A Modest Proposal for Structured Sociology Teaching: Part 2

Part 1 looked at what we might think of as the bare bones of a structured sociology teaching schema and in part 2 we can start to add some visual and verbal flesh to this skeleton. What we’re aiming to do here is create a structure that’s simple enough for students to remember and easy […]

A Modest Proposal for Structured Sociology Teaching: Part 3

The previous post identified and briefly outlined the 5 categories that make-up the Structured Teaching scheme and in this post we can look at each category in a little more detail by way of a “worked example” based around Differential Educational Achievement. We can start with a visual example of what a mind-mapped structure might […]

Maths in Psychology

The 2015 A-level Psychology Specifications place a new emphasis on students’ ability to both understand and, more-importantly, apply a range of statistical tests to psychological problems. This new set of short films, written and presented by Deb Gajic (UK Psychology teacher and examiner) covers the main statistical tests students encounter in psychology: Chi Square, Sign […]

The Amstradification of Education

“Amstradification” refers to the idea that when offering someone a choice between two things that can be considered to be broadly similar, you make your favoured option sound better by making the unfavoured option sound worse… Older readers will probably be familiar with Amstrad, the consumer electronics company founded by Alan Sugar, but for the […]

Now That’s Magic Too! The Structure / Action Debate

Not to leave sociologists out of the equation, Olson et.al’s. research (Influencing choice without awareness, 2015) that looks at the tricks used by magicians to influence the choices made by their audience can also be used to illustrate the structure / action debate for students. Just as the magician uses a variety of techniques to […]

Social capital: Internships

The concept of social capital refers to the “networks of influence” people are able to create and key into through the course of their lives and an interesting example linked to family, education and work is the contemporary practice of internship. This frequently involves the ability to work for a potential employer for free in […]

Crime, Deviance and Education

Experiments with “Zero tolerance policing” have taken place in both Britain and America, but the latter has taken this approach (usually underpinned in social policy terms by Wilson and Kelling’s “Broken Windows” hypothesis) further by applying it to schools – a trend that has been taken-up by some UK schools particularly, but not exclusively Academies […]

Education and gender stereotyping

This short article (based on research by Lavy and Sandm, 2015) is a simple introduction to some of the ways gender stereotypes are perpetuated in early-years schooling. The research can also be linked to the work done by writers such as Rosenthal and Jacobson (Pygmalion in the Classroom: 1968) in exploring the significance of labelling and […]

Education and Class

A research snippet from the Sutton Trust (2014) that suggests inequalities in extra-curricular tuition and activities can have an impact on differential educational achievement.

Teacher-Pupil Relationships

One dimension of teacher-pupil relationships is how the former are able to encourage the latter. This article looking at the notion of praise, its benefits and whether it should be given publicly or privately for greatest effect.