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Garbage in, garbage out

This is my latest article for the rather wonderful Teach Secondary magazine. Schools are awash with data but do we know any more about how children are performing? Are we clear how likely they are to achieve particular targets? Can we diagnose what’s preventing them from making progress? All too often the answer is no. The problem can be simply summed up as data ≠ knowledge. Here’s a lovely video of celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, showing a group of youngsters what goes into chicken nuggets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA After whizzing up a mixture a skin, bone and “horrible bits” he explains that manufacturers squeeze [...]

2019-01-02T11:32:38+00:00October 16th, 2018|assessment|

Survivorship bias and the enduring appeal of bad ideas

Survivorship bias occurs when we draw conclusions only from examples which have passed some sort of selection criteria and systematically discount those which have not. During World War II, British bombers were suffering a fairly awful attrition rate. Understandably, the RAF were keen to try to improve the survivability of their aircraft. Most of the bombers that limped back to base showed signs of heavy damage around the cockpit and wing tips and so the prevailing opinion was that if these sections of the aircraft were reinforced more planes would survive. Then, along came statistician, Abraham Wald who pointed out that [...]

2021-09-13T18:43:09+01:00October 9th, 2018|Featured|

Modelling and observation: a low threat model for teacher development

For some years now I've been of the opinion that while lesson observations can be useful learning opportunities the person doing the observation learns far more than the person being observed. This is a bit of a problem as, in the main, the people who observe the most teach the least. This means many schools end up with a class of teachers who know an incredible amount about teaching but don't do all that much of it. Consequently, I usually advise school leaders to use some of their non-contact time to free up colleagues to be able to observe more. As [...]

2020-08-03T12:09:59+01:00October 7th, 2018|training|

A measurement checklist

Campbell's Law: The more any quantitive social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to measure. Goodhart's Law: Any measure used for control is unreliable. Metrics can be great. We can be so preoccupied at seeing only what’s right in front of us that it’s all too easy to miss anything peripheral. Having one eye on data helps us to think statistically instead of relying only on anecdote and heuristics. It’s hard to argue that metrics [...]

2019-11-05T12:41:01+00:00October 3rd, 2018|Featured|

What’s the best (and easiest) way to teach?

I thought I'd said all I ever wanted to say about group work until, responding to a tweet from an education professor exhorting all teachers to add group work to their teaching repertoires, I unwisely suggested that maybe that wasn't such great advice. Unless you teach PE, drama, or some other subject where outcomes require cooperation this may not be good advice. Instead think very carefully about what the purpose of asking children to work in groups might be. All too often it adds little and costs much. https://t.co/psx985tnSS — David Didau (@DavidDidau) September 23, 2018 In all honesty, I really [...]

2020-08-14T15:09:24+01:00September 25th, 2018|Featured|

The school leadership bubble

Some years ago the English faculty I led was subject to a week-long leadership review. Knowing that every member of the department was to be observed and that we would be expected to showcase loads of 'student centred learning' I made sure everyone had planned plenty of group work and taken steps to minimise whole class instruction. At the end of the week the headteacher congratulated me on the quality of all of the lessons he'd seen and how student centred they had been. Despite this, I could see he looked a bit troubled and asked whether anything was wrong. He cleared [...]

2018-09-24T21:43:59+01:00September 24th, 2018|leadership|

What if everything you knew about mindsets and resilience was wrong?

Here are the slides I use for my talk at researchED Malmö: What if everything you know about mindsets and resilience is wrong? from David Didau The following is the English text of an article I wrote for Pedagogiska magasinet on which the presentation was, in part, based. What leads to success? Obviously, as teachers, we should be interested in children’s academic test scores, but what else is important? Are there certain skills, qualities of dispositions that the successful possess and everyone else lacks? If there is, can we identify these magic ingredients and teach them to our students? An exciting range [...]

2018-09-24T17:04:50+01:00September 24th, 2018|Featured|

Why do some children struggle with reading?

Janet and bloody John! When I was about 7, my primary school teacher told my parents that I would probably never learn to read. Apparently, the suspicion was that I might be mentally subnormal. My mother wasn't having any of that. Although she had no experience of teaching reading, she took me out of school, borrowed a set of the Janet and John reading scheme and set about teaching me to read. We spent several hours a day ploughing through the mind numbingly tedious 'adventures' of the flaxen-haired tykes. God I hated them Some weeks later she took me [...]

2019-10-01T13:58:04+01:00September 20th, 2018|literacy, reading|

Born stupid

If I've learned anything over the last year or so it's that intelligence - whatever we believe that to be[1] - is not innate. Whilst it seems hard to deny that some of our potential for becoming intelligent is genetically endowed, it ought to be obvious that our ability to reason is entirely dependent on our environment.[2] If you doubt this, try to reason about something of which you know absolutely nothing. The impossibility of such an act ought to make it clear that the faculty of reason is dependent on knowledge. Were someone to raise a child in complete isolation [...]

2018-09-16T01:32:21+01:00September 15th, 2018|Featured|

A manifesto for closing the advantage gap: my slides from researchED18

The talk I gave a this year's researchED national conference was, I'm afraid to say, shameless promotion for my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. Each of the slides represents an incredibly brief potted summary of the book's ten chapters. The book will be published some time in the coming months and, as the release date approaches, I'll write a series of posts that expands on each chapter. For now I hope this sufficiently whets your appetite to pre-order a copy. Making Kids Cleverer - ResearchED 2018 from David Didau

2018-09-09T11:45:41+01:00September 9th, 2018|Featured|

What’s your ambition for children?

Today I listened to Paul Smith, CEO of Future Academies, talk about his ambition for the young people who attend the schools in his Trust. He said he wanted them to be able to go to a 'nice' restaurant, feel confident about ordering and be able to have a 90 minutes conversation about current affairs. This might seem a pretty modest wish, but I have taught very many children who may never have this kind of experience. I never really thought about my ambition for children in quite this way before. I'm not sure that going to a restaurant is exactly [...]

2018-09-07T18:08:20+01:00September 7th, 2018|Featured|

Do children need to love their teachers?

Yesterday, I wrote a post explaining that important as the quality of teaching in a school is, there are other, more important things on which to concentrate. In response, Katharine Birbalsingh, head mistress of Michaela School tweeted this: I agree with lots of this but @DavidDidau misses a, if not THE most important thing: kids need to love their teacher. They need to be inspired. When a kid loves their teacher, they’ll work & work for them both inside & outside the classroom. And hard work is what counts. https://t.co/5g4qivJxvc — Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) July 8, 2018 Did I miss a [...]

2020-02-02T21:10:25+00:00July 9th, 2018|Featured|
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