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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|

What *does* improve children’s writing?

In my last post I discussed evidence that suggests grammar teaching does not lead to an improvement in children's writing. Although it seems implausible that grammar teaching would not be positively correlated with writing outcomes, there's a lot of evidence that is strongly suggestive that what I prefer to believe may not in fact actually be true. I've written enough about cognitive bias to know that I am predisposed to look for evidence that supports my preferences and dismiss evidence that contradicts them. The point of evidence is that it forces us to confront the extent to which our intuitions map [...]

2019-12-08T14:39:13+00:00December 1st, 2017|writing|

Can grammar teaching improve pupils’ writing?

Let me begin with an anecdote. The first time I ever really encountered the meta language of grammar was after finishing my degree in English Literature and embarking on a six-week course to qualify to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL). I had to cram a whole host of previously unknown terminology in order to pass the course and it all seemed pretty pointless. Not knowing this stuff hadn't made a jot of difference to my ability to read and write as far as I could tell. After I got my certificate I bounced from place to place using my [...]

2017-12-13T09:10:51+00:00November 29th, 2017|research, writing|

Why I recommend self-report to audit teachers’ grammatical knowledge

The response to my recent post on supporting teachers' standards of literacy was overwhelmingly positive, although, as expected, there was also some criticism. Some of the criticism was directed at my suggested process and several people were unhappy about the use of self-report to audit teacher's current level of confidence. I acknowledge that self-report is a notoriously unreliable tool for determining what people think and believe - often respondents simply answer in the way that they think the questioners wants them to and they are at pains to present themselves in the best possible light. Additionally, some readers felt that many [...]

2017-11-21T11:29:32+00:00November 21st, 2017|Featured|

How can we support teachers' standards of literacy?

Recently, I've spent some time talking to school leaders about how to implement and evaluate effective literacy policies in schools. From these conversations it's clear that one of the main stumbling blocks is concern over some teachers' standards of literacy. If "every teacher in English is a teacher of English," unless teachers are familiar with some fairly basic knowledge of the English language they may, inadvertently, be passing on misinformation and bad habits to their students. This is likely to disproportionately affect the least advantaged children, disadvantaging them further. It therefore makes sense to hold teachers to account for the personal [...]

2017-11-18T10:55:54+00:00November 18th, 2017|Featured|

Fundamental British Values: What are they and how should we teach them?

The Department for Education is in the process of setting up an expert advisory group to look at how best to develop and resource a curriculum intended to instil fundamental British values in our young people. These values are defined by the DfE as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. While we might want to quibble about whether these are the right values (and whether of not they're especially British) this is what has been settled upon, and, however cynical you feel about government diktats about what schools need to [...]

2017-10-27T11:32:55+01:00October 27th, 2017|Featured|

Leading literacy in schools

Leading on literacy can be a thoroughly thankless task. It can often feel like you're working incredibly hard to produce resources and strategies which colleagues at best ignore and at worst resent. The problem is often that we're expending effort in the wrong place and trying to persuade teachers to do the wrong things. Frustratingly, there's very little guidance about how best to spend your precious and it can be hard to find clear information on what approaches are likely to be most successful. My advice is to minimise the amount of time spent on apostrophe worksheets and spelling posters. It's [...]

2017-10-17T11:20:34+01:00October 17th, 2017|Featured|

Are IQ tests biased or meaningless?

Since my last foray into the world of intelligence testing, I've done a lot of reading about the idea that a) IQ tests are culturally biased and b) that the entire concept of intelligence is culturally biased. I want to preface my conclusions by reiterating the following points: I do not believe we should ever use IQ tests in schools to classify students, or to predict their academic acheivement. I do not believe that any group of people is in any way superior to any other group. The fact that various studies show differences in the IQ scores of men and [...]

2017-09-15T17:34:44+01:00September 15th, 2017|Featured|
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