Videos

Climbing on the slide rather than sliding down? That should be possible at school, says Barbara Vandorpe, as long as the children who want to slide down have priority. She advocates risky play at school. "Risky play allows children to push their boundaries and learn to deal with risks themselves."

No less than half of beginning secondary school teachers quit within five years. Lisa Van Raemdonck (University of Ghent) wants to do something about this. In order to achieve more well-being and less stress in education, she focuses on 'SEMS'. Find out what this acronym stands for and how she wants to achieve this in this pitch.

Heavy smartphone use results in poorer study performance, according to research by Simon Amez (Ghent University). To investigate this, Simon followed students for three years. Students with above-average smartphone use even score up to 1 point out of 20 less on their exams than their fellow students. 👨🏼‍🎓 📱

A 'vector', isn't that something for mathematicians and physicists? Linguist Weiwei Zhang (KU Leuven) proves the opposite. She uses vectors to study related words and synonyms that appear in different language variants, such as "subway" in American English and "underground" in British English.

We don't know enough about the algorithms used by Academic Social Networks and how they recommend to researchers which papers to read and which scientists to follow. What if these algorithms are unknowingly influencing researchers' activities, and in a way steer what they should work on next?

People are very good at making analogies: our brains can very quickly see similarities between two things and then draw comparisons between them. We're so good at it that we do it unconsciously. Marie-Anne Markey (KU Leuven), with the help of Boris Johnson & Jane Austen, explains how this can be seen in our language...

Our education system suffers from a shortage of teachers. During her PhD Law researcher Evelien Timbermont (VUB) discovered one of the causes of this problem: the outdated & complicated rules for the employment of teachers. Fortunately, she also knows the solution to this problem.

"Why don't teachers dare use the word 'expert'? Where is that professional pride?" Isabelle Step wants to help change that with her Experto tool.

Did you now that one in five starting teachers will leave education within five years. To help them, Sofie Michels and her colleagues developed "Startkracht", a support tool for beginning primary school teachers.

Co- and teamteaching can be a real added value in education. However, this is not always a success: everything depends on good communication between co-teachers. That is what Mieke Meirsschaut tries to foster - in corona-free times- with amongst other her chat cards.

What do you do when you see a toddler walking around with scissors? Do you panic? Do you get angry? Do you take them off immediately? It's tempting to intervene immediately in such a situation. But no matter how well you mean it, you do deprive a toddler of the opportunity to learn to deal with risks on his or her own.

"You're a bad teacher and your class is absolute bullsh*t!". Novice teachers often do not know how to deal with this type of verbal-aggressive behavior, partly because it is not yet sufficiently addressed in their training. To tackle this, Delphine Franco is working on a solution.