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Post-truth and the best way to teach

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. St. Augustine We've always had a tendency to defer to what is most said most magnificently and shun that which is badly uttered but now it's a thing. To much fanfare, 'post-truth' has entered the lexicon and now we have a made-to-measure term for the emotively uttered truism that turns out not to be er... true. Deliberate falsehoods would be much easier to combat because, as Hannah Arendt put it, "The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of [...]

2017-01-03T10:25:55+00:00January 3rd, 2017|learning|

The 10 most popular posts on The Learning Spy in 2016

Here are the 10 most viewed posts of last year. Only half of them were actually written last year and some of them are several years old. I reckon this must in part be due to the fact that there are so many links to some of my older posts knocking around on t'internet and so, because my views have changed, I've taken the opportunity to rewrite some of them fairly extensively. I wonder if you can guess which ones? 10. 5 things every new (secondary) teacher should know about reading (August 2016) 9 Bottom sets and the scourge of low-level disruption (November 2016) 8. Is growth [...]

2017-01-02T18:29:35+00:00January 2nd, 2017|blogging|

The most interesting books I read last year

I put together a round up of my favourite reads of 2015 and some people seemed to like it. So, in typically opportunistic manner, I though I'd repeat the exercise. Here are some of the books I found most interesting in 2016: Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens was one of the books I most enjoyed last year so I was trilled to see Harari had a new one out. Homo Deus is subtitled 'a brief history of tomorrow' and, while acknowledging that predictions about the future are most noticeable for how wrong they tend to be, suggests a variety [...]

2017-01-02T14:54:23+00:00January 1st, 2017|Featured|

My favourite posts of 2016 on The Learning Spy

Here follows a selection of some of what I consider to be my best posts of 2016. I've learned not to be surprised that what I think is my best writing is rarely appreciated by others and this is certainly reflected in the selection below; almost all of these posts went largely unnoticed by the reading public. In a desperate attempt to rectify this injustice I once again foist them before you for your consideration. January Can anyone teach? Well, that depends on what you think education is for - The role of the teacher is a continual battleground between the various [...]

2016-12-31T10:58:09+00:00December 31st, 2016|blogging|

My favourite blog posts of 2016

Here follows my extremely partial take on some of the blog post I have most enjoyed reading this year Heather Fearn - Reading fluency and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ My only continuing niggle with Heather's blog is that she stubbornly refuses to add a 'follow by email' widget and, seeing as I can't make head not tail of RSS feeds and the like, I often miss her posts much too often. That said, pretty much everything she writes is ace and I really should make more of an effort. This one, on the haphazard way reading is taught in secondary schools [...]

2016-12-30T13:30:22+00:00December 30th, 2016|blogging|

Last one in: My return to Michaela

I had an afternoon free in London on Monday (what luxury!) and arranged to pop in to Michaela Community School to see what, if anything, had changed since my last visit in May 2015. I hadn't realised it at the time but my blog was one of the very first written about a visit to the school and marked something of a watershed. Hard to believe now, what with a series of high profile education debates and the launch of their manifesto, The Michaela Way, but staff had been operating under radio silence and blogging was verboten. Headteacher, Katherine Birbalsingh laughingly [...]

2016-12-16T16:24:01+00:00December 16th, 2016|Featured|

Struggle and success

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Albert Camus The gods of ancient Greece punished Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, for his hubris by condemning him to an eternity of pushing a huge rock up a hill only to have it roll down again as soon as he got it to the top. One can only imagine that Sisyphus was not a happy chap. Pushing a boulder up a hill with no prospect of ever reaching the top has become the very image of futility. Most people only persist with something difficult [...]

2017-03-14T22:24:39+00:00December 9th, 2016|learning|

So, I’ve been reinstated by Twitter

Without a word of explanation, my Twitter account unsuspended itself this evening. In case you didn't get round to noticing, I'd been suspended the day before. Thank you so much to the veritable legion of supporters who inundated @twitter with requests to get me off the naughty step - it almost brought a tear to my jaundiced, cynical old eyes. I also have to thank some blue-ticked big hitters from the edupress for going straight to the top: https://twitter.com/RichardA/status/806957477086527488 https://twitter.com/Ed_Dorrell/status/806958309639159808 But have I learned anything from the experience? Probably not. It was odd and strangely liberating  to read tweets about myself without being able [...]

2016-12-09T00:14:20+00:00December 8th, 2016|Featured|

So, I’ve been suspended by Twitter

This afternoon various people started text messaging me to ask why my Twitter account had been suspended. Needless to say, the news came as something of a surprise. No one from Twitter had contacted me and, after filing a complaint, I've been left kicking my heels and speculating. The two competing theories are 1) that this guy complained about me (seems unlikely that Twitter would take him seriously) or 2) that I've breached some sort of ethical code for posting 4 or 5 30 second clips from the Pixies concert I attended the previous evening. (Again, this seems unlikely as there's [...]

2016-12-08T00:32:09+00:00December 7th, 2016|Featured|

PISA 2015: some tentative thoughts about successful teaching

Despite all the eminently sensible caveats offered by Sam Freedman, PISA provides a fascinating lens through which to view the world of education. The most interesting of the PISA documents I've had a chance to look at today is Policies and Practices for Successful Schools. It's a long document and a great many policies and practices are addressed, but the most interesting to me is the section on how science is taught (pp 65-77). As the report says, "How science is taught at school can make a big difference for students." In order to work out what sorts of activities regularly occur [...]

2017-03-06T08:14:28+00:00December 6th, 2016|Featured|

Making a mockery of marking: The new GCSE English Language mocks

The following is a guest post from the mastermind of Comparative Judgement, Dr Chris Wheadon. The marking of English Language is likely to be extremely challenging this year. English Language has long form answer questions, typically with 8, 16 and 24 mark responses. Ofqual’s research suggests the following range of precision is normal across GCSE and A level: 8 mark items: +/- 3 marks 16 mark items: +/- 4 marks 24 mark items: +/- 6 marks So, when an 8 mark item is marked, for the same response, it is normal for one marker to give 4 marks, while another will give 7 [...]

2016-12-05T13:38:59+00:00December 5th, 2016|assessment|

Is criticising learning styles an attack on the poor?

Richard Olsen is a PhD candidate at Monash University studying "pedagogical capacity, effectiveness and quality in a changing world". He recently linked to this Australian Research Summary of Learning Styles saying, "Attacking learning styles isn't about learning styles, rather promoting instruction & learning as recalling facts." This is an interesting idea and not one I'd encountered before. He goes further, claiming, "the sustained attacks on learning styles are really attacks on feminist pedagogy, pedagogy of the poor and inquiry." I was curious enough about this to ask him what feminist pedagogy is. He didn't tell me. In fact his only interaction with [...]

2017-04-09T18:14:09+01:00December 4th, 2016|myths|
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