The Classify Education Newsletter #1

Andrew Wilkinson
April 01, 2024

Welcome to the first edition of 'The Classify Education Newsletter’ & thank you for subscribing. This newsletter will arrive monthly in your inbox and will provide you with some updates on Classify, teaching & learning tips and some interesting things you might want to check out.

Want to take a look at Classify Education? Click the button below to take get a guided walkthrough of our prototype dashboard👇

Classify updates

The Classify platform development is almost complete (approx 80%) and we are hoping to have something ready to share soon.
Attended and delivered a talk at the amazing Abu Dhabi Teaching Conference at Repton Abu Dhabi.
CONFIRMED - I will be speaking at ResearchED Dubai on April 27th focusing on explanations in the classroom. Come and say hello if you are attending.
The Learning Curve School Leadership Podcast will be launching on April 8th. The first guest will be Daniel Cummings a leader with a wealth of experience and the current Head of Prep School at Brighton College - keep a lookout in your podcast apps!
There are now 2 blogs live on The Classify Education Blog check them out here.

Leadership reflection

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Leaders should seek to reduce the volume of work but also abandon pointless work; do fewer things but do them better.

John Tomsett and Jonny Uttley

Reflection: I can’t stop thinking about this quote and how it applies to so much in education. Pointless admin, pointless data habits, pointless disruptions to learning and pointless ‘filler’ activities. It raises a lot of questions…could doing less, particularly in curriculum, lead to better outcomes? Could cutting out administrative tasks lead to higher quality teaching?

The data drop

PIRLS 2021 scores in Abu Dhabi show that Indian curriculum schools performed highest. 6881 private school students participated in the study from 174 of Abu Dhabi’s private schools. The top 4 curriculum types (Indian, IB, SABIS, & Canadian) are categorised as high performing with the UK & Pakistani classed as intermediate and US & MoE schools classed as low performing.

Learn more in our PIRLS 2021 Abu Dhabi Overview blog here.

Data from Teacher Tapp

Some interesting data from Teacher Tapp in the UK showing how often teachers analyse the data of their class. Not surprisingly ‘Termly’ was the most popular option and 86% of teachers assess their class data at least once a term. This data is based predominantly on the UK but a UAE version of this survey would be interesting. I would also be interested to find out what data the 10% of teachers who analyse data at least once a fortnight are using as these seems to be more formative in nature, mainly assessing short-term performance and not long-term learning.

Teaching & learning tip

Silent Teacher

Silent Teacher is by far and away my favourite strategy when working with EAL students and introducing a new concept. I first came across this when reading ‘How I Wish I Taught Maths’ by Craig Barton (legend). It requires very little in the ways of preparation, just some good material to work with and a well thought-out definition. Watch the video below to see my demonstration. 🎥

Five things we enjoyed this month

Learn more about Classify

I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Classify Education Newsletter and you found some value in it. Please share with your colleagues and keep your eyes peeled for more from Classify over the next month. If you have any feedback for us about the newsletter, please get in touch by replying to this email.

Myself & the development team are working hard on the Classify platform at the moment but if you would like to find out more about how we can support your school schedule a call now👇