Topical Resources
Tooled Up Events
- January 19, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Staff Only
- Professor Adam Fox (Allergy London) & Sarah Knight (The Allergy Team)
- January 20, 2023
- 12:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Rugby correspondent Gavin Mairs interviews trailblazing player and ex-headteacher, Floyd Steadman
- January 25, 2023
- 19:00
- GMT
- January 26, 2023
- 19:00
- GMT
- Staff Only
- Dr Lewys Brace, University of Exeter
- February 1, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Kate King and Sarah Cox
- February 7, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Staff Only
- Dr Ingrid Obsuth
- February 17, 2023
- 12:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Dr Lisa Sugiura, University of Portsmouth
- March 14, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Professor Gareth Morgan (Children’s Hospital Colorado)
- March 15, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Dr Lisa Sugiura, University of Portsmouth
- April 25, 2023
- 19:30
- BST
Guidance for Educational Settings
Following a Suicide or Sudden Death
To mark World Suicide Prevention Day on Saturday 10th September, we are proud to have published a resource for schools, written in collaboration with suicide prevention charity, The OLLIE Foundation. This comprehensive guide will provide leadership teams in schools and other educational settings with the detailed guidance needed to coordinate an appropriate, helpful and safe response following the tragic event of a suicide or sudden death in their community.
This invaluable resource is available for free. Simply click the button below to view and download the PDF.
The home of evidence-based resources on all aspects of parenting, education and family life
Schools that are part of our Tooled Up Education community can provide their parents and teachers with access to Dr Weston’s exclusive resources, covering areas such as aspiration, resilience, mental health and behaviour.
As a member of the Tooled Up community you will have access to a whole host of evidence-based resources, which will enable you to support your children or students in a way that makes their lives and educational journeys both easier and more enjoyable.
Dr Weston's Wednesday Wisdom
In an ever increasingly busy and demanding world, Wednesday Wisdom provides a reflective 2 minute read every week that readers constantly tell us they look forward to. Full of topical and relatable experiences that help provide reflection, motivation and support in achieving a balanced family life.
Over the years, thousands of people have benefitted from, and continue to enjoy, the parenting and educational talks from Dr Kathy Weston at Tooled Up Education and have subscribed to Wednesday Wisdom. Join now for free to get your own weekly digest of motivating, interesting, and thoughtful parenting advice from Dr Weston herself.
“I just wanted to say how grateful I am to read your Wednesday Wisdom email. Perfect size for the time I have to engage and reflect and think about the topics you touch on. It helps me to evaluate my parenting and take a step back to look at scenarios that play out.”
Parent – October 2020
Social Shocks
There is a lot going on in the world and our perspectives (whether we like it or not) are shaped by the news media that we read and hear and the extent to which things resonate in our own lives. In the last week, you’ve likely seen a number of issues which might have stopped you in your parenting tracks and left you puzzled over how best to respond.
Parenting Question of the Week
My wife suffers with health conditions and has been diagnosed with cancer. The chemotherapy is starting to become difficult for her and I am concerned about the impact this may have on my child’s learning at school. I am also concerned that my son doesn’t bottle things up and that we do all that we can to help him feel supported.
Our Promise: We will answer all questions, and, whilst we may share your question and answer to help others, we will never declare who asked it.
Researcher of the Month
Professor David S. Yeager, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin
Research Interests
Professor Yeager is interested in understanding the processes shaping adolescent development, especially how social cognitive factors interact with structural and physiological factors to create positive or negative trajectories for youth. He is also interested in learning how to influence these psychological processes, so as to improve developmental and educational outcomes for youth.
Growth mindset interventions have received a great deal of attention in schools and among researchers; in part because they tend to be short, scalable and easy to apply. Research shows that when growth mindset beliefs are put into practice, they can improve young people’s outcomes months, and even years, later. However, few studies have considered the impact of teachers’ mindsets on the children in their class. In this new paper, our Researcher of the Month, Professor David S. Yeager, considers whether students can independently implement their growth mindsets in virtually any classroom culture, or if their growth mindsets need to be supported by their teachers’ own growth mindsets.
Professor Yeager’s study hypothesises that growth and fixed mindset beliefs might influence teachers’ attitudes and classroom practices, and impact on students’ application of growth mindset interventions. They speculate that teachers with a growth mindset might present mistakes as learning opportunities and reinforce this with assignments and evaluations that reward continual improvement. In contrast, teachers with a fixed mindset might suggest that only some students have the talent to get an A or say, for example, that not everyone is a “maths person”. This could discourage students from asking questions or revealing confusion.
They analysed data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets – an intervention experiment conducted in the US, with a large, nationally representative sample of 9167 14-15 year old students and their 223 maths teachers. Results showed that providing students with a growth mindset intervention resulted in more growth mindset beliefs. However, whilst students in classrooms with growth mindset teachers made meaningful gains in their maths grades, students in classrooms with fixed mindset teachers did not.
“This finding suggests that students cannot simply carry their newly enhanced growth mindset to any environment and implement it there. Rather, the classroom environment needs to support, or at least permit, the mindset by providing necessary affordances.”
The key takeaway for all teaching staff from Professor Yeager’s paper is that supportive classroom contexts matter. For growth mindset interventions to be impactful, attention also needs to be paid to the messages that teachers present about ability, learning and mistake-making.
Tooled Up News
Studying Shakespeare?
Is your teen working towards their GCSEs? Macbeth is a key GCSE text for many of our teens and we are extremely excited to share the arrival of our new Supporting Macbeth resources for our Tooled Up community. These are revision resources for Macbeth written with parental engagement and home study in mind.
Shining a Light on Kindness
Given that World Kindness Day was celebrated earlier this month, on November 13th, now seems a good time to talk about the results of a very large and exciting public science project. The Kindness Test was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 in conjunction with a team from the University of Sussex, led by our brilliant former podcast guest, Professor Robin Banerjee. A whopping 60,000 people aged 18-99, from 144 different countries filled out the online questionnaire, making it the world’s largest in-depth study on kindness to date.
Tooled Up teachers 📣📣📣
This video for 11-12 year olds might be used in PSHE lessons or form time. It features two short lessons on personal hygiene: https://bit.ly/3upwZT8
#education #edtech #learning #children #teens #mentalhealth #wellbeing
We’ve spoken to clinical psychologist @DrAnnaColton to find 5 top exercises that really work to calm us down 👉️ https://bit.ly/3UFmaH8
#parenting #parentingtips #familysupport
This week's Wednesday Wisdom is out now.
Read the full article and sign up for our weekly updates via the link: https://bit.ly/3UIIKi6
#mentalhealthawareness #mentalwellbeing #wellbeing #parenting
Currently recording brilliant webinar on separation anxiety with Oxford researcher and psychological well-being practitioner, @ChessellChloe for Tooled Up parents and staff in our Tooled Up schools 👌🗒️
This presentation for 11-12 year olds pupils, aims to help them recognise their emotions, provides helpful advice on developing strategies for handling them and is packed full of practical questions & activities: https://bit.ly/3UB3ybn
#education #edtech #children #teens
We will explore the experience of single parenthood and the unique challenges that parents & carers might face when raising teens in particular. We welcome all questions, live or submitted in advance: https://bit.ly/3B60wF2
#parenting #familysupport #children #raisingteens
We are recording a webinar on separation anxiety with brilliant researcher @ChessellChloe tomorrow afternoon. If any parent or any member of staff across our Tooled Up schools have any questions, please submit them to: kathy@tooledupeducation.com
*Excited* to have booked an interview with a leading expert on low mood and depression in teens @DrS_Reynolds - parents/staff across our Tooled Up schools are invited to submit questions in advance of a recorded webinar with Shirley in late Dec.
E: kathy@tooledupeducation.com
These books feature strong characters with either disabilities or neurodevelopmental differences.
They can help children feel seen and represented, build empathy and celebrate the wonderful diversity of experience that is all around them: https://bit.ly/3gPFhjQ
#familysupport
Calling all Tooled Up #Teachers - as usual, we’ve got exciting webinars coming up in the new year and you can already sign up! Stay tuned for more.
Register your place now: https://bit.ly/3UomIks
#teaching #education #learning #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthmatters
Good morning! The Tooled Up research elves have been working on new resources such as: managing children's disappointment re: school places, dental anxiety and sending out invites for our 2023 online autism conference. Busy busy!
This week's Wednesday Wisdom is out now.
Read the full article and sign up for our weekly updates via the link: https://bit.ly/3EP2ElF
#parents #parentingtips
1/ 🔹 One of the most famous quotes by Maria Montessori: "Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed." 🔹
How do teachers’ mindsets impact on children’s academic outcomes?
Researcher of the Month, Professor David S. Yeager, focuses on this and considers whether simply teaching students a growth mindset really goes far enough?
More: https://bit.ly/3OMndUr
Useful for any #parent with #children who use TikTok, this video provides a brief introduction & overview of the platform, explains how #TikTok works, how the algorithm operates and what privacy settings there are: https://bit.ly/3V8z80R
@Fiyory_ please email our office as we might be able to help! kathy@tooledupeducation.com
Featuring slides on various topics including sleep, anxiety, physical activity, body image, social media and more, our series of slides can be used during form time or PSHE to prompt older #teens to discuss various issues impacting on their wellbeing: https://bit.ly/3EeQEcQ
We’ve been working with English teacher & #GCSE examiner Patrick Cragg on resources on Shakespeare.
He explains what GCSE #students are expected to write, what makes an excellent essay introduction and explores three key motifs from core GCSE text: https://bit.ly/3OgKvBv
This week's Wednesday Wisdom is out now.
Read the full article and sign up for our weekly updates via the link: https://bit.ly/3gt6BEn
#parents #parentingtips
#autismawareness #autismacceptance
We're delighted HMC (Headmasters' and Headmistresses Conference) have chosen us as one of their Platinum Partners which recognises our commitment to providing the best support through evidence-based resources and high-quality CPD to whole-school communities.
We're delighted to announce the new @HMC_Org #PlatinumPartners programme is now available to connect HMC schools with experts in independent schools & that we're now working in #partnership with Tooled Up @TooledUpTips. Read more on HMC's Partner Directory https://buff.ly/3EtCzIu
Educating a neurodivergent child early on about masking is important for them to develop self-advocacy skills & their sense of identity which will help their well-being down the line
Myths about what is masking & what to do about it 👇
@TooledUpTips
https://www.tooledupeducation.com/wisdom/coping-by-camouflage/
@HMC_Org Thank you. Great to be working with you 🙏
All of our Tooled Up #parents have access to exclusive webinars - and as per usual, we’ve got some exciting webinars with brilliant experts coming up in the new year.
Make sure to sign up already! Register your place now: https://tooledupeducation.com/events
@BlackheathHigh @GDST Thanks for having @Parentengage
@MTSPrep love it!
@sskevington1 @Parentengage @BlackheathHigh @GDST Thank you 🙏
@DrSkripka Thanks for sharing, we are going to feature this research in next week's Wednesday Wisdom. See: http://www.tooledupeducation.com
Calling all Tooled Up #Teachers - as usual, we’ve got exciting webinars coming up in the new year and you can already sign up!
Stay tuned for more and register your place now: https://www.tooledupeducation.com/events
#CPD #education
We’ve put together discussion topics focusing on disgraced social media influencer, Andrew Tate. These questions can be used at home or in the classroom to prompt open conversations about how we can respond to toxic & harmful material online: https://bit.ly/3EGodGn
Testimonials
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Have a Question?
If you are interested in learning more about Tooled Up Education, have a technical question, press enquiry or any other query, please follow the link below or get in touch with Dr Weston’s team on email: office@tooledupeducation.com
