Unity Research School Newsletter

Issue #4

Autumn term

This month, 5 more of the colleagues who inspired at researchED Ipswich last month:

@baronbedford - primary adviser, Unity Schools Partnership

@QuarkEpoch - Roger Higgins, Director of Norwich Research School

@TriciaTailored - passionate about how the science of learning can help children learn

@hgaldinoshea - Eng/Media teacher, @researchED1 organiser

@BenRogersEdu - teacher of physics and author

15 MINS: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM - IMPLEMENTATION

Our friends at Evidence Based Education, Stuart Kime and Jack Deverson discuss the importance of implementation when adopting and enacting research-based interventions and professional development, drawing upon examples from behavioural science and the theoretical framework for implementation developed by the Education Endowment Foundation.

LISTEN HERE

30 MINS: WHAT EVERY TEACHER NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE TEENAGE BRAIN

Sarah Jane Blakemore is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London and the author of books including the multi-award winning Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. In this TES Podagogy podcast she explains that we often over-estimate what a teenager is capable of doing. She also discusses mental health, mindfulness, school starting ages, and sleep.

LISTEN HERE

30 MINS: EEF TRIALLED AND TESTED

In this second episode of the EEF's Trialled and Tested podcast, Jamie Scott from Evidence Based Education speaks to the EEF's joint heads of programmes, Eleanor Stringer and Matthew van Poortvliet, to find out more about their approach to identifying projects to fund, commissioning evaluations, and scaling-up promising projects.

LISTEN HERE

ANNOUNCING NEW TRAINING OFFER

WE HAVE 30 FREE EARLY BIRD TICKETS AVAILABLE TO SUFFOLK MATHS SLEs ONLY! ENTER CODE SLE30 TO CLAIM

FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!

Brought to you by the Eastern Research Schools in collaboration with Norfolk and Suffolk Maths Hubs, a course designed to support primary and secondary schools to implement the recommendations of the EEF’s Improving Maths in Key Stages 2 and 3 Guidance Report.

Find out more and register here

NEW GUIDANCE ON WORKING WITH PARENTS

The Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) latest guidance report – Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning – reviews the best available research to offer schools and teachers four recommendations to support parental engagement.
Parents play a crucial role in supporting their children’s learning, and levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes. Yet it can be difficult to get parents more involved in their child’s learning, especially if their own experiences of school weren’t positive.

This latest report is designed to support primary and secondary schools to work with parents – particularly those from disadvantaged homes – to support their child’s learning.

Read more

And in this blog post, Chris Woodcock, from Durrington Research School, introduces the latest guidance report and explains how schools can use it to boost parental engagement. 

BLOG: ENSURING A TRIP TO THE SUPERMARKET BRINGS ABOUT A FEAST!

Louise Clark, inspired by her recent experience of working with the Research School Network, attended the first researchED event in the East of England organised by the team at Unity Research School ... she outlines what a great decision that turned out to be!

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PRIMARY-SECONDARY TRANSITION: IT’S MORE THAN DRUM WORKSHOPS

"One of the main barriers that makes the journey into secondary education such a bumpy one for some of our new arrivals is literacy." Florence Pope from Aspirer Research School writes for Schools Week on how practical evidence can help.

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NEW ROUND OF IEE INNOVATION EVALUATION GRANTS 

The new funding, provided by Learning by Questions, will support schools with up to £5,000 to test a new innovation in classroom practice.

Innovations can either be based on existing evidence or, where evidence is lacking, test a new approach to address a challenge within school. Potential innovations should meet the following criteria:

• Be developed and evaluated within a school (so applications from third party organisations will not be considered).
• Be related to core curriculum subjects (maths, science and English) in Key Stages 1-3 (ages 5-14). Approaches in other areas will be considered, but are less likely to be successful.
• Capable of using the Learning by Questions system as part of the innovation and/or evaluation (we will check this for you).

If you have an innovation that you would like to be considered, please complete this short expression of interest. Your application will be reviewed by staff at the IEE and Learning by Questions and, if successful, we will help you to develop the project further.

Deadline for applications: Friday 21 December 2018.

EVIDENCE 4 IMPACT: LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK

The past few months have seen many changes at Evidence 4 Impact (E4I). E4I is an independent service that provides teachers and school leaders with accessible information on which educational interventions have been shown to be effective. The new version of E4I went live earlier this year and the site is now linked in to the Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit. As E4I continues to evolve we would love to know what you think of the site and find out more about the way in which visitors are using E4I. If you regularly use any interventions we haven’t included or can think of a way the site would be more useful in supporting you to use evidence-based interventions then please let us know by completing this short user survey.