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Less marking, more feedback: A challenge and a proposal

I've been arguing for some time that if teachers spent less time marking (by which I mean writing comments on students' work) then they might have a lot more time for giving meaningful feedback which actually helps develop more flexible, durable learning. This is a message that tends to play well with harried, over burdened teachers but often fills school leaders with horror. The fear is that because some teachers are lazy, good-for-nothing loafers they'll simply take this as an opportunity to shuttle off to the pub every evening and their students will be even more neglected. I can certainly understand [...]

2016-12-01T16:18:59+00:00December 1st, 2016|leadership|

Marking is an act of folly

Contrary to popular belief, marking and feedback are not the same thing. Clearly they're connected - and, ideally most marking has the intention of giving feedback - but the process of marking or giving marks does not, in and of itself, equate with feedback. Those who see marking as an essential component of a teachers' role should wonder why, in many parts of the world - particularly east Asian countries which seem to do very well in international comparisons - teachers do not routinely mark students' work. If it were essential this would not be possible. Anglophone countries - and the UK [...]

2016-12-04T17:26:15+00:00November 30th, 2016|leadership|

More good proxies for learning

A few days ago, I wrote about a brief online discussion I had with Dan Willingham on the importance of thinking hard. In the comments, Greg Ashman pointed out that thinking hard cannot be the only way in which learning happens, how else, he asks, would we explain the success of Zig Englemann's Direct Instruction programme? Although I'm not totally convinced that students receiving Direct Instruction don't have to think hard, it's certainly true to say that they're not expected to struggle. Think also about rote memorisation. Most people would probably agree that memorising your times tables doesn't requires thinking hard. [...]

2016-11-28T22:40:07+00:00November 28th, 2016|learning|

Seven Theses on Education

Dennis Hayes, professor of education at Derby University and co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education recently wrote the following Facebook post: Seven Theses on Education 1. Education is solely concerned with knowledge and understanding (not about character building or happiness) 2. Education is not training (i.e. not about skills or ‘learning objectives’) 3. Education is an end in itself and not a means to another end (such as ‘social justice’) 4. Education is universal (for all) (you can’t teach if you think some children can only learn in certain ways or can only reach a certain (low)level) 5. Education [...]

2016-11-28T00:03:32+00:00November 28th, 2016|Featured|

Can thinking hard be incidental? A conversation with Daniel Willingham

For some time now, Rob Coe has been suggesting that a good proxy for students learning in lessons is that they "have to think hard". This seemed eminently sensible and I've written about this formulation on a number of occasions, most recently here. I saw Rob speak at a conference on Friday and tweeted the following: "Learning happens when you have to think hard." How many minutes do children spend in a day really thinking hard? Asks @ProfCoe — David Didau (@LearningSpy) November 25, 2016 Rob suggested the answer might be as little as 10 minutes a day and that this [...]

2016-11-27T17:08:36+00:00November 27th, 2016|Featured|

Context isn’t king

It's become quite fashionable recently to say that there's no best way to teach because what works depends on the context in which you teach. This is a considerable improvement on asserting that [insert half-baked, debunked practice of your choosing] is the best way and then penalising teachers for not doing it, but it's still a bit of a cop-out. I'm not claiming context doesn't matter - of course it does - but it isn't nearly as important as some would have us believe. Clearly, the context of schooling in different countries varies greatly and most right-thinking people acknowledge that 'policy tourism [...]

2016-11-21T16:26:09+00:00November 21st, 2016|Featured|

Bottom sets and the scourge of low-level disruption

In many English schools, low-level disruption is the norm. Children talking when expected to be silent, fiddling with equipment and each other, calling out, and generally not being 'on task' are all routinely accepted as just something with which teachers have to contend. In 2014, Ofsted published this report on low-level disruption in schools. It it, "around two-fifths of the 723 teachers in the survey who believed that disruptive ‘talking and chatting’ was a key problem said it occurred in almost every lesson." The entire concept of 'behaviour management' is predicated on the idea that teachers must manage students' inevitable disruptive [...]

2016-11-14T21:10:57+00:00November 14th, 2016|behaviour|

What do we mean by ‘skills’?

Any definition of skills depends on knowledge. Joe Kirby has written persuasively about skills and knowledge forming a double helix - inseparably intertwined and mutually interdependent. This is definitely a more helpful way to think, but it might be even better to abandon the term 'skills' altogether. Is riding a bike a skill? Well, if we mean is it a set of procedures, which we can master to the point that we're able to cycle without having to think about it then, yes it is. Is essay writing a skill? Well, it's not the same sort of thing as riding a bike, but yes, it's another set of [...]

2017-04-14T20:39:12+01:00November 10th, 2016|Featured|

What are ‘thinking skills’ and can we teach them?

...from a purely theoretical standpoint alone, it hardly seems plausible that a strategy of inquiry that must necessarily be broad enough to be applicable to a wide range of disciplines and problems can ever have, at the same time, sufficient particular relevance to be helpful in the solution of the specific problem at hand. David Ausubel It's tempting to believe that if we teach children how to think, then they'll think better. After all, when we teach children to read, then they read better and when we teach them to juggle then they get better at juggling. Why should thinking be any different? Well, [...]

2017-02-23T23:08:15+00:00November 9th, 2016|research|

Does ‘brain training’ increase intelligence?

In my last post I outlined the differences between fluid and crystallised intelligence and argued that fluid intelligence (Gf) - the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge - is fairly fixed, whereas crystallised intelligence (Gc) - the ability to retrieve  and apply information stored in long-term memory can be improved relatively straightforwardly by teaching students knowledge and then giving them practice in retrieving and applying this knowledge in a variety of contexts. This is a shame because as Daniel Willingham says in Why Don't Students Like School? The lack of space in working memory is a [...]

2016-11-08T11:34:38+00:00November 8th, 2016|psychology|

Making kids cleverer

One of the real problems with improving education systems is that there tends not to be much agreement about what education is actually for. I've written about this issue before and have made clear my view, education should exist to make children cleverer. Clearly this in part depends on a belief that it is actually possible to make children cleverer , no matter their starting point. So, what evidence is there that we can become more intelligent? Everyone knows about Carol Dweck's immensely popular theory of the growth mindset; that we can become cleverer by believing we can become cleverer. This is certainly [...]

2016-11-05T16:10:08+00:00November 5th, 2016|psychology|

Why what you teach matters

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that within the next two years Ofsted will stop grading the quality of teaching, learning and assessment as part of their overall judgement on schools' effectiveness. This will probably be replaced with a judgement on a school's curriculum and assessment policies and practices. If I'm right, how a teacher teaches will become less and less important, instead, schools will be increasingly held to account for what they teach. Even if I'm wrong, I think it's still very important to think carefully about what we teach. Judgements on how teachers teach are primarily  concerned with whether children [...]

2016-11-05T15:11:11+00:00November 4th, 2016|curriculum, learning|
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