Supported Experiments

Supported Experiments or Action Research are excellent ways to improve your teaching, and that of your team. Indeed experimenting with something new to you is arguably the only way to improve student achievement. You can't improve without changing! Supported Experiments involve experimenting with a new teaching approach using it more than once, and gradually adapting it until it works. These experiments are done for the team and they are supported by the team. Once you have found a way of making a strategy work you tell your team about it and they adopt it on their Active Scheme of Work, or in the Best Methods Manual. You may also coach them in the use of this new method.
On this page you will find a number of Proposals for Supported Experiments and some completed by teachers. Each explains an approach to teaching that might be new to you, and has been shown by research to be most effective. For example assessment profromas and positive reinforcement can both, if well implemented, add up to two grades to each student's performance.

Each Proposal has a bit of theory, and then some very practical ways of implementing the approach. Alternatively you could experiment with teaching methods on the active learning page. (See Active Learning page)

Don't just copy the ideas in these Proposals. You will need to use these materials and approaches as models, and fiddle with them until they work for you and for your students. Happy Experimenting! Let me know how you got on!

Are you are a manager trying to improve learning and teaching?
See "Action Research: what and why", and 'Supported Experiments' downloads below.
Download Action research: what and why
Download Supported Experiments

Many colleges are using Supported Experiments, here is a link to Woodhouse college in London who have done some brilliant experiments, perhaps some in your subject. Woodhouse's experiments

Zoya Galzie an ICT teacher at West Thames College wrote this account of an experiment on the 'One Minute Paper'. Other experiments have shown that this method raises students performance by about two grades. Galzie

Here are some proposals for Supported Experiments. In the last two the ideas are given in outline, but the experiment is left to you:
Download reinforcement
Download Assessment proformas
Download Equal Opportunities
Download Generic Skills
Download Right Brain left brain
Download Formative tests and quizzes
Download Dweck on Motivation
Download Anything could happen here
Download Pot luck

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