While the principles of this course apply to both primary and secondary teaching, the examples used relate to secondary.

• How can teachers shape their teaching according to how pupils learn?
• What are the behaviours and attitudes of truly great teachers?
• How can evidence-informed teachers maintain their individuality in the classroom?

Does how pupils learn matter?

How can we design truly great teaching if we don’t have a model for learning in our minds to guide us? asks John Tomsett in his latest work. Tomsett argues that effective teaching is founded upon an understanding of how learning happens. When he swapped the classroom for the woodworking workshop, he was struck by how hard it is to learn anything! Motivated by his failure to learn how to make a modest wooden stool, Tomsett asked our most insightful educators about how we learn. Dylan Wiliam, Paul Kirschner, Efrat Furst, and Carl Hendrick et al. helped Tomsett further his understanding of the learning process, and underlined why teachers might benefit from learning about learning before they begin teaching!

This course follows the golden thread from the latest educational research to what teachers do in the classroom to help pupils make good progress in their learning.

Benefits of the course

• Gain a clear, jargon-free understanding of how we might teach to maximise pupils’ learning.
• Hear insights from some of the best, contemporary educational thinkers and researchers.
• Understand how best to engender change in teachers’ classroom behaviours and habits.
• Take away practical pedagogic practices that you can use immediately on returning to school.
• Be clear about your next steps in improving teaching & learning in your classroom/school.

Course Outline

What is the problem?

Evidence-informed classroom techniques are too often enacted without teachers knowing why those techniques might improve learning, primarily because the teachers do not have a shared understanding of how learning happens.

With a clear sense of how pupils learn, teachers can design teaching which has a much better chance of all their pupils learning effectively.

• Session 1 - What do we know about teaching and learning? A diagnostic session where we work collaboratively to find out what we think we know about how we teach so that pupils learn.
• Session 2 - The curriculum triumvirate: John outlines the relationship between content-teaching-assessment (what he calls the curriculum triumvirate) and its implications for what we do in class.
• Session 3 - How we learn: A session where John presents a certain view based upon cognitive science about how pupils might learn new things.
• Session 4 - If that's how they learn, how might we teach? A session which brings together what we have covered on Day One and begins to answer the titular question.
• Session 5 - Applying your new knowledge: What is the implication of what you have learnt for you and your school? How do we cajole teachers to adopt pedagogies rooted in the learning process?

Presenter Profile

John Tomsett taught for 33 years and was a teaching secondary headteacher for 18 years, latterly at Huntington Research School, York. He was Chair of the York Schools and Academies Board for five years. He has published 13 books on education and is a popular speaker on education. His current work is focused upon understanding how pupils learn in order for us to teach more effectively. He is the educational consultant for the award-winning AI teacher coach, Aristotal.

Cost: £150 per delegate; £50 each for subsequent delegates from same school

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