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Unprofessional misjudgement

No, I’m not using evidence, but I’m not using prejudice either. I am exercising my professional judgement. Sue Cowley It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. Richard Feynman A few days ago I wrote about why we shouldn't credulously accept evidence, and that it wasn't as simple as suggesting that teachers either use evidence or prejudice to inform their decision. We are all guilty of using prejudice whether or not we use evidence. [...]

2017-03-01T14:50:08+00:00March 1st, 2017|research|

Evidence and disadvantage: How useful is the EEF Toolkit?

Although everyone's education is important, the education of disadvantaged students is, arguably, of much greater importance than that of students from more advantaged backgrounds. The more privileged your background, the less it's likely to matter what happens at school. Conversely, the more socially disadvantaged your background, the greater the impact of what does, or does not happen at school.Sadly though, access to education is more than likely to experience a Matthew effect. Those who have the best chance in life are the most likely to get a great education. That being the case, it seems reasonable to suggest that whilst all children deserve that the [...]

2017-02-27T09:01:15+00:00February 26th, 2017|research|

Education isn’t natural – that’s why it’s hard

One of the most troubling conundrums in the field of education is that the common sense observation that children learn so many things simply by virtue of being immersed in an appropriate environment is contradicted by the overwhelming empirical data that explicit instruction outperforms discovery approaches in schools. Why should this be? Surely if children can learn something as complex as speech without much effort, why do we need to go to the trouble of painstakingly teaching them phoneme/grapheme relationships? It's easy to sympathise with the view that it would be better to just give them some appropriate reading material and [...]

2023-05-11T11:23:00+01:00February 23rd, 2017|psychology|

Faith, scepticism and the ‘unswayable minority’

How do you stop people believing myths? The short answer is, it depends on how strongly people believe the myths. I've just read The Debunking Handbook, an excellent, free and succinct (only 9 pages in length!) manual produced by Sceptical Science for tackling misconceptions. In the section on what it refers to as the 'Worldview Backfire Effect' it makes the point that, "You ... stand a greater chance of correcting misinformation among those not as firmly decided about hot-button issues. This suggests that outreaches should be directed towards the undecided majority rather than the unswayable minority." When I wrote What if... I [...]

2023-05-04T10:36:25+01:00February 19th, 2017|myths|

O brave new world! The search for 21st century qualifications

It's difficult to ignore the appealing certainty that the times in which we are alive are unique and fundamentally different to any that have gone before. The most cited reason for this is the fact that the internet has changed everything. Technology has been transforming education for as long as either have been in existence. Language, arguably the most crucial technological advancement in human history, moved education from mere mimicry and emulation into the realms of cultural transmission; as we became able to express abstractions so we could teach our offspring about the interior world of thought beyond the concrete reality [...]

2017-02-16T12:37:59+00:00February 13th, 2017|learning, psychology|

Can all of learning be summed up by test scores?

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not all that bothered about test scores. I mean, obviously I'd far prefer pupils did well rather than poorly on a summative exam, particularly if it is likely to have some bearing on their future life chances - who wouldn't? - but I'm certainly not interested in raising test scores for the sake of raising test scores. Which is why I feel taken aback when people say things like this: @C_Hendrick @DavidDidau @LearningSpy you all really do think all of learning can be summed up by test scores don't you? — David Cahn (@EYBrofessional) February 12, [...]

2017-02-12T18:02:57+00:00February 12th, 2017|research|

How can school inspection get what it wants?

I read a great piece by Dr Becky Allen in Schools Week this morning on inherent unreliability of school inspections. In it she makes the point that human beings are incapable of making reliable, high stakes judgements due to our adaptive reliance on heuristics and our inability to adequately introspect about our biases  and preferences. But despite the dangers, she says, "This is not to say that school inspection should not have a role in our system. It is possible that the threat of inspection, day-in-day-out, leads to better practice in schools that outweighs the obvious dysfunctional behaviours it creates." I [...]

2017-02-11T07:33:17+00:00February 10th, 2017|leadership|

Is it worth trying to memorise facts?

We can only think about what we know and, no mater how intelligent we might be, we cannot think about something about which we are ignorant. But how well do we need to know things? Is there any point to memorising facts? I had an interesting discussion with some primary maths teachers recently about the benefits of memorising certain basic maths facts. While pretty much everyone agreed that if children had memorised number bonds to ten and times tables then they would have an advantage when performing calculations, there was a difference of opinion on what was reasonable to expect. Some teachers suggested that [...]

2017-02-08T17:17:40+00:00February 8th, 2017|learning|

War and Peace in education

After a long flight, I've finally finished rereading War and Peace and, if you were in any doubt, it is a masterpiece. I found so much I'd either entirely forgotten or hadn't understood from my first reading over 20 years ago. What particularly struck me was the final chapter from the Second Epilogue. Throughout the book, Tolstoy has been advancing his theory of history as being far more than the will and actions of 'great men'. We are, he rather thinks, all slaves to circumstance and our attempts at writing history are mere post hoc rationalisations of what happened. In this final [...]

2017-02-02T20:34:19+00:00February 2nd, 2017|Featured|

Knowing the names of things

Many people have written many thousands of words about the difference between knowledge and understanding, but I think Richard Feynman nails it here: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. This is sometimes used to belittle the idea that knowing what things are called is useful. Of course I agree that [...]

2017-11-27T17:52:07+00:00January 30th, 2017|Featured|

Is growth mindset bollocks?

Like everyone else, when I first came across Carol Dweck's theory of growth mindsets I was pretty psyched. There was something so satisfyingly truthy about the way the labels 'fixed' and 'growth' mindset could explain why children failed or succeeded at school. I wanted to believe that something as simple as telling children their brains are 'like a muscle' and showing them a cartoon about synapses forming could make them cleverer. And if praising effort instead of praising intelligence really did make all this happen, then why the hell wouldn't we? And best of all, the whole edifice was established on rock-solid, credible research and [...]

2017-01-28T13:42:55+00:00January 25th, 2017|psychology|

Reading for betterment

About 20 years ago, I read Tolstoy's uber-novel, War and Peace. The perfect set of conditions all came together: I'd just been sent a copy of the book by a friend who was keen that I read it, I was in my third year of an English literature degree and fairly convinced of the benefits of reading improving books, and I was ill and was living in a world where home internet access wasn't really a thing - at least not for students - and so I had little to distract me. I devoured it in about 2 weeks. Although long [...]

2024-06-16T12:30:51+01:00January 24th, 2017|reading|
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