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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|

Two types of learning – which one is best?

Evolutionary biologists think of learning as being either social or asocial. Social learning is essentially copying - what is everyone else doing? - whereas asocial learning is accrued by interacting with the environment through trial and error. All learning is either social or asocial; we either learn through mimicry or experimentation, innovation or observation. When thinking about how to teach, it's worth considering the role of evolution in shaping the way we have adapted to think and learn. In our distant past, learning was a costly strategy - time spent learning was time we couldn't spend looking for food and opportunities [...]

2021-12-17T19:27:03+00:00July 4th, 2017|learning|

Put down your crystal balls

Many of the schools I visit and work with feel under enormous pressure to predict what their students are likely to achieve in their next set of GCSEs. In the past, this approach sort of made sense. Of course there was always a margin for error, but most experienced teachers just knew what a C grade looked like in their subject. Also, when at least half of students' results were based on 'banked' modular results, the pressure to predict became ever more enticing. Sadly, the certainties we may have relied on have gone. Not only have Ofqual have worked hard to [...]

2017-07-04T09:32:36+01:00July 3rd, 2017|assessment, leadership|

Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer

Here are the slides I used in the talk I gave at this year's Education Festival: Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer from David Didau The antipathy of very many otherwise sensible people to the concept of intelligence is really quite remarkable. This aversion seems only to be increased by bringing up the subject of IQ tests. The idea that IQ tests are only useful for showing how good some people are at taking IQ tests is a deeply ignorant view based upon a breathtaking piece of intellectual dishonesty. It's difficult to believe that people like Professor Guy Claxton [...]

2017-06-26T07:55:06+01:00June 25th, 2017|Featured|

‘Understanding’ and Occam’s razor

At the beginning of the 20th century, physicists Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein both concluded independently that measurements of light speed would be the same for all observers. But while both arrived at the same results from their equations, Lorentz’s explanation relied on changes that take place in ‘the ether’. Because Einstein's paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies made no reference to a mysterious, undetectable substance, his explanation was accepted as being the most likely. Even after Einstein's theory of special relativity had been accepted, Lorentz wasn't willing to let go of his belief in 'luminiferous aether'. In 1909 he wrote, [...]

2024-11-18T19:08:41+00:00June 24th, 2017|learning|

A Novice→Expert Model of Learning

Every artist was first an amateur. Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the best understood principles of cognitive psychology is that novices learn and think differently to experts. These labels are domain-specific, not person-specific; I can be an expert at particle physics whilst still being a novice at evolutionary biology. Or skateboarding. Similarly, you could be an expert skateboarder whilst knowing little of nothing about theatre design or ancient Tibetan languages. What this means is that we're all novices at something, and many of us will be experts in at least one domain. To demonstrate how you think differently as an expert [...]

2018-01-07T15:09:36+00:00June 21st, 2017|learning|

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue’s model of learning? Part 2: The meta analyses

To help us better understand how we learn, John Hattie & Gregory Donoghue propose a new conceptual model of learning. I've already written about my concerns with the metaphor of depth in Part 1. In this post I want to explore what his meta analyses reveal about the best approaches to take with students at different stages in the journey from novice to expert. Inputs The first layer of Hattie & Donoghue's model is termed 'inputs' or, what children bring to the process of learning. These are grouped into three areas dubbed skill, will and thrill. The most important individual differences between students [...]

2017-06-18T12:09:33+01:00June 18th, 2017|learning|
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