Each year, we host and attend various in-person events, including training sessions, networking events and conferences. Join us at these events or watch our on-demand, recorded webinars to gain ideas and insights and get inspired.
Events are added to the calendar at different times throughout the year, so please check back regularly for the latest information.
Join our seminar to hear from our expert guest speakers on Values and National Security Education and celebrate with the winners of the Young Cultural Ambassador Awards.
A new calendar year offers a natural reset, an opportunity for your learners to pause, look back and lean forward with purpose. Reflection isn’t just a feel-good exercise; it’s a powerful learning accelerator. It helps students consolidate knowledge, develop metacognition and set actionable goals. It also helps you, the teacher, gain insights into what’s working, what needs adjustment and how to sustain momentum. Below are activities that fit into real classrooms and real schedules, with variations for different age groups and subject areas.
Reflection builds self-awareness and agency. When students name what they’ve learned and where they want to grow, they’re more likely to persevere and achieve. For you, structured reflection provides a clearer picture of learning gaps and strengths, enabling intentional planning. Think of these routines as small investments that pay off in greater engagement, clearer goals and smoother instruction all year long.
Many of you use courseware, dashboards and assessment reports. Use them to ground reflection in evidence:
Reflection is a powerful tool. Begin small, stay consistent and let students’ feedback guide you. With clear prompts, support and the right tools, including Pearson’s, you can turn New Year’s energy into steady progress for your class.
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Inquiry-based learning is all about using questions to generate interest. Starting a class with a question helps young learners engage with the topic straight away. Introductory questions can be big or small, and here are some examples of big questions:
These open questions get students thinking about lots of different aspects of each topic. However, small questions can work as well:
These closed questions don’t necessarily lead to further discussion. However, they are a way to introduce a topic and give learners an easy way to contribute without the pressure of getting an answer right or wrong.
When students are invited to share their opinions, they feel that their contributions are valuable. It also lets the teacher gain insight into what the learners already know.
Inquiry-based learning can support students to answer these big questions in an easy and satisfying way, including:
A bulletin board fits in well with the concept of inquiry-based learning. The teacher pins a big question to the center and then encourages learners to add their notes, sketches and ideas to the board.
Because there are many possible answers to the big questions, it’s important to emphasize that learners can change their minds as they learn more: after all, that’s the whole point of learning.
The Now I Know! series follows this structure. Each unit has language aims based around a big question to get learners thinking more deeply.
You can put it into practice in your own classroom by starting off with a topic, and then thinking of a big question to get things started. So, for example, if your topic is outer space, your big question could be: Why do we explore space?
That will get your students thinking and sharing their knowledge about space travel, moon landings, astronauts, aliens – you might be surprised at some of their answers. Ask them to write notes, do a sketch or do a mind map, then pin their contributions to your bulletin board.
There are lots of options for follow-up activities:
Once you’ve piqued their interest and the students are excited about the topic, it’s time to channel that enthusiasm into a more focused activity. For example, you could introduce the story of the Golden Record on the Voyager space probe. At the time of the Voyager launch in 1977, a phonograph record was included onboard which contained, in the words of then-president Jimmy Carter, “a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings.” The record included music from different cultures, greetings in 55 languages and sounds of the natural world. There were also 115 images of life on Earth, many annotated with explanations.
Bring it back to inquiry-based learning, and instead of telling students what is on the record, ask them what they think might have been included. Again, they can add their ideas to the bulletin board.
Follow-up activities could include:
This is just one example of a topic, but any topic can be treated in the same way. If you, as a teacher, share your curiosity and enthusiasm with your students, they’ll pick up on that and become enthused in turn.
The spirit of enquiry is one of the most important things we can instill in our young learners. Inquiring minds are innate - just think of the way toddlers ask “Why?” about everything. The mistake that adults can sometimes make is to reply to the ‘why’ questions with an answer, when actually, sometimes children just want to have a discussion.
As educators, it’s important to reply to children’s questions by opening up a discussion, no matter how abstract the question. For example, if a toddler asks something like “Why a leaf?”, you can expand that conversation to talk about colours, trees, nature, things that grow... the possibilities are endless.
In fact, this is our main role as educators: to facilitate and continue those conversations, to pique our learners’ curiosity, to share our enthusiasm and wonder rather than simply teach the correct answer.
Show your students that you don’t have to find immediate answers, that there’s no such thing as a silly answer. It’s okay to wonder and muse. In your lessons, focus not on giving students the answers but on equipping them with the tools to research and find them themselves. In this way, you’ll create lifelong learners with a passion for education.
