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ED:TALK – Evidence & Dialogue Toolkit

Studying at Cambridge

The Toolkit approach

Options

The Toolkit offers a flexible approach which you can adapt to your context.

  • Pick one of the example projects in this Toolkit and run it in your classroom;
  • Use the tools in this Toolkit to design your own project;
  • A combination of the above;
  • Or, if you don't want to start with a full project, the Toolkit also offers ideas for a single lesson to improve student engagement and learning.

Steps

The Toolkit will help you think about your project in 5 steps.

  1. Decide your goals
  2. Design your project
  3. Decide what evidence to generate
  4. Implement and evaluate
  5. Share your findings

The Toolkit gives you structures ideas and tools for each of these steps.

Collaboration & Reflection

Evidence shows that projects achieve best outcomes when teachers work together.

  • Find a colleague to share reflections and experiences
  • Talk through your plan, findings and challenges during and after your project
  • Look for unexpected engagement from students
  • Analyse surprises with a colleague.

No colleague to work with?

  • One of your school leaders
  • Other people working in your classroom — teaching assistants or resource teachers
  • A teacher from another subject department
  • A student teacher
  • A fellow student from your teacher training course

Many of the teachers who worked on the development of the Toolkit initially felt that their projects had not been very successful because they hadn't gone exactly as planned, or because change had been slow or difficult. However, as they discussed their outcomes with colleagues, they came to see from those colleagues' feedback that they had achieved a lot more than they had realised. Discussing their projects with colleagues helped them notice things that had changed.

We could take the Toolkit and adapt it in a way that suited our children.

Working together as a team was really important for the success of our project.