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The secret of successful schools: the Anna Karenina Principle

For men are good in but one way, but bad in many. Aristotle Tolstoy's great novel, Anna Karenina, opens with the famous line, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy's point is that a happy marriage depends on a long lists of variables: mutual attraction, agreement about finances, parenting, religion, in-laws and many other crucial respects. You might have everything else in your favour, but if any one of these vital ingredients is missing, or out of kilter, happiness is doomed. This is the Anna Karenina Principle: A deficiency in any one of a [...]

2017-06-14T07:12:21+01:00June 14th, 2017|leadership|

Ability is the consequence not the cause of what children learn

The evidence on ability grouping appears relatively well-known. The EEF Toolkit summarise the research findings thus: Overall, setting or streaming appears to benefit higher attaining pupils and be detrimental to the learning of mid-range and lower attaining learners. On average, it does not appear to be an effective strategy for raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils, who are more likely to be assigned to lower groups. It appears that children who are deemed to be 'low ability' fall behind pupils with equivalent prior attainment at the rate of 1-2 months per year when placed in ability groups. Conversely, high attainers make, [...]

2021-05-11T23:37:59+01:00June 13th, 2017|Featured|

My idea for making science a more fundamental part of culture and society

I've been asked to contribute an idea to the British Science Association's campaign, Science: not just for scientists. Their aim is to compile "100 ideas to make science a more fundamental part of culture and society". My idea, if you're interested, is falsifiability. If you want to vote for my idea, or any other, you can do so here. The importance of being wrong What I love about science is that it’s not an attempt to prove ideas to be right; instead it’s all about testing theories to destruction in the hope of finding them to be wrong. This is a lesson [...]

2018-07-23T09:12:59+01:00June 2nd, 2017|Featured|

How not to disagree: Swearing & insults

If you don't like swearing this post's probably not for you. I'm a big fan of profanity and, much to the chagrin of my family, I swear immoderately. There are times when nothing else quite expresses the depth of one's feelings or conveys a point with suitable emphasis. I enjoy the judicious use of most swear words and, suitably combined, they can even achieve a certain caustic beauty. Back in the mists of time when I taught EFL, one of my students' favourite lessons was on the uses of 'fuck' as a phrasal verb. It really has quite remarkably varied utility. But despite [...]

2017-05-30T22:08:41+01:00May 30th, 2017|Featured|

What does the Theory of Multiple Intelligences tell us about how to teach?

As I explained here, the scientific consensus is that intelligence is general. That is, if you are good at verbal comprehension, you'll also tend to be good perceptual organisation, and if you're good at maths, you're also likely to be good at English. This is counter-intuitive. Most people believe that mental abilities trade off against each other and the doing well in one area means doing poorly in another. Of course, this might be true for some people, but just because your mate John can barely count his own fingers but happens to be a literary genius, doesn't disprove the fact that [...]

2020-05-15T13:12:01+01:00May 26th, 2017|psychology|

Reframing the debate: It's not what you do, it's why you do it

For the past few years I've regularly railed against anyone who claims that either there is no debate about the best way to teach, or that said debate isn't worth having because the vast majority of teachers either don't know there's a debate or don't care about it. While this may or may not be true, some of the people I've interacted with in this time have, like me, come to change their mind about how best to teach, and some have become ever more deeply entrenched in opposing schools of thought. Calling these schools of though 'traditional' and 'progressive' is probably [...]

2017-05-23T07:37:16+01:00May 23rd, 2017|Featured|

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 2: The effects of education

In Part 1 of this series I laid out why IQ matters and that, far from being a banal measure of merely of how well some people do in a series of irrelevant tests, IQ actually has real power to predict people's life chances. What seems incontrovertibly true is that a higher IQ leads to a better life. This could easily seem like a counsel of despair if it automatically meant that children with lower IQs lived shorter, less fulfilled lives. Thankfully, there is something we can do and in this post I want to show the effects education has on raising IQ. [...]

2017-05-22T15:24:05+01:00May 22nd, 2017|psychology|

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 1: Why IQ matters

Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not. Montaigne Although it’s become a truism to say we know relatively little about how our brains work, we know a lot more now than we used to. Naturally, everything we know is contingent and subject to addition, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or pretend we don’t know enough to draw some fairly clear conclusions. Despite the many myths surrounding it, intelligence is a good candidate for being the most well researched and best understood characteristic of the human brain. It’s also probably the most stable construct [...]

2017-05-22T15:14:22+01:00May 21st, 2017|psychology|

Should teachers do what children want?

Every weekday morning, my daughters both moan about having to get up for school. They moan about their teachers and they moan about homework. Given free rein, they would spend all day every day watching BuzzFeed video channels, making Spotify playlists, watching Netflix and taking online quizzes. It's not that they're lazy, it's just that they'd really rather not have to learn maths, science and geography. They're both moderately conscientious, reasonably hardworking girls who never put a foot wrong in school. On parents' evenings, we're regaled with tales of how good their attitude to school is and how much progress they're [...]

2018-01-05T23:32:17+00:00May 19th, 2017|behaviour, leadership|

The problem with problem solving (or, why I struggle to reset my clock)

When the clocks went forward in March and we arrived in British Summer Time, I made an abortive attempt to change the time on my car's clock. I knew, from having eventually changed it six months ago, that this is a process entirely within my grasp and yet, after about 10 minutes of frustrated fumbling, I'd only succeeded in moving the time forward by 20 minutes. I gave up and resigned myself to having a clock that is 20 minutes fast for the foreseeable future.  This has resulted in a few moments of confusion and panic over the past few weeks. Things [...]

2017-05-14T10:28:40+01:00May 14th, 2017|psychology|

Why parents should support schools

Like all parents, I want the best for my children. When they're unhappy, I'm unhappy. When they suffer injustice, I'm incensed. When their school makes a decision I disagree with, my first reaction is to get in touch and point out where they've gone wrong and what they should do about it. When she was in primary school, my eldest daughter had a teacher who believed in the power of collective punishment, and, as a well-behaved, hard-working pupil she was made to suffer for the poor behaviour of some of the other children in her class. This struck both her and me [...]

2017-05-14T12:10:29+01:00May 13th, 2017|behaviour|

Can we improve school interviews? Part 3: The interview lesson

In Part 1 of this series I reviewed some of the evidence on what makes for effective interviews, and in Part 2 I looked specifically at creating a less biased, more structured formal interview. In this post I'm going to lay out my thoughts on the usefulness of the interview lesson. One of the peculiarities of teaching is that teaching a sample lesson has become a ubiquitous part of the interview process. The received wisdom is that we can work out a lot of what we want to know about a prospective employee's teaching ability by watching them teach a class [...]

2017-05-11T17:48:54+01:00May 11th, 2017|psychology|
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