prepared for adult life, then that can only be a good thing. (more…)

A study was recently conducted by MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, into the effects devices like Ipads and Laptops and access to the internet, have on the results students get in the classroom, which shows the general trend of worse results among students who use them in the classroom.

In the study, 726 undergraduates were split into three different groups randomly; one acting as the control with no access to devices, another one where they were allowed unrestricted access to them, and finally one where there was restricted access. The study took place in the West Point naval academy in the USA, where student ranking is determined mostly by exam results and competition is purposely kept at a very high level, so people were very motivated to succeed and ignore distractions. (more…)

Teaching in high school is a demanding job, and depending on what subject you’re teaching, it could be even more so. Subjects aren’t necessarily equal in terms of the demands for marking students’ work, teacher pay, difficulty, or importance. (more…)

Technology has the ability to improve most aspects of our way of life, from the ability to express ourselves and communicate with others, to entertaining ourselves in our free time, and education is not immune to the benefits of over improving technological capabilities.

Incorporating technology into our lesson plans is necessary because it plays such an important role in our lives now. Students need to be repeatedly and regularly exposed to the technology of today in order to be able to fit into the society of today.

There are two methods for doing this; we can begin teaching technology classes to students in the same way that we teach computers, or every teacher in every classroom can attempt to become more capable with tech and then incorporate their use in the lesson.

There are a lot of great ways to teach students about the full capabilities of their technology, and it is important that schools seek to teach them about this. Employing online sources of information for educational requirements; teaching students about how they can this and generally take control of their digitised lives; all of these issues are becoming very important things that the education authorities need to address.

Taking account of Learning difficulties has been a very much neglected part of the government run education sector since its initiation, but recently, with the massive increase in people with the label, the need and desire to address these and related issues have become apparent.

As this desire/need to address learning difficulties in the classroom is a relatively recent phenomena, it is understandable why we seem woefully unable to provide these individuals with a quality education without excluding them from general education (through sending them to special needs schools) while at the same time causing as little disruption to other student’s education as possible, which should be everyone’s goal.

Why is it important that student’s with learning difficulties are taught within the general population? Segmenting the population more than it needs to be will, inevitably, result in individuals being less prepared for work in general population.

So how do we deal with and adapt to this new and growing need of the education system? Luckily, we’re already doing the solution, which is to experiment with new ideas. Currently, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of different strategies being employed around the world to provide education in a more inclusive and adaptable way, so that student’s and their individual skills and requirements are appropriately satisfied wherever possible. At some point or another, one strategy will prove to be effective (hopefully cost effective too), and that strategy will be adopted by a wider group, who will then improve it even further, until we’ve got something which can be deployed globally to help people reach their full potential.