As we head towards the end of our first year implementing our Teaching: Principles in Practice, it seems like the perfect time to celebrate the endeavours of our brilliant teachers who have been wo…

Blog of the Week Mike Hobbiss – Managing attention in classrooms is a social justice issue Combining cognitive science and educational disadvantage with aplomb, this blog gives us both the wh…

Blog of the Week Phil Stock – Universal provision: The Teacher is the Intervention More from Director of Greenshaw Research School Phil Stock on his school’s Graduated Response. Evidenc…

Blog of the Week Inner Drive – 10 Insights from Dylan Wiliam on Formative Assessment and the Science of Learning If your thinking about how to get formative assessment right, here is a great …

Director Chris Runeckles discusses how structured talk can be used to tackle educational disadvantage

Blog of the Week Shaun Allison – Still Looking for the Bright Spots I know. However, in my defence this is from Shaun’s own Substack not either of our blog sites. Also, it articulates h…

How we are using Steplab to continue to strengthen our culture of teaching and learning

Blog of the Week Mike Hobbis & Paul Cline – Why subjects need their own take on the ‘cogsci revolution’ This is via the TES from Mike and Paul. I really like the way they contextualise cognitiv…

Blog of the Week Matthew Evans – Adaptive teaching: in search of conceptual clarity Brilliant thinking and writing from Matthew here around adaptive teaching and what it really means for teac…

Led by Director - Chris Runeckles

Blog of the Week David Windle – Entropy, attendance and implementation An interesting perspective on the EEF’s implementation guidance, here is one quote to get you started: “Unle…

Blog of the Week Blake Harvard – Easy Application of Interleaving in the Classroom Blake neatly summarises a research paper on interleaving and why (it might) be worth us adding it to our reg…

Blog of the Week Inner Drive – Boosting participation: Wait times and question types Inner Drive summarise the latest findings from new questioning research and its implications for type of q…

Chris Runeckles explores supporting students to articulate metacognitive thinking and purposefully direct their learning

Blog of the Week Pete Foster – Autonomy Traps for School Leaders This is a debate that has been rumbling for some time. What I like about Pete’s blog is how he sets out some of the pitf…

Blog of the Week Pritesh Raichura – Choral Response and ‘I Say You Say’ This is really good from Pritesh. Includes the why and the when as well as the how, stongly recommend you read to the e…

Blog of the Week Claire Stoneman – Don’t make the thing, the Thing I think this blog chimes really well with the engage and unite cross-cutting behaviours from the new implementation guidance…

Government publishes names of first 20 RISE advisers to help support 'stuck' schools

Blog of the Week Alex Quigley – Supporting shy pupils to talk in class Developing structured talk is a focus for many schools and teachers at the moment, here Alex shares some new research fr…

If I am perfectly honest, I am not very good at keeping to my new year resolutions – last year it was to drink less caffeine and more water at work – but honestly, I have no idea where the oversize…

Blog of the Week Inner Drive – Teaching Unpacked: What do great teachers see? Only a short blog and not on a new study, but very interesting nonetheless. I’m always thinking about teach…

Blog of the Week Kat Howard – School Improvement | Steady Work A great articulation from Kat about the importance of strategic thinking and a dogged focus when driving school improvement. Class Tea…

Director Chris Runeckles shares one aspect of a literacy focused partnership with Brighton and Hove schools

Durrington Director Chris Runeckles explains how his school frames routines for driving the thinking of students.

Blog of the Week Simon Botten – We need to talk about SEND Dominating the national conversation with good reason, SEND is something we are all thinking about at the moment. Simon helps us to …

Blog of the Week Amarbeer Singh Gill – Bringing Cognitive Science into the Maths classroom We’ve been getting back into cognitive load theory at Durrington recently so this is a both a …

A large number of teachers and school leaders write blogs.  They use their blog as a way of reflecting on their own practice as well as sharing good ideas and resources. Every Friday, one of the ma…

Blog of the Week Matthew Evans – What’s in a name? It’s brave to write blogs like this, that might stir a reaction, but we need to be made to think about our system, and writing like th…

This blog has been brewing for a while. Pretty much a year in fact. The genesis was my visit to the brilliant Forest Gate Community School in November 2023. Several things stuck with with me follow…

The role of high expectations, routines, consistency and strong relationships in supporting disadvantaged learners.

Blog of the Week John Rodgers – Stories make us stay The central reason research schools exist is to tackle educational disadvantage. John reminds us of how we can best connect teachers with …

Blog of the Week Town End Research School – Pedagogy trumps programmes Lots of head nodding while reading this. It might be messier but developing individual teachers’ pedagogy should a…

I was re-reading a few of our own Classteaching blogs the other day, and one really got me thinking. Back in July Research School Associate Jody Chan wrote about the amount of lesson time that can …

Blog of the Week Sam Crome – Helping your teams to thrive in autumn term 2 I like a timely blog, and this feels like one to me. We all know what this half-term can be like and Sam gives us so…

Blog of the Week Alex Quigley – Disciplinary literacy: 50 years of failure Alex explores why, despite its value, disciplinary literacy has repeatedly failed to embed in schools. Class Teachin…

Maybe it’s because I have recently run some training on it or perhaps it’s because the term has been rearing its head on edu-twitter (edu-X just doesn’t sound right!), but the concept of responsive…

Blog of the Week Blake Harvard – Classroom Seating and Student Achievement As Blake says in this blog, it is always great to have research to back your intuitive choices. So… here&#8217…

Working in schools, time can get away from you. You blink and then realise you’ve been at something for five or six years. Disciplined inquiry at Durrington might be one of those things. We s…

Working in schools, time can get away from you. You blink and then realise you’ve been at something for five or six years. Disciplined inquiry at Durrington might be one of those things. We s…

Blog of the Week Phil Stock – Addressing disadvantage: a wicked problem that requires a ​‘clumsy’ response Some problems we solve and others we manage. Phil explains which are which and how t…

Blog of the Week Alex Quigley - Streaked tenrecs and improving reading The bit that chimes here with me is the relationship between background knowledge and reading and how the resultant benefit can c...

Blog of the Week Pete Foster - How can I improve behaviour when things haven’t started well? Pete's writing is perfect for supporting teachers new to the profession. I always think that at this time o...

The first in a series of blogs connecting the EEF's implementation guidance with leadership at Durrington

The Research Schools Network is a collaboration (EEF and IEE) to create a network of schools that support the use of evidence to improve teaching practice.