If you can’t write it, you can’t think it. The science and humanities curricula are full and there just isn’t … More
Tag: learning
Listening Comprehension in Lessons
We spend a lot of class time talking to students. Explanations; questions and instructions all require students to comprehend what … More
Strong Writing is Different In Every Subject But Weak Writing Is All The Same
Each subject writes differently. Strong history writing balances evidence to reach conclusions about significance, cause and consequence or similarity and … More
Making Reading Comprehension Visible in Physics
Let’s say you’ve got a class full of students who are strong readers. You give them a text that you … More
What Counts as a High Quality Text in a Primary Science Classroom?
We should be reading more high quality books to children, but which books should we choose? Literacy books, blogs and … More
Born Listening? Why Listening Is Hard and How to Help Your Students Listen and Understand Better.
This blog is about the forgotten half of oracy: not talking but listening. Listening is often described as the Cinderella … More
The Simple View of Reading
Less Simple than it Looks The Simple View formula presented by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 is presented as a … More
Good Enough Comprehension
Or not quite good enough… I’m a decent reader, but I find recipes hard to follow. The trouble is that … More
Some Jobs Sentences Do in Science
I’ve been thinking a lot about how important sentences are in science. The new DfE Writing Framework puts sentences at … More
Building Sentences in Physics – Talking Precisely about Energy at KS 3&4
It’s a mistake to think that we don’t have time to explicitly teach the sentences that students need to talk … More
Reading for Learning 