Miss Lucy Halligan

Reception Class Teacher.

Primary Science enthusiast who has been privileged to teach the whole of the Primary Science Curriculum: Y1-6.

All views own.

[Brad Weinstein @WeinsteinEdu]

So true! 🧡

[Jamie Clark @XpatEducator]

🔀 NEW! Transition breakdown is almost never a behaviour problem. It's often an instructional one. Research on designing and explicitly teaching classroom transitions — plus a free planning tool. This week's edition of ⚗️DistillED 👇

https://t.co/Nj6pfLBl1M

[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.

[Impact @ImpactWales]

Pupils not motivated to learn? Try tasks that boost engagement:
✅Explain ideas in their own words
✅Break learning into meaningful chunks
✅Connect new learning to prior knowledge

Use our Rothkopf sketchnote to improve learning. [email protected]

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

I have written a free guide on responsive teaching for @UNESCO available here: https://t.co/puvgOyGgi3

[Jamie Clark @XpatEducator]

NEW ONE-PAGER! Collaborating with @C_Hendrick on Responsive Teaching—translating his excellent new @UNESCO guide into a clear, practical summary for busy teachers.

Help share these important principles—repost 🔁 and download it FREE here 👇

https://t.co/to98KgwPt4

[Miss Lucy Halligan @LucyLuScience]

❤️ 100%
#teaching

[Jamie Clark @XpatEducator]

✅ CHECKING FOR UNDERSTANDING! This guide dives into the heartbeat of responsive teaching. CFU is crucial for making the invisible visible and capturing data needed to adapt teaching in real time.

🌱 Support my work by tapping REPOST and grab a FREE high-quality copy here: https://t.co/Xj2XpPGvnu

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the education job is already done. That's my honest assessment after working in education for over thirty years. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes it is. But if you can't read the biology textbook, you're not going to learn biology.

Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading as it becomes more sophisticated. The child who reads voraciously will figure out everything else. The child who doesn't will struggle with everything.

[Jon Harper @Jonharper70bd]

We took a thoughtful look at mini whiteboards. Four disciplines. Practical examples. Clear limits. They’re not the end all be all, but this is a helpful conversation if you’re exploring the idea.
@AmberBHaven @AndrewWatsonTTB @SoLInTheWild https://t.co/OijUxk8Cyb #teachers

[Jamie Clark @XpatEducator]

📣 CHECKING FOR UNDERSTANDING! “If there’s one thing to get right in teaching, it’s Checking for Understanding.” This 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

https://t.co/7NvPGRbkyi

[Twinkl Resources @twinklresources]

This is your Sunday night reminder to remember how valued your hard work is💙

[Kate Jones @KateJones_teach]

Check. Adapt.

A useful resource for teachers shared by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)

Many misunderstand, so pause and fix.
Some are unsure, so adapt support.
Most understand, so extend and support.

Teachers make so many decisions each day, this resource offers helpful advice about what to do & when informed by evidence captured in a lesson.

[Miss Lucy Halligan @LucyLuScience]

Drawings from the children when they come into school always make me smile. In this one from a 4 year old, I'm the little one with brown hair! 🤣 #thejoyofteaching #eyfs

[Sue Cowley @Sue_Cowley]

I'm doing a half term #giveaway of these two of my books on #behaviour. Like and retweet this post to enter! Winner announced next Sunday (22nd Feb). See the thread for more details and a flash sale this week by my publishers @BloomsburyEd. #freebie

[Amjad Ali @TryThisTeaching]

I’ve created snappy checklists for the following-

✅ Behaviour for Learning
✅ Inclusive Teaching
✅ Accessible Content
✅ CPD Engagement
✅ Literacy Boost
✅ Teacher Wellbeing
✅ Equity in the Classroom
✅ TA Empowerment
✅ Leadership for Learning
✅ Adaptive Teaching
✅ Classroom Climate
✅ Professional Conversations
And more…!

Download from here for FREE- https://t.co/nwF52uyoYH

[Brad Weinstein @WeinsteinEdu]

So true. 🧡

[Miss Lucy Halligan @LucyLuScience]

We're so lucky to have amazing TA's to help us to set up a fun variety of activities each day. This week we we were learning about farms starting with a visit to Attwell Farm on Monday. #eyfs #enhancedprovision

[Brad Weinstein @WeinsteinEdu]

Important! 🧡

[Tom Sherrington @teacherhead]

NEW: The choreography of teaching 30 children at the same time https://t.co/R9fxgXRK6i Longish read!