Training for Schools
Olo offers thoughtful professional learning for schools and teaching teams, shaped around the realities of everyday language classrooms. Training is developed around each school’s context and priorities, connecting educational thinking with practical ideas teachers can use, adapt and make their own.
Training may take the form of a focused workshop, a longer programme or a session developed around a particular need. Current offers and outlines will be added here soon.
We believe in the quiet confidence of a thoughtful approach. Our training sessions are designed to be observational and human, focusing on the small details that make a significant difference in the educational journey.
Explore Olo workshops
Each Olo workshop begins with a recognisable classroom moment and opens it up for closer exploration. Age-group tags will help visitors find the sessions most relevant to their teachers and learners.
Available online or on-site and adaptable to different coursebooks and teaching contexts.
Early literacy
Very young learners
Beneath the Sounds
What Systematic Synthetic Phonics Really Asks of a Child
Adam gets every answer right.
His worksheet says he knows phonics.
Then we ask him to blend the sounds.
He cannot.
Meet Adam and a collection of children whose answers conceal very different gaps. Some of their stories may surprise you. Others may feel uncomfortably familiar.
This practical workshop looks beneath the surface of systematic synthetic phonics to uncover the layered skills involved in decoding, blending and segmenting, and to explore what different children may need from us next.
Early literacy
Very young learners
When Words Become Reading
What Early Literacy Really Asks of a Child
Sophie reads every word.
Her teacher’s finger moves quietly beneath the line as she goes.
Slowly. Carefully. Correctly.
She reaches the full stop.
Then we ask her what happened.
Sophie does not know.
And there are other children waiting for us. Each brings a different clue. A pause. A habit. A small dependence we nearly miss.
As their stories unfold, we will look more closely at what it takes for words on a page to become reading.
Grammar · Language into use
Primary
Taking Primary Grammar into Purposeful Use
Beyond Word Maths
Nina’s grammar worksheet is perfect.
She sees he, she or it and adds s.
She changes the verb in brackets, completes the missing article and builds an answer from the words provided.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Then we ask her what her brother does after school. “Brother… football.”
Nina knows how to solve the worksheet.
The grammar belongs to her. But does the language?
This practical workshop explores how we can help primary children move from controlled grammar practice towards using grammar naturally in their speaking and writing. Through simple structures, communicative games and purposeful grammar play, we will create more opportunities for children to notice meaning, make choices and gradually use whole sentences for reasons of their own.
Meaningful grammar practice does not have to be difficult. It simply has to invite real meaning often enough for the language to begin travelling beyond the worksheet. We will laugh at impossible meanings, bring new vocabulary and grammar into the same encounter, and move from answers the worksheet has already chosen to answers only the child can give.
Speaking
Very young learners
When Will They Speak?
Primary
What Speaking Actually Asks of a Young Child
Leo knows the answers.
“What’s your name?”
“My. Name. Is. Leo.”
“How many days are there in the week?”
“There. Are. Seven. Days. In. The. Week.”
“What is the name of your class?”
“The. Name. Of. My. Class. Is. Blue.”
Every word is correct. Every sentence is complete.
But Leo’s language cannot move.
He can say the sentences. He cannot yet do anything with them.
Drawing on language-acquisition theory and deceptively simple classroom activities, this practical workshop explores how spoken language gradually becomes familiar, meaningful and available for children to use. It also makes room for the silent period, when the teacher may be doing some of her most important work without yet being able to see its results.
Perhaps speaking begins long before a child can show us it is there.
Everyday learning
Very young learners
The Power of Everyday
Primary
How Small Classroom Choices Build Learning Over Time
The lesson was brilliant.
Everyone was engaged. The activities worked. The children left buzzing.
But it happened once.
Meanwhile, Tuesday kept happening.
What if some of the strongest learning in a classroom is carried by what happens again tomorrow?
Drawing on learning theory and practical classroom experience, this workshop explores how small, intentional choices can allow learning to accumulate across ordinary days. Teachers will leave with simple, adaptable ideas that do not require more time, more materials or their most energetic selves.
An extraordinary lesson can inspire. The everyday is what gets to stay.
Writing · Integrated skills
Primary
Before the Writing Lesson
Building Young Writers Across the Unit
Writing again.
Maya sighs. Her teacher does too.
The task takes forever. Every sentence needs prompting. Sometimes every word. At home, patience wears thin. Eventually, the page is finished, and everyone is relieved to put it away.
Then Maya meets an unseen task in a test and cannot carry the writing alone.
How can so much work leave progress feeling so painfully slow?
This practical workshop explores how small, purposeful encounters with writing can be woven through vocabulary, grammar, reading and speaking lessons, allowing language, familiarity and control to accumulate across a unit. Writing becomes easier. But that is only the beginning. Children gain enough freedom within the language to make real choices, shape their own meaning and begin to find their voice on the page.
A perfect-world ambition? Not at all. But writing may need to begin long before the writing lesson does.
Grammar
Teens
If You Study Hard, You Will Succeed
Giving Teen Grammar Something to Say
If you study hard, you will succeed.
If I won the lottery, I would buy a big house.
The grammar is clear. The sentences are correct. And generations of teenagers have had absolutely nothing to say about either of them.
Meanwhile, students complete demanding grammar worksheets, debate the smallest differences between forms, and still leave the grammar behind when they begin to speak or write.
How can so much work produce so little usable language?
Drawing on grammar pedagogy and what we know about the role of affect in learning, this practical workshop explores how familiar grammar structures can become invitations to think, choose, react and say something real. Teachers will experience, adapt and create personalised activities that preserve meaningful support while giving teenagers purpose, humour and room for their own voices.
Grammar can do more than produce correct sentences. It can help teenagers say something worth hearing.
Classroom management
Very Young Learners
The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.
Lower Primary
Classroom Management Beyond Chaos and Control
It was the loudest of lessons. It was the quietest of lessons.
It was the classroom in which nothing could be taught. It was the classroom in which everything could be taught and nobody could learn.
It was the triumph of classroom management. It was the disappearance of the class.
On Monday, the children call out, wander freely and conduct urgent diplomatic negotiations over three identical blue pencils. The teacher repeats every instruction until the words lose all known meaning.
On Tuesday, she tries kindness.
By Wednesday, kindness has failed.
On Thursday, the demon arrives.
And oh, the comfort of Thursday.
Books open together. Pencils move together. Thirty small bodies remain exactly where they were placed. For the first time all week, the teacher hears the end of her own sentence. She reaches the final slide. Her coffee is still warm. Peace, at last, has descended upon the land.
The little devils, meanwhile, sit in the fearful stillness of innocent prisoners. What have they done? How long is the sentence? Will there be parole before break?
Nobody asks. Nobody moves. Nobody learns, of course. But the lesson is completed beautifully.
Then Friday comes. The teacher’s heart softens. A little talking is permitted. One child leaves a chair. Another needs a pencil. Somewhere at the back, an eraser becomes the subject of armed conflict.
And by Monday morning, the whole tragic cycle begins again.
Somewhere between Monday’s uprising and Thursday’s reign of terror, there must be a classroom where people can actually live and learn.
This practical workshop looks beyond behaviour tips to the systems that organise participation, movement, materials, groups and transitions, so children can work in different ways without the teacher having to manage every moment.
Lexis
What If the Word Comes First?
Teens
When Vocabulary Becomes Something to Think With
We often teach vocabulary as though the learner already has a complete thought and simply needs the English word for it.
But sometimes the movement runs the other way.
A word gives shape to a feeling not yet named. A phrase catches in the ear. A line from a song, story or conversation becomes available at just the right moment, and the learner discovers not only something new to say, but something new to notice.
When does thought shape language, and when does language shape thought?
This workshop explores how words, chunks, expressions and patterns move beyond definitions and exercises to gather sound, rhythm, association and use. Teachers examine the role of listening, reading, repeated encounters and authentic response, then design lexis work that helps new language become familiar in the mouth and alive in the mind.
A new language does not only give learners new ways to say what they think. It gives them new things to think with.