Welcome to The Learning Spy

In 2011, frustrated by the state of education, I started blogging. What began as an outlet for professional irritation quickly became something more deliberate: a place to make sense of teaching as it is actually lived, not as it is imagined in policy documents. Over the years I’ve written about the constraints and pressures ordinary teachers face, the successes and failures of my own classroom practice, and the ways research and cognitive psychology can help us understand what works, what doesn’t, and why.

The Learning Spy is widely recognised as one of the UK’s most influential education blogs and has won a number of awards. By the mid-2010s the site was attracting millions of readers, and it has continued to be a platform for serious debate about teaching, curriculum, accountability and the stories we tell ourselves about learning.

The blog has now moved to Substack, where I continue publishing at daviddidau.substack.com.

Alongside writing, I’ve spent a great deal of time working with schools on curriculum, assessment, literacy and the teaching of English. One of my recurring themes is deceptively simple: teachers need to make the implicit explicit. Teachers are highly literate, but many have never been taught how to explain the invisible knowledge that underpins fluent reading and writing. Too often we assume pupils can do what we can do. The task is to break literacy down, codify it, and teach it deliberately, so that more children gain access to the kinds of language that unlock the curriculum. If you’d like to book me to deliver training or speak at a conference, please email me.

I’ve written several books including The Secret of Literacy, What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? What Every Teacher Needs to Know about Psychology, Making Kids Cleverer, Intelligent Accountability, Making Meaning in English, and Bringing the English Curriculum to Life, all of which reflect my long-standing interest in how schools can teach more deliberately, more coherently, and with more intellectual seriousness.

Praise for Making Kids Cleverer

Schools and parents alike invest so much energy in teaching children and yet often understand relatively little about what exactly it is they are trying to achieve. In Making Kids Cleverer David Didau reviews everything we know from cognitive science on how to enhance children’s learning, and delivers a powerful argument that we can – and must – help all children succeed at school.

Rebecca Allen, Professor of Education, University College London Institute of Education

David Didau has done it again! Making Kids Cleverer is an engaging, highly readable analysis of the latest research on how we learn and what we can do to improve the achievement of our pupils. Anyone involved in the care and education of children and young people would gain a huge amount from reading this book.

Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London

Making Kids Cleverer is a truly magnificent manifesto. Everything David Didau says chimes deeply with what I know to be true and what I am trying to accomplish in our schools. It is an absolute joy to read, and an incredibly timely tour de force that can, and should, have a national impact. A must-read for everyone in education, from trainee teachers to inspectors and policy makers.

Lady Caroline Nash, Director, Future Academies

In Making Kids Cleverer David Didau provides us with a brilliant and accessible account of why knowledge is opportunity, and of how we can increase children’s knowledge through a thoughtful and scientific approach to schooling.

David C. Geary, Curators' Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri

I have not read another education book that brims with as much insight and stimulating thought as this one: every page serves up a new surprise or gentle provocation.

Andy Tharby, teacher, co-author of Making Every Lesson Count, and author of How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone

Praise for What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?

The title indicates that Didau is ready to smash idols. Fortunately for us, he creates more than he destroys, deftly assembling findings from the learning sciences to build a path toward more effective classroom learning.

Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia

This is a truly remarkable book. No other book that I know of manages to integrate an in-the-trenches classroom-teaching perspective with an accessible coverage of critical findings from cognitive-science research.

Robert A. Bjork, Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA

This is my new favourite book on education. I read it from cover to cover before writing this preface, and I plan to revisit it regularly. If I was still running a PGCE programme, it would be required reading for my students, and I can think of no better choice for a book-study for experienced teachers. Anyone seriously interested in education should read this book.

Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Education

Almost everyone will find something to disagree with in this book, something to upset you, challenge your beliefs and either make you angry or make you think. However well-informed you are, Didau finds a crack, a weak point from which to infect you with doubt. Nothing is sacred: formative assessment, effect size and growth mindset all come under attack. But there is wisdom on every page, worthy of more detailed thought and study. Didau is at heart a teacher; he understands teachers, classrooms and schools. But he understands research too and blends these elements into a coherent whole. There is a canon of about a dozen books that I recommend to teachers most of which are cited in this one. My essential reading list has a new entry.

Professor Robert Coe, PhD, Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM), Durham University

Praise for The Secret of Literacy: Making the implicit, explicit:

David Didau`s book is everything a book about the work of teaching should be: clear-eyed, lively, wise, and funny. Written by a front-line practitioner of the craft.

Doug Lemov, Managing Director, Teach Like a Champion Team

David Didau`s book is everything a book about the work of teaching should be: clear-eyed, lively, wise, and funny. Written by a front-line practitioner of the craft.

Doug Lemov, Managing Director, Teach Like a Champion Team