Assessment is now regarded as a 'high stakes' issue: schools, teachers, and individual pupils are often judged by the results of national tests and public examinations.This book addresses both formal and informal ways of assessing children's work and progress. Pupils' learning is often neglected in the debate, so this book puts what children actually learn right at its centre and involves them sensibly and appropriately in the improvement of teaching and learning.The book i...

Primary teachers have always been required to master a wealth of knowledge and professional skills and recent debate has led to pressure for ever higher levels of competence. Ted Wragg's book provides a comprehensive guide to the skills needed by today's primary teachers. Separate chapters cover such central demands of the job as explaining new topics, asking stimulating questions and settling down with a new class and one is devoted to the particular problems of supply teachers. Based on ...

This book explores strategies for building up a repertoire of ideas, approaches and techniques that allow teachers to develop effective explanatory skills. It covers issues such as the use of an appropriate language register and analogies for handling topics with which teachers might be unfamiliar.

The ability to ask intelligent and searching questions, to use questioning for different purposes and to know what to do with the answers is crucial to teachers of all subjects and age groups. Sometimes a whole lesson can be built around one or two key questions.Ted Wragg and George Brown explore the wide range of questions that teachers can ask, from those requiring simple recall of information right up to those that stimulate complex reasoning, imagination and speculation. The bo...

First Published in 2004. In the nineteenth century, teacher training institutions were called 'normal schools', because it was assumed that there was only one way to teach - the 'norm'. Today there is no single style of teaching endorsed by everyone. How teachers teach depends on factors like the age and ability of the children, their background and needs, the nature of the subject or topic being studied and the resources available. The authors draw on their considerable experience of teac...

This book describes research undertaken during the Teaching Competence project, a two-year research project which looked at five main areas surrounding this subject.

This book is one of a set of eight innovative yet practical resource books for teachers, focussing on the classroom and covering vital skills for primary and secondary teachers. The books are strongly influenced by the findings of numerous research projects during which hundreds of teachers were observed at work. The first editions of the series were best sellers, and these revised second editions of the series will be equally welcomed by teachers eager to improve their teaching skills.

One of the most important challenges teachers face is making sure children can read. It is an absolutely crucial skill, and current educational policy is giving it a very high priority. Based on one of the largest studies ever undertaken of what primary schools do to improve literacy, this book reports what Professor Ted Wragg and his research team found. The importance placed on literacy has never been greater. When children learn to read, they are laying the foundations for their entire ...