SecEd Podcast

In this episode, Alex Quigley offers tips and ideas for the explicit teaching of writing skills in the secondary classroom. Drawing on his book, Closing the Writing Gap, Alex explains how secondary teachers of all subjects can improve their students' writing skills – and why this is important. We discuss general principles, the Simple View of Writing, explicitly teaching and modelling the stages of writing, using talk and rhetoric, disciplinary literacy, teaching grammar, sentence composition, handwriting, and spelling. Alex offers us some easy exercises/techniques including tips for improving sentence construction, editing-revising-rewriting, checking work back, vocabulary, and more.

Are you ready for the new school year? This podcast offers a checklist for senior leaders in secondary schools to help you prepare for the autumn term and beyond. Our experts discuss common 'new year' tasks for school leaders as well as common problems at this time of year. We focus on the school improvement cycle and self-evaluation – what should be in place and what lies ahead for the School Improvement Plan? We talk staffing, including CPD, succession planning, induction of new staff, staffing shortfalls, and communicating priorities. We talk parental engagement, curriculum-planning, assessment, governance and meeting cycles, and finances.

At least 250,000 children and young people are living with Long Covid including an estimated 4.8% of secondary-age students. This episode looks at the implications for secondary schools and what we can do to support these students academically and pastorally. We discuss the many and varied symptoms of Long Covid and the impact they can have on learning, education, and wellbeing. We offer ideas and interventions – big and small – to address these issues and support pupils suffering from this often-debilitating illness in the classroom and beyond. The advice is relevant to anyone working with young people in schools.

This podcast tackles memory – asking what teachers need to know about how students learn, forget and remember information. Our experts offer a wealth of tangible teaching strategies as they discuss short-term, working and long-term memory, how they work and interact, and the implications for how we teach. We discuss how we can direct pupils' attention, the limitations of short-term memory, and how to help students manage the cognitive load. We discuss how to present information effectively so that students pay attention to it, how to build knowledge or schema, prior learning, pre-testing, and we ask what we should avoid doing.

This episode looks at supporting pupils as they make the transition from primary to secondary school. We chat with two secondary schools and two feeder primaries about common transition challenges and solutions. We look at when transition work should begin, what the process looks like, engaging with parents, identifying pupils who may struggle, and supporting vulnerable pupils. We discuss tried and tested ideas for transition interventions, activities and taster days. Other topics include curriculum consistency, academic support, year 7 transition activities, open evenings, year 7 pupil ambassadors working with year 6 pupils, and the impact of Covid on transition.

This episode considers extra-curricular activities and what effective provision looks like in the secondary school. What are the common challenges when delivering extra-curricular provision? What kind of activities work best? How do we schedule these activities – when and where? How do we ensure equitable access and do we 'target' students? We also discuss how we can staff extra-curricular provision and encourage staff to take-on activities. And how do we encourage student take-up? How can our provision support a 'broad and balanced' curriculum offer? What role do external partnerships have to play? And should we quality-assure and evaluate our provision?

How can school leaders ensure that teacher appraisal and performance management processes are fair and effective. Our experts discuss what an effective appraisal and PM policy looks like and what kind of evidence the process should require. We discuss how to set objectives to enhance mastery and protect teacher autonomy, what happens to those objectives once set, and how they should be monitored and measured. We explain why we should avoid data-driven objectives and how to manage the process to ensure "no surprises". We discuss lesson observations, how to have challenging conversations, and how to protect teacher workload and wellbeing.

All homework should have a clear purpose – but what? This podcast asks what secondary teachers should consider when planning homework. We discuss the purposes of homework, different types of tasks, and which are most effective. We agree some golden rules for setting homework, ask how much we should be setting, and what teachers should avoid doing. We discuss what we should do with the results of homework. Should there always be feedback? What about checks or whole-class feedback? Should homework always be 'marked'? How can we tackle misconceptions? How can we use peer-marking and approaches to keep workload manageable?

This episode considers how teachers can use test-enhanced learning – commonly known as retrieval practice – as well as spaced learning and interleaving techniques to help students remember/recall the information they are taught. Our experts discuss what these approaches look like in the classroom and the evidence and reasoning behind them. We consider activities that work best, what to avoid, test difficulty, feedback, addressing misconceptions, how memory works, how to create the gaps for spaced learning, how many times we should 'retrieve', and offer tips for getting started. The podcast coincides with a SecEd series focused on test-enhanced learning: https://bit.ly/3NxTmy0

This episode looks at how we can help students to prepare for their GCSE and A-level exams, including handling the anxiety and stress that exam season can bring. Our experts discuss supporting students academically and pastorally, including tackling the impact of Covid on exam preparation. We look at preparing students so they know what to expect, building techniques to use on the day, spotting the signs that students may be struggling, and revision support, including teaching ideas and revision tips. We talk sleep, handling the distraction of social media, and how students can destress and regain a sense of control.