Research on effective teaching

How do we know our pupil literacy interventions are working? And whether we’re targeting the right children, in the most effective way? Discover how to use data to prove what’s making a difference and pinpoint where action is needed most. Ruth Luzmore explains how transforming pupil literacy assessment and decision-making into a data-driven approach can save your school time and money, and help your staff collaborate to meet all your pupils’ needs.

Strengthen your school’s teaching of writing – in a way that really works and is rooted in research. Shareen Wilkinson shares tried-and-tested strategies to support your pupils to make rapid progress and produce sensational pieces of writing. From teaching children to proofread and edit at any age, and the importance of teaching from a whole text, to recommendations of high-quality texts to use to inspire brilliant writing, Shareen sets out the steps to success.

Learn how to get the most possible pupils to pay the most possible attention in class, for the most possible time. Adam Boxer shares a set of whole-class questioning techniques to help primary and secondary teachers do just that. He also sets out how you, as a school leader, can support and monitor these strategies to help improve teaching and learning across your school, so all your pupils make the best progress.

Get your school community fired up about reading – from reluctant parents/carers to hard-to-reach groups like Key Stage 2 boys. Eve Cairns Vollans shares a number of creative approaches that sparked a reading frenzy at her school. Learn how to use social media to encourage reading at home, create a community bookshop to make reading more accessible, and swap outdated paper reading journals for video reading diaries – something that increased home reading in Eve’s school by 38%.

Retrieval practice is a feature of high-quality teaching and supports pupils to learn. Understand retrieval practice, and learn strategies and tips to use it effectively across your school.

Understand why pupils get overwhelmed with information, and learn strategies to maximise learning by reducing cognitive load. Download our handout to use in CPD sessions and during lesson observations.

Get to grips with retrieval practice: a pedagogical strategy that focuses on strengthening pupils’ ability to recall knowledge, so that your teachers don’t have to re-teach as much material. Primary teacher and senior leader Alex Beauchamp explains what retrieval practice is, what it looks like in the classroom, how to get your staff on board with it, and how to evaluate how well you’ve embedded it in your school.

Ditch your preconceptions and empower children to embrace challenge and grapple with difficult concepts, creating a classroom environment that allows everyone to achieve success. Experienced teacher and leader Megan Mansworth shares practical, research-informed strategies that show what ‘high expectations for all’ look like in practice – from getting rid of ability groups to differentiating by outcome.

Know your dual coding from your cognitive load theory? Want to encourage evidence-based teaching in your school, but can’t remember your cognitive science? Remind yourself what these key terms in pedagogical theory mean and how to spot them in the classroom.

Bring your curriculum to life by adopting Barak Rosenshine’s 10 principles of instruction. Alex Pethick covers these research and evidence-based principles to improve teaching, learning and classroom practice. They include carrying out daily reviews of learning, constructive ways to present information and how to use questioning effectively.

Get to grips with how to use teaching assistants (TAs) effectively in your school, to maximise pupil outcomes and reduce teacher workload.

Improve writing outcomes in your school. Get ideas for high-quality teaching of writing at Key Stage (KS) 1 and 2. Find research-based example strategies, a teaching framework and primary school case studies to help you along your improvement journey.