MsThomasEnglish

English teacher and Deputy Headteacher at Radyr Comprehensive School. Views are my own.

[Alex Quigley @AlexJQuigley]

An excellent blog by @EnserMark on ‘Teaching and learning vocabulary’ in geography.

“Once we begin to look for morphology in geography, it becomes impossible not to notice how saturated the discipline is with these patterns.

https://t.co/QpLtdoKFHg

[🇬🇧 TeacherToolkit.co.uk @TeacherToolkit]

What does effective learning look like beyond correct answers? https://t.co/soI06ok3MT

[🇬🇧 TeacherToolkit.co.uk @TeacherToolkit]

Handwriting is BETTER for learning than typing.

But we all knew that.

The challenge is, what do we do for pupils with SEND?

(Marano et al., 2025, p. 23) - featured in #GuideToLearning

https://t.co/oZmrR0Ddyr

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Mary Myatt @MaryMyatt]

Stories do more than engage.

They build knowledge, they deepen vocabulary, and they give pupils access to worlds, people, places and ideas they might not otherwise meet.

That is why story-rich curriculum work matters.

[Tom Sherrington @teacherhead]

Designing Teaching & Understanding Learners with @dylanwiliam , Mind the Gap - our most viewed youtube episode with now over 10,000 views. @Emma_Turner75
https://t.co/E82stYt7l7 via @YouTube

[Deepak @deepak39agarwal]

Encoding:  Possibly the most under-emphasised element in securing learning for all.   https://t.co/XklcJ4Ifvx via @teacherhead

[Tom Sherrington @teacherhead]

Student Talk: It matters - not only to deepen learning but because it also just does. https://t.co/FpELJFacRe via @teacherhead

[Tom Sherrington @teacherhead]

The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it. https://t.co/qxsZlTrTHS via @teacherhead

[🇬🇧 TeacherToolkit.co.uk @TeacherToolkit]

How to implement adaptive teaching: 10 classroom strategies
https://t.co/dEje4lkzPw

[Alex Quigley @AlexJQuigley]

💡NEW POST 💡

'SHARE to support struggling readers and writers'

S – Scaffolding challenging tasks
H – High expectations for every student
A – Assessment-driven adaptations
R – Responsive interventions
E – Explicit teaching

https://t.co/d5dUBzyxnq

[Tom Sherrington @teacherhead]

This is a great MindtheGap episode about the @EducEndowFoundn with @BeckyFrancis7

[InnerDrive @Inner_Drive]

Today is the day. 🎓

At 4pm GMT, Jade Pearce is breaking down the difference between differentiation and adaptive teaching, and what it actually looks like in the classroom.

Free to join. Still time to sign up: https://t.co/Pgkei5rcsZ

[Evidence Based Education @EvidenceInEdu]

"From my own classroom experience, I have seen how regular retrieval opportunities can boost students' confidence.

When learners can recall curriculum content quickly and accurately, they begin to approach tests and exams with greater assurance.

This confidence is not coincidental. It is the result of repeated, low-stakes retrieval practice opportunities. To maximise both academic and pastoral benefits, teachers may want to consider the following..."

Blog by Kate Jones 👇

https://t.co/dDCL9zY6Zi

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

@Literariium Check it out:

https://t.co/cFCojBUE1Q

[Knowledge Matters @KnowledgeMatrs]

Repeating double plays isn’t coaching.
Teaching the footwork, the throw, the timing—that’s coaching.

@dylanwiliam on why learning must build skills that transfer, not just mimic performance.

#KnowledgeMatters #ScienceofLearning

[Estyn @EstynHMI]

Our recent blog looks at the teaching of maths in Wales.

Read the blog in full to explore the resources available to support maths educators:

https://t.co/oqZuLfhKUG

[Tom Bennett OBE @tombennett71]

Children grow by being exposed to medium levels of stress, and being supported to a) deal with the objects of the stress, b) find ways to solve it, and c) cope with the experience of feeling it.

Too much stress overwhelms and discourages. Too little and students don’t care, and motivation is lost. For something to matter there must be stakes involved.

Scaffolding this process is exactly the job of the adult in a mentoring, pastoral or educational relationship with a child.

[Alex Pethick @alexpethickPKC]

@DrWHKitchen @Doug_Lemov @C_Hendrick @P_A_Kirschner @greg_ashman @dylanwiliam @daisychristo @tgeducation Our results at the Knowledge Schools Trust show how disadvantaged pupils following our knowledge-rich curriculum outperform non-disadvantaged pupils nationally. https://t.co/GCLdGfaYwD

[Jamie Clark @XpatEducator]

📣 NEW! “If there’s one thing to get right in teaching, it’s Checking for Understanding.” This new one-page guide breaks down how to thread CfU checks into every lesson — inspired by the ‘How Learning Happens’ work by @C_Hendrick and @HughesHaili

Look out for the next edition of ⚗️DistillED, exploring this in Rosenshine’s 6th Principle of Instruction: CfU—coming Thursday.

https://t.co/YznfhHQZGe