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You’ve just taught new structures in the perfect tense. You model it, practise it across the different skills, and ask, “Does everyone understand?”. Thirty heads nod. A few students produce a correct sentence and the lesson feels like a success. Two weeks later, the writing tells a different story: French: Je suis mangé, j’ai allé Spanish: Ayer yo voy al cine German: Ich habe nach Berlin gefahren Checking understanding is harder than it looks, and grammar and accuracy is wher

Every October / November, when I choose the first set of mock papers for our students, I ask myself whether it's still fit for purpose. This year the answer is genuinely different. For the first time since we started to teach the new specification, we have something real to check our assessment material against: the first set of results under the new Edexcel / AQA GCSE specification landed in the summer, and that changes what mock season looks like this term. As I wrote back

Back in January, I shared a blog on Improving GCSE Performance Post-Mocks (link here ). Yesterday, I came across a LinkedIn post from...

Mock exams are a key moment for Year 11 students, giving us a clear picture of how they are doing and where they need to improve . For...

Using the spreadsheet shared by Ben Merritt on Secondary MFL Matters, I've completed a comparison for Edexcel. Tab 1 (Picture 1): This...

In our department, we are committed to ensuring that our approach to marking and feedback for Modern Foreign Languages is both effective...

In this post, I would like to concentrate on the one element of our job which most of the colleagues (myself including) that I have...

With recent publications of various edu-books, mini whiteboards seem to be experiencing some kind of ‘re-birth’ in the world of...

One of the six pedagogical principles of expert teaching is modelling, a research-informed strategy demonstrating to our students how to...

Following my previous post on Thinking about assessment where I have mentioned using multiple-choice quizzes (MCQ) for formative...

‘Assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.’ Dylan William The importance of assessment is obvious, it is a process...

What is effective questioning in the classroom? Effective questions are defined as questions focusing on eliciting the process in...

Recently, I have read ‘The Feedback Pendulum’ by Michael Chiles which analyses different types of feedback and its research based...