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Welcome to the Teaching and Learning Blog for The Douay Martyrs Catholic Secondary School.

The purpose of this blog is to showcase the various teaching and learning strategies used within the school.

Check back every week for new posts and if you are interested in writing a blog post, please contact jrothwell@douaymartyrs.co.uk

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Shut Up and Let Them Talk: Why Oracy Might Be the Best Thing You’re Not Teaching

There’s a moment in every classroom when you ask a perfectly reasonable question and 30 young faces stare back at you like goldfish at feeding time; mouths slightly open, eyes glazed.  Cue the familiar teacher monologue: “Come on, you guys must know this…” Five awkward seconds later, you roll your eyes and start answering your own question (again). Welcome to life before oracy. Now, I know you might be about to click off this article, thinking 'here we go again, another post about speaking and listening' but this is no mere call to action to instruct your pupils to 'talk more'. So often, we misinterpret what oracy actually is and we completely underestimate how important it is in our classrooms and beyond. Think of oracy as the lost sibling of literacy and numeracy ; it's the “third wheel” at the education family reunion. Yes, it’s all about speaking well: being able to express ideas clearly, reason aloud and even disagree without declaring verbal war but it is also...
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Apathy, passivity, disinterest: oh my! How to create an active learning environment

 "Active learning." A phrase that either inspires you to plan a 'gold plated' lesson filled with buzzwords and a buzzy atmosphere or else it sends your eyes rolling to the sky and fills you with an inexplicable tiredness. For a time, I thought Active Learning was what they did in PE. Or perhaps in drama or any subject that required students to be, well, active! Even when my understanding developed past that initial misjudgement, I still thought active learning was about getting to kids up out of their seats.  I'm great at active learning, I thought. My kids get up and write on the board! They go around the class room, books and pens clasped in hands as they find the strategically placed information points I've blu-tacked to the wall! Never mind that it would be far quicker for them to have the information on the board or printed in advance, ready for them to summarise in their own words. Nope, better they be up and about; active! It was only when I began study...
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Retrieval Practice, or developing Long Term Memory

 Memory is a funny old thing.  It acts as our brain's magic portal to the past with something as simple as the smell of Impulse body spray/Lynx Africa (delete as appropriate) transporting us back to a cramped PE changing room circa 1999, foggy with the offending mist, and the eternal odour of rubber mats. But memory also plays tricks on us, forcing us to hunt for important documents we put down only a few hours ago, whose mysterious location we have inexplicably forgotten, when you're already running late (hint: try the fridge - that's where mine were.) Last year, to aid me in my understanding of memory, I completed an experiment with my form group, the very obliging 7R (now 8R). In this experiment, I asked them to name as many of the 50 states of America as they could. We made it to (a not unimpressive!) 17 states. This is information they pulled from their Long Term Memory which they had absorbed in to their brains through prior learning and cultural osmosis. I then put a...
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