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A summary of my arguments about education

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew. Oliver Goldsmith A tradition without intelligence is not worth having. T. S. Eliot Debating ideas in education - and anywhere else - is essential if we want to improve the lot of children and society. Over the past 6 years of so I've learned huge amounts from taking part in this back and forth and have, as well as becoming a good deal more knowledgeable, become a lot more adept at thinking critically about the ideas I encounter. My views have changed a [...]

2017-08-16T13:59:14+01:00April 13th, 2017|psychology|

The Great Education Debate

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate. Hubert H. Humphrey With increasing frequency, someone will pop up on social media to announce to the world that debating the best way to approach the project of education is a waste of time. These are the reasons I'm typically presented with when I demur: 1. It's boringly repetitive and nothing new is ever contributed. 2. It's just a bun fight rather than an actual debate and no one ever changes their minds. 3. Real teachers in real schools don't know anything about it so it obviously can't be [...]

2017-04-18T17:29:04+01:00April 12th, 2017|Featured|

The consequences of freedom Part 2

Last month I wrote about RD Laing and how his conception of freedom has had a lasting and negative impact on education as well as wider society. In this post I want to consider the role of Isiah Berlin in shaping how we have come to think about freedom. Berlin was a Russian born, British educated philosopher and political theorist. At the heart of his thinking was a concern with how to protect individual freedom. He wanted human beings to be free to make their own mistakes without well-meaning, paternalistic institutions making decisions about what is best for us. He saw this nannying attitude [...]

2017-04-12T12:08:33+01:00April 12th, 2017|behaviour|

Neo-progressivism

Like most people involved in education, I believe in social justice. I want all children, no matter their backgrounds or starting points, to have the best chance of achieving well. I want young people to be creative. I want them to be skilled at collaborating with others to solve problems. I want them to be able to clearly and critically communicate their thoughts. I want them to take on challenges and persist in the face of set backs. I want them to be prepared for an uncertain future. And, of course, I want them to be tolerant, compassionate, open-minded, curious, cooperative [...]

2018-01-23T13:16:52+00:00April 9th, 2017|Featured|

Why do we forget stuff? Familiarity vs recall

Now and then, I've taught whet seemed to be a successful lesson. I'd explain challenging content, check for understanding, get some great responses to consolidation activities and, at the end of the lesson, students would troop out happy, confident and certain they'd grasped what ever it was I'd taught only for them to have seemingly forgotten it all by next lesson. Sound familiar? How is it that children can appear to have understood one day but forget the next? In order to remember something, first you have to think about it. We can't think about everything in the environment because we have [...]

2017-04-09T21:50:41+01:00April 8th, 2017|psychology|

Are ‘closed book’ examinations a bad idea?

Changes to the GCSE English Literature specifications are, apparently, starting to bite. As well as abandoning the modular approach to assessment in which students sat 2 separate modular exams and completed an extended piece of controlled assessment, students are now expected to sit two terminal exams.  One change to these exams which has upset lots of English teachers is the move from 'open book' to 'closed book' exams. What this means is that students are no longer permitted to take copies of the texts they have studied into the exam and are instead required to have learned quotations by heart. The TES [...]

2018-01-22T08:10:42+00:00April 6th, 2017|English|

Didau’s Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the science of classification. As such it’s useful for ordering items within a domain into different categories. Contrary to popular understanding, although taxonomies can be hierarchical, they don't have to be so. In education, the word ‘taxonomy’ is most closely associated with the prefix, ‘Bloom’s’. As every teacher knows, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a triangle with ‘knowledge’ at its base and ‘evaluation’ or ‘creativity’ at its apex. In fact, Bloom’s Taxonomy is not just a triangular diagram, it’s actually an attempt to classify different thinking skills. The triangle has simply come to represent the taxonomy. The educational psychologist, Benjamin Bloom, who [...]

2019-10-23T19:13:40+01:00April 4th, 2017|Featured|

The importance of reading fluency

Following on from a recent post on the folly of forcing children to read along as they are being read to, I presented my thoughts on reading fluency and the problems with 'reading along' at researchED's English & MFL conference in the stunning surroundings of Oxford University's Examination Rooms. For those who might be interested, here are the slides I used. The importance of reading fluency from David Didau

2017-04-03T00:02:04+01:00April 3rd, 2017|reading|

Global warming in education: Why Schleicher is wrong

Without data you're just another person with an opinion. Andreas Schleicher As we all know - well, most of us - the climate is changing as a result of human behaviour. Maybe we could do something about it, but it won't be painless. It would involve those of us living in the developed world giving up some of the conveniences we take for granted. If we don't make these changes we shouldn't be too surprised if global temperatures change drastically resulting in all sort of disturbing possibilities. Similarly, human behaviour has an effect on the educational climate and the beliefs and [...]

2021-06-29T16:54:11+01:00March 31st, 2017|Featured|

The problem with ‘reading along’

It has become an unwritten law of teaching that when reading aloud to students, the teacher must ensure students are reading along in their own copy of the text. This is, I contend, a bad idea. To understand why we need to consider working memory in some detail. It's well-known that the capacity of working memory is strictly limited - estimates range from anywhere between 4 to 9 items at any one time - but it's less well-known that working memory is almost certainly not a single edifice. Baddeley and Hitch's widely accepted working memory model contains four distinct components. The central [...]

2017-03-27T15:01:54+01:00March 25th, 2017|psychology, reading|

The consequences of freedom

Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM! Mel Gibson Freedom is one of the most popular tropes in modern thinking. We yearn for it and yet feel constantly thwarted. Like Macbeth we are "cabin'd, cribbed, confin'd, bound in to saucy doubts and fears." Wouldn't it be [...]

2017-03-26T21:38:23+01:00March 23rd, 2017|behaviour|

What do teachers believe?

It's well-established that various 'myths' about how students' learn are remarkably persistent in the face of contradictory evidence. In 2014, Paul Howard-Jones' article, Neuroscience and education: myths and messages revealed the extent of teachers' faulty beliefs: In the UK, 93% of teachers believe that matching instruction to students' preferred learning style is a good idea, 88% believed in some form of Brain Gym, with 91% being convinced by the left-brain-right brain hypothesis. He concludes with the following: Neuromyths are misconceptions about the brain that flourish when cultural conditions protect them from scrutiny. Their form is influenced by a range of biases in how we [...]

2017-03-16T20:49:30+00:00March 16th, 2017|research|
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