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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|

Why I don’t think emojis should be studied in school

I have nothing against emojis, just as I have nothing against kittens, turpentine or billiards. I'm more than happy for anyone who's minded to stroke kittens, drink turps and swan around with a billiards cue. Equally, I have no problem whatsoever with people peppering their texts or tweets with smiley faces or grinning turds; each to her own. But, despite my laissez-faire approach to emoji in general life, I'm afraid this easy going, live-and-let-live facade melts away when teachers argue that emoji - or any other essentially transient pop culture phenomena - ought to be used or studied in the classroom. [...]

2017-07-20T16:49:31+01:00July 20th, 2017|curriculum|

Beware the nuance trap

In possibly the best titled academic paper of the year, Kieran Healy argues that nuance is, contrary to popular belief, a bad thing. He makes it clear he's not arguing against nuance per se, but against the tendency to make ...some bit of theory “richer” or “more sophisticated” by adding complexity to it, usually by way of some additional dimension, level, or aspect, but in the absence of any strong means of disciplining or specifying the relationship between the new elements and the existing ones. (p. 118) He argues that this kind of demand for nuance makes for worse theories, that [...]

2017-07-15T14:32:39+01:00July 15th, 2017|Featured|

Conscious and unconscious minds: Implications for teaching and learning literacy

This is a guest post by Hugo Kerr who got in touch with the offer that this appear first on the blog. What Hugo refers to as the 'unconscious mind' is, I think, largely analogous with my interpretation of long-term memory. There are echoes of Daniel Kahneman's system 1 and 2 and Jonathan Haidt's elephant and rider in these ideas. I'm not sure I agree with all his ideas and proposals, but Hugo's plea that we address ourselves to aligning teaching with the silent, unseen power of our unconscious is certainly worth of consideration. Here follows an introduction to his thoughts and a [...]

2017-07-15T08:17:18+01:00July 15th, 2017|Featured|

If not knowledge, what?

knowledge /ˈnɒlɪdʒ/ noun facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. "a thirst for knowledge" awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. "the programme had been developed without his knowledge" Those of us who talk about putting knowledge at the heart of education might not be talking about the same thing. In a recent post, I wrote the following: Philosophers tend to think about knowledge as justified true belief. Getting to grips with this would involve recapping some drawn out, tangled philosophical debates. I’m not going to do [...]

2024-11-18T19:16:23+00:00July 14th, 2017|Featured|

What is a broad and balanced curriculum?

Historically, the curriculum schools have taught hasn't really mattered that much. Then, when the National Curriculum was introduced in the late 1980s, committees of experts had made all the decisions for us. As more and more schools have academised and won free of the strictures of  the National Curriculum, you might have expected a flowering of thought about how best to structure and select what children should be taught, but far more effort has been expended on the how of education. This may, in part, be due to Ofsted's long preoccupation with judging the quality of teaching and learning provided by [...]

2018-02-26T09:18:51+00:00July 8th, 2017|curriculum|
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