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Is gaslighting a thing, or am I going mad?

In the 40s crime film, Gaslight, a murderous husband tries (and ultimately fails) to convince his wife she's going mad by hiding various of her possessions and then accusing her of having done it herself. He isolates her from anyone who might be able to corroborate her version of events, saying that she's not well and that she needs to rest. After a while, she begin to believe that she's going mad and that she shouldn't go out in public. Naturally, the wicked plot unravels and the evil husband is unveiled as the cad he really is. Whatever the film's merits, [...]

2017-09-12T16:55:25+01:00September 12th, 2017|Featured|

Why I’m grateful for black people talking to me about race

I've just finished reading Reni Eddo-Logde's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race.* As a result I feel I need to update some of what I've recently written. Eddo-Lodge does an excellent job of articulating how 'whiteness' can - possibly should - be viewed as an ideological structure similar to patriarchy. She argues that being white conveys all sorts of advantages, some subtle, some obvious while not being white results in equal and opposite disadvantages, and, because being white comes along with all this good stuff, white people, wittingly or otherwise, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. [...]

2017-09-05T17:05:17+01:00September 5th, 2017|Featured|

The Back to School Collection

So, Monday morning looms and another term begins. For everyone stepping back into a classroom this week, chin up, don't work too hard, and remember, it's just a job. For those new to the profession - or simply looking for a bit of refresher - I wrote a series of back of school posts a few years ago and, having reviewed them, am still happy they represent a pretty solid approach to teaching. Here they are: Routines Relationships Literacy Planning Marking Here too are a series of 'Five Things" posts that will, I believe, be useful for all teachers: Reading Writing [...]

2017-09-03T14:52:35+01:00September 3rd, 2017|Featured|

The tension between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’

One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the ‘ought’ from the ‘is.’ My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce. Jacques Monod Here is a list of things I believe to be both important and true: Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests predicts educational outcomes, health (both physical and mental, safety, happiness, creativity, conscientiousness and longevity. The [...]

2020-02-18T15:57:30+00:00August 24th, 2017|Featured|

Two fallacies to avoid

Avoiding logical fallacies can be tricky and, as responses to some of my recent posts has made clear, anyone who spends time debating evolutionary psychology, behaviour genetics or science in general will find themselves having to hack through thick swathes of them in their attempts to get a little closer to truth. Two particularly prevalent and egregious fallacies we must strive to avoid are the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy, first coined by the philosopher G.E. Moore, is similar in construction to Hume's 'is/ought problem'. The fallacy, in essence, confuses what's natural with what's good and leads [...]

2020-02-18T16:19:14+00:00August 14th, 2017|research|

Do schools matter less than we think?

Disturbingly for all of us involved in education, it seems as if schools and teaching may matter a lot less than we would like to believe. Before setting out the arguments I want to make it clear that this is a struggle for me and I really don't want it to be true. That said, being professionally sceptical requires that we doubt what we want to believe as much - more - than the stuff that's obvious guff. In order to understand what comes next, I'm going to take the liberty of providing a quick refresher on the mechanics of behaviour [...]

2017-08-12T17:44:15+01:00August 12th, 2017|research|

Larkin was wrong: parenting makes less difference than we think

Being a parent is a terrifying responsibility. The message of Larkin's poem, ‘This Be The Verse’, is that parents cannot help but pass on their failings to their children, and that the reason we are as we are is an inevitable consequence of how we were brought up. The thought that I probably can’t help filling my daughters with my faults can seem an alarming inevitability, but one of the most troubling truths I’ve had to grapple with as a parent is that parenting doesn’t really matter. OK, that’s not quite right: parenting matters a great deal in how happy we [...]

2020-02-24T07:00:03+00:00August 11th, 2017|Featured, research|

What causes behaviour?

The age-old debate as to what causes human behaviour - nature vs nurture - shows little sign of running out of steam, despite having been emphatically resolved as far as science is concerned.  Although all knowledge is contingent and no scientist worthy of the name would ever say there are no facts established completely beyond doubt, the mountains of evidence that have piled up in favour of genetic causes for behaviour as opposed to environmental ones is solemnly impressive. No one argues that genes are wholly responsible for how we behave or that the environment has no effect on how we [...]

2017-08-24T17:29:34+01:00August 10th, 2017|research|

Getting culture right Part 1: Normative messages

If you want to change anything within a school, culture is crucial. As Tom Bennett argues in Creating a Culture: How school leaders can optimise behaviour, culture is "the way we do things round here". His advice to school leaders is to purposely design the culture you want in your school and then work hard to communicate your vision so that it becomes something that lives in the minds of everyone within the school community. Easy to say, hard to do. Any attempt to change culture has to start with acknowledging and then shifting what's considered socially normal. If the social norm [...]

2017-08-02T15:25:28+01:00August 2nd, 2017|behaviour, psychology|

How to start a lesson

Starters are, as the name suggests, meant to start off your lesson and engage students in some sort of learning related activity the moment they shuffle though your classroom door. I’ve seen (and been responsible for) countless starter activities either projected (or written in the old days) on the board or scattered over desks. This ensures the keen beans who arrive early don’t have to lose precious learning time while they wait for the cool cohort who will cut it is fine as you allow ’em to. Back in 2002 I moved to a new school and was given as a welcome present 101 [...]

2017-07-29T10:58:51+01:00July 29th, 2017|Featured|

Castle Shakespeare: Why study the Bard?

Let me give you, let me share with you, the City of Invention. For what novelists do... is to build the Houses of the Imagination, and where houses cluster together there is a city... Let us look round the city: become acquainted with it, make it our eternal, our immortal home. Looming over everything, of course, the heart of the City, is the great Castle Shakespeare. You see it whichever way you look. It rears its head into the clouds, reaching into the celestial sky, dominating everything around. It’s a rather uneven building, frankly. Some complain it’s shoddy, and carelessly constructed [...]

2019-11-30T15:34:56+00:00July 23rd, 2017|English, Featured|

How to be an English teacher: designing an English PGCE

From September I will be teaching a small group of prospective English teachers what I think they need to know in order to do a decent job as part of the new BPP University PGCE course. I was very flattered to be asked to be involved, particularly as I have no special expertise and no track record at all in higher education, but thrilled beyond reason at the idea of designing the kind of course I wish I'd be on when I trained to be a teacher back in the 90s. Whilst I wouldn't go as far as to claim that [...]

2017-07-22T07:41:24+01:00July 22nd, 2017|Featured|
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