What gives your school its personality, its spirit, its own culture? How can you assess school climate, and improve it? With details and case studies this item introduces the next.

This 100 item questionnaire is for you to photo-copy and use. It quickly shows which parts of your school's life you can change for the better, and checks when you have done so.

If you can't change the child perhaps you can change the school. Alternative schools for truants and offenders, called in New Zealand 'Activity Centres', are growing. Do they work? A case study.

PE lessons look full of stimulating and beneficial activity. But are they? You can try some of this research out yourself. It can lead to greater achievement and enjoyment.

Learning only testable facts will not be enough for survival. Learning fact-finding skills will not be enough. Independent thinking, being able to make good decisions, having clear values and a store of useful knowledge are needed.
So teachers want to help students develop effective methods for handling the overwhelming flow ...

This item is about a major unfairness in the New Zealand school system. This unfairness persists year after year. It is built into the way in which young children are promoted out of the junior school. It is the fact that so many are held back or 'retained'. This practice ...

Homework is tradition that has survived waves of enthusiasm and of disenchantment. The famous report in the USA called A Nation at Risk, prescribed 'more homework' as one remedy for education's many ills. Other reports, however, caution that homework hasn't produced the benefits claimed for it; more of the same ...

Much of our current educational practice is based on the assumption that play is important to children - indeed that it is essential to their growth and development. We also assume that adults, particularly teachers, play an essential role through organising and participating in children's play. But it is revealing ...

Finding out how much your pupils know - how many points they can recall, the number of words mis-spelled, the number of problems solved correctly - this is comparatively easy and there is an elaborate technology of tests and statistical analysis to help. This is by far the most common ...

For years I've had vague feelings of disquiet about my teaching of science and I couldn't work out what was worrying me. I read up the Units beforehand to see the scientific facts the children needed to know, carried out the activities which I thought enabled them to 'discover' those ...