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Good intentions are not good enough

I genuinely believe that everyone involved in education is well-intentioned. If making money was the prime motivation I'm sure we could find other, more profitable areas to operate in. Like international arms trading. Everyone wants the best for young people, but, of course, there's little agreement on what this should look like. Human beings are tribal. We band together with those who share our ideological preferences and make those with whom we disagree the enemy. This makes a certain kind of sense. If someone dissents from our well-considered opinion about how children ought to be educated we're prone to engaging in [...]

2018-01-23T17:04:18+00:00January 23rd, 2018|Featured|

12 rules for schools – Rule 2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

This is the second in a series of posts adapting Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules of Life to the context of eduction. You can find my thoughts on Rule 1 here. Please note, Peterson talks about a lot of other stuff - much of it religious - which I'm largely ignoring. This is just my partial take. According to this study, one third of every prescription a doctor writes goes unfilled, and, over half of those people who do collect their medication won't take it correctly. Why would this be? Why would some one who felt ill enough to visit their doctor not then [...]

2018-01-23T15:33:40+00:00January 22nd, 2018|Featured|

12 Rules for schools – Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back

I've just finished the Canadian academic and controversialist, Jordan Peterson's book, 12 Rules of Life: An antidote to chaos and my over-riding impression is that it's an important, erudite and thoughtful addition to the library of anyone interested in philosophy, ethics, religion, literature, psychology and the history of thought. But it's an often challenging and occasionally irritating at times. I guarantee that Peterson will say things which will annoy you. Don't let tis put you off. His wisdom and compassion underlie even his most provocative and incendiary ideas. His 12 rules are as follows: Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders [...]

2018-02-26T11:36:05+00:00January 21st, 2018|Featured|

Can we develop a ‘love of learning’?

The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus Why are some people healthier than others? This might sound like a bit of silly question. The answer is surely obvious: some people eat better and exercise more than others. But is that all there is to it? Couldn't 'healthiness' be attributed, at least in part, to our genes? Might some of us be born with a greater capacity for health than others? We know that various physical traits - eye and hair colour, height, weight, certain specific genetic disorders - absolutely are inherited, so why not a general factor of healthiness? [...]

2022-04-02T15:29:13+01:00January 13th, 2018|Featured|

Getting culture right Part 2: Understanding group psychology

This is the second post on getting cultures right in schools. You can find Part 1, on social norms and using normative messages, here. We are essentially social animals and have evolved to thrive in groups. Although we tend to be disposed to share resources and cooperate with those we perceive as belonging to our group, we are worryingly ready to discriminate against anyone we see as an outsider. Creating a community with a sense of belonging is the ambition of all schools. In part, this involves creating a sense that students are part of an in-group – whether in a local [...]

2018-01-12T15:20:49+00:00January 12th, 2018|behaviour, psychology|

Teaching to make children cleverer – Part 3

As discussed in Part 1 of this series of posts, it seems probable that the best way to use education to increase children's cognitive capacities is to increase the quantity and the quality of what they know. In Part 2 I discussed ways we might increase the quantity of what of what children know about the world, and in this post I want to explore how we might go about selecting what to teach with an eye for quality. Any attempt to discuss improving the quality of children's knowledge will be, inevitably, subjective and partial, but every effort ought to be made to reduce [...]

2018-01-10T15:11:02+00:00January 10th, 2018|curriculum|

Teaching to make children cleverer – Part 2

In my last post I reviewed those aspects on intelligence which are likely to be most malleable by teachers. Briefly, research into individual differences suggests that intelligence is fairly stable and that environmental factors - parenting and teaching - seem to wear off over time. At the same time, research into social attitudes (the rise in IQ scores over that last century) clearly demonstrates that something really is changing and that these changes have real world significance. This present us with a paradox which perhaps can be explained by saying that g (the tendency of cognitive abilities in individuals to correlate [...]

2018-01-07T11:28:33+00:00January 7th, 2018|psychology|

A year in blogging

This was my sixth year of blogging and it was a real mixed bag. For reasons of mental well-being I more or less stopped blogging in the last four months of the year and almost completely swore off social media. That said, almost 750,000 people visited the site and I managed to cobble together over 100 posts, the ten most popular of which are summarised below. 1. Is growth mindset bollocks? - 25th January A somewhat scurrilous foray into the latest failure to replicate Carol Dweck's research into the growth mindset. In summary, I don't think her research is bollocks, but I'm [...]

2018-01-06T15:30:32+00:00January 6th, 2018|blogging|

Teaching to make children cleverer: Part 1

I've argued previously that the aim of education ought to be to make children cleverer. If I'm right, then not only is it desirable, it's also possible to achieve this end. But before we can do so, we need to make sure we have a solid understanding of precisely which aspects of intelligence we might be able to boost. In What Is Intelligence? James Flynn suggests a number of factors that make up an individual's intelligence: Mental acuity - the ability to come up with solutions to problems about which we have no prior knowledge Habits of mind - the ways [...]

2018-01-07T15:15:49+00:00January 5th, 2018|Featured|

Reading aloud might boost students' memories

In the latest edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, Bradley Busch writes about a new study which compared the effects on memory of reading in silence to those of reading out loud. Noah Forrin and Colin MacLeod's paper, This time it’s personal: the memory benefit of hearing oneself, explores what's been termed the 'production effect' - a neat name for the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently. The speculation is that the effort of saying something out loud appears to make information more cognitively 'sticky', creating stronger schematic connections in long-term memory. This advantage appears [...]

2017-12-07T10:26:28+00:00December 7th, 2017|psychology, reading|

The best books I’ve read this year

Here follows a list of the books that I've most enjoyed and which have most affected my thinking this year. I've presented them in alphabetical order so as not to have to make choices about which were best: if they're on the list then I think they're worth reading. I note, with some shame, that yet again I've gone mainly for books by white men. Please don't hold that against me or them. I never consciously make choices about what to read based on the physical characteristics of the writer, but am nevertheless aware that what we choose to read shapes [...]

2017-12-06T17:30:07+00:00December 6th, 2017|Featured, reading|

Thought Depends on Knowledge

Paul Kirschner, lead author of the research paper that has perhaps most influenced my thinking, is a bit of an educational hero. Imagine my nervousness when he came to see give a talk on 'the trouble with transfer' at the researchED national conference a couple of years ago. There are few audience members likely to be more knowledgeable or more intolerant of guff. It came as a very welcome relief when he made a few complimentary comments afterwards. I've since met him on a number of occasions and have found him to be hugely insightful, incredibly generous and charmingly irascible. So, after [...]

2017-12-05T15:46:01+00:00December 5th, 2017|blogging|
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