Understanding Children's Learning : A Text for Teaching Assistants

Structured to support teaching assistants, this pioneering textbook provides an academic underpinning to each of the key topics studied. The book: develops the theoretical knowledge needed to enhance work in the classroom; encourages students to reflect on their own practice; is in an ideal textbook format - full of tasks, questions, summaries and reading lists; and covers both primary and secondary years. Practical, easy-to-read and written specifically for teaching assistants, this book is also applicable for any trainee teachers or students of education.

Colin Lever has spent all of his teaching career in mainstream schools that have contained a high percentage of challenging children. As both a teacher and head of faculty he has been an advocate of a child centred approach to teaching and learning, playing an active part in ‘turning around’ two failing schools, both of which were inclusive in their philosophy.

Following a secondment in 1988 he worked with a colleague from the Special Needs sector to set up an integration project that gave children with severe learning difficulties access to mainstream education and the National Curriculum. The project received national acclaim and established itself as one of the longest running integration project of its type at the time.

Colin has written extensively over the past twenty years for all Key Stages, principally in the areas of Science and Technology.

At present Colin is employed as a behaviour ‘specialist’ in a mainstream school, working as part of an S.E.B.D and M.A.S.T team. He works with challenging children and advises colleagues and senior management and the LEA on all aspects of behavioural management in order to facilitate inclusion.