What are habits and why are they so important to learning? How do we form habits and how do we make them stick? This session will look at various ways to develop good behaviour for learning habits in your students, based on research on behaviour change.

How to systematically talk with pupils and evaluate the endurance of learning. The question was how to do that without feeling underprepared and wasting valuable time asking questions that lack structure and impact. Pupil Book Study has been acknowledged as one main influences for the Ofsted Deep Dive methodology. It offers a researched-informed, systematic toolkit enabling leaders and teachers to focus on evaluating the curriculum, teaching and long-term learning. Used by schools across the world.

School leaders often have little time to examine things with what Maryanne Wolf calls a 'quiet eye'. Claire will explore some of the ways in which school leaders' eyes are drawn to things which accompany but do not necessarily cause an event, and how school leaders can be hindered by the temptation of 'cruel optimism' - the prospect of the change that’s going to come, but solutions presented that are simplistic and difficult to attain. She will argue that there is a glut of cruel optimism in education at present which may be hindering rather than causing school improvement. Claire will offer some ways forward to help school leaders attend to our schools with more awareness and rationality, so we can think more effectively, and make better decisions.

There is plenty of literature to suggest that the current curriculum and assessment arrangements for 11-16 year olds are in need of review. Since the last major revisions to GCSEs were introduced in 2015, there has been no systematic review. Whereas we have a strong foundation to build on there are certainly some areas that need a close look. These include: the burden of assessment at 16, the balance between exams and other types of assessment, the impact of current maths and English GCSEs, and the need for the curriculum to move with the times. And we need to have a coherent plan for responding to changes in technology. Charles Clarke and Paul Steer have been heading up an OCR review and are keen to share some of their findings to date and to hear your views.

We have a teacher survey asking teachers for their views and opinions of 11-16 curriculum and assessment. Our second survey is for students to share with us their opinions and experiences of 11-16 education.

Few education issues have been more contentious in recent years than the use of permanent exclusions in schools. Much of what has been reported in the media hasn't been true. This talk looks at what the statistics actually show.

Home education is growing in the UK, with around 30,000 14-16 year olds educated outside of schools. How do these young people access GCSEs and other qualifications? We'll explore some of the challenges, and also look at the different approaches home educating families opt for.

Arguably one of the primary purposes of education is to allow students to apply the things that they know to new settings, but this is often easier said than done. Transferring information between contexts requires students to form schemas which are both detailed and flexible. This talk will initially draw on the neuroscience of learning to produce a simple model for the formation of these sorts of schemas in the classroom: multiple, overlapping, partial representations (MOPaRe). We will then look at how the MOPaRe model has influenced my own teaching and curriculum planning, and how it might influence yours.

This session will explore systems and mechanisms that enable CPD across a MAT and across a region. Sufian will draw on his experience to codify best practice in a multi-school environment. He will also explore ways to develop and also retain people, at a time when retention is a key challenge - CPD can be used as a key lever to retain.

This session demonstrates how our English curriculum at DEMAT breaks down the writing process into its transferable parts to ensure that our writers develop syntactic control. We will look at this through the lens of teaching the correct comma usage. We discuss how we explicitly teach comma usage from year 1 to year 6, directly linking with Daisy Christodoulou’s work with ‘The Writing Hub’ alongside the research underpinning ‘The Writing Revolution’ by Hochman and Wexler.

This session will focus on the principles of effective feedback and how this can be brought into the classroom through live marking. We will look at the key principles behind feedback, why these are important and practical ways to make live marking work in a busy classroom.

Alex explores the most common reasons why pupils’ learning fails. Issues include patchwork prior knowledge, misconceptions, a lack of independence, low motivation, and more. Alex draws upon research evidence from cognitive science to plot the path for pupil success.

In the session I aim to present the international research and theory of our writing system and how this impacts on how we learn to read, spell and write fluently. I will present what the evidence suggests about how we can teach our children to read using a speech to print approach and share the implementation of Sounds Write. I will share why and how we devised a spelling programme for KS2 which uses a speech to print approach and will enable our children to develop strategies for reading, writing and spelling from Reception to KS2 and beyond.

The case for an ed tech revolution: Ed tech has so much potential, both for teachers and learners, so why hasn’t it yet had the transformative impact on education that has long been promised?

The first pancake is never the best, but we must start somewhere. In this session, I will introduce a simple way to help frame how we think about the ways AI tools and AI technology might be used in our teaching practice. As we look at each "pancake", I'll share some related emerging research themes, including FATPS, SEAME, CT2.0, anthropomorphisation, and feedback literacy. Here are some new acronyms and terms to get to know. Let's discuss and consider what they might mean for teaching and learning.

What is good problem-solving in mathematics? We conducted a trial with 1700 pupils and 140 teachers, using comparative judgement to assess answers to a set of mathematical reasoning problems. In this session we’ll look at how pupils did and what we can learn from it. In particular we’ll explore the disconnect between how problem-solving is often experienced in school, and how generic approaches neglect the knowledge needed to solve problems effectively.

This session will explore the effects of using shared resources on pre-service and in-service teachers’ pedagogical development. Building on research evidence from the past 20 years, as well as considering the increasingly wider availability of online lesson materials, I will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using pre-made resources. The context of the session will be mainly primary and secondary mathematics, but the conclusions are transferable to other subject areas as well.

Research into reading now tells us a lot about how accomplished readers are successful when they read. How can we use this evidence to build a more impactful approach to using text in the classroom? This session looks at the elements that build a strategic reader and considers how these can translate into teachers' planning and explicit teaching of reading, so that pupils can access texts successfully and build reading skills which will enhance their life chances.

Many schools have embraced the importance of placing vocabulary front and centre of their curriculum provision. But how do we ensure that pupils' receptive understanding of new language translates into long-term expressive stores of vocabulary that can be applied correctly in context and retained over time? At Unity Research School, we explored this through our Early Stage Development Programme and in the process, learned a huge amount about vocabulary instruction and the implementation cycle. Join Lauren and Andy to hear more about the underpinning mental model for explicit vocabulary instruction and the implementation triumphs and pitfalls that we experienced.

This session will outline the various psychological and behavioral problems that can arise for adolescents after years of being unable to read well in a system where reading is ubiquitous. We will then consider the protective factors that reading provides for young people, and lastly look at the growing evidence that remarkable improvement in reading for adolescents is possible.

There’s good evidence that instructional coaching can be an incredibly effective form of professional development. But what’s it like to actually be an instructional coach? What makes a good coach? What are the knowledge and skills required? How does a coach get better? Drawing on both wider research and case study examples, this session explores what it means to be a good instructional coach, and considers a model of responsive coaching.

How do you turn things around in tough schools very rapidly and bring people with you at the same time?
This session covers many practical, on the ground school improvement strategies for even the most challenging and disadvantaged schools, particularly in relation to behaviour, culture and standards.

Mentors play an invaluable role in the development of trainee teachers. But what can mentors take from educational research when considering how best to support trainees to thrive? We’ll unpick 3 common problems faced by trainees. We’ll explore issues connected to trainee motivation and the powerful potential for mentors to foster feelings of self-efficacy. And we’ll review evidence-informed approaches that can support trainees to develop positive habits just at the right point in their careers.

This session will explore what challenge in learning really is, the conditions necessary for making learning challenging in the classroom and ways we can sustain challenge throughout a course of learning.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused unprecedented global disruption to education. There is now an opportunity to reflect on what happened to better understand the impacts, and to learn lessons about what did – or did not – work for teachers. In this talk, we will present the findings of research that surveyed teachers around the world to record their views about the impacts on students and teachers, and their experiences of teaching through the pandemic. We will share the key findings, including those relating to learning loss, wellbeing, and experiences of remote teaching. We will also discuss some of the positive outcomes of the pandemic, as these emerged from follow-up interviews with some of the survey respondents.

What are the gains that have been made in education over the last ten years, and what do we need to focus on now?