2015 Conference videos on YouTube

[maizie]

Some of the videos from the 2015 Conference are now on YouTube.

Anne Glennie: The Attainment gap? What about the teaching gap? https://youtu.be/bxqpNzASnJA

Marj Newbury: Teacher training. https://youtu.be/UDZNePRHsoo

Debbie Hepplewhite's keynote talk: https://youtu.be/kB4dvNh4DW8

Nick Gibb's speech to conference: https://youtu.be/G3KLZHsu_j4

* New: Sam Bailey: Transforming the life chances of our children https://youtu.be/dKAZ9HUn2ho

Interviews with Jan Hilary, Head Teacher St George's School Battersea and Theresa Plummer, specialist teacher at St George's School

Jan Hilary Interview https://youtu.be/nE5CGE3Fn08

Theresa Plummer Interview https://youtu.be/u_GCKxGsoOw

[Susan Godsland]

Wonderful blog post commenting on the Jan Hilary, Head Teacher St George's School, video

https://thequirkyteacher.wordpress.com/ ... video-out/

[JIM CURRAN]

A number of years ago they introduced a play based curriculum into primary schools that served disadvantaged and deprived areas here in Northern Ireland.It was called the "Enriched Curriculum". It was a disaster that only succeeded in disadvantaging disadvantaged children even more.I remember a primary 4 teacher in one of these schools telling me that he could have cried when the children came into him at the start of their primary 4 year. The boys couldn't hold a pencil and worst of all they had no interest or motivation in anything to do with learning. Guess what , all they wanted to do was play.

[Susan Godsland]

'Twitter outrage over headteacher's EYFS comments'

http://linkis.com/nurseryworld.co.uk/i1YC8

In a video interview about how St George’s School in Battersea achieves its excellent results, headteacher Janet Hilary says, ‘What is the nonsense that we play every day in the early years? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have hours of free play, but there is plenty of time in the school day for structured teaching. At St George’s we do structured teaching from three.’

Ms Hilary, who is now executive principal of Floreat Academy Trust, goes on to tell the interviewer, Derrie Clark, an educational psychologist, that every three-year-old in their nursery speaks in full sentences.

The interview has been posted on YouTube by Reading Reform Foundation UK, a lobbying campaigning and teaching body.

Asked how they achieve their results, Ms Hilary says, 'The children at St George’s have lots of play and lots of discovery, but they of course just love structured teaching.

[JIM CURRAN]

In too many of these debates it's usually a choice of either or but as Janet Hilary has made very clear the children at St.Georges get lots of play but the school's overall emphasis is on teaching and learning.

We know from the research that when children from disadvantaged backgrounds arrive at school there is already a considerable gap between them and their more advantaged peers.The Hart and Risley study,"Meaningful Differences in the everyday experience of young American children " explains how an almost insurmountable vocabulary gap has opened up between disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers by three years of age.One group of children had heard 46 million words and the other group 16 million words.The researchers use the term ,"thirty million word gap".

E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation has been one of the few programs that has managed to begin to narrow this gap. The program's emphasis is very much on teaching and learning.They have been using the program in Massachusetts since the early 1990's and the results have been outstanding. On the 2005 NAEP tests Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth and eighth grade reading and fourth and eighth grade maths .It then repeated the feat in 2007.No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year - let alone for two consecutive test cycles.

[maizie]

Last video has been posted, Sam Bailey, HT of The Forest Academy, Barnsley.

Really worth watching; Sam explains how she turned around one failing school and is in the process of transforming another

(link in first post of this thread)