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What’s the starting point for all learning?

"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious." George Bernard Shaw UPDATED 7th February 6.30pm This morning in answer to a question about whether children should be taught to challenge 'neat interpretations', I suggested that it's usually a good idea to know something really well before you start questioning it. In response I was told by a Head of English who has now asked for her tweet to be removed from this post that my opinion was "Rubbish," and that, "Asking questions is the starting point for all learning." She went on to say, "If only [...]

2016-02-08T12:52:13+00:00February 7th, 2016|learning|

Romanticism & the Enlightenment: Meta-beliefs in education

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." James Baldwin Before claiming, as so many seem wont to do, that the dichotomy between progress and tradition is a false one, it’s worth exploring how our beliefs about education have been shaped. In the early 18th century the ideals of the Enlightenment – scientific method, logic and reason – were in full swing. Everything could be counted, weighed, measured and objective truths about the world discovered, quantified and neatly labelled. As always, whenever the pendulum [...]

2016-03-02T08:38:12+00:00February 6th, 2016|myths|

Reading difficulty is a teaching problem not an intelligence problem

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate I've visited a lot of schools over [...]

2020-02-04T14:09:03+00:00February 4th, 2016|literacy, reading|

More guff on creativity

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. (One of my favourite fake Einstein quotes.) What is it about creativity that makes so many otherwise sensible people say such silly things? Most of us can only watch in awed wonder as the truly creative turn out one marvellously realised idea after an other. There's a tendency to see it as evidence of some sort of mysterious, spooky 'otherness' which us normal folks just don't possess, but it's largely agreed that creativity is, if not directly teachable, at least possible to foster. The trouble is, being creative at say, making Lego models, doesn't make [...]

2016-06-13T11:20:24+01:00February 3rd, 2016|myths|

Learning about learning: What every teacher needs to know

When I trained to be teacher I was told little or nothing about how children learn. Because a lot of what we intuitively suppose about the process of learning is often flatly contradicted by cognitive science this was a huge handicap. Since you can't think about stuff you don't know, I spent all my time pontificating on the process of teaching, but lacked the theoretical framework and knowledge base to consider how my students learned. I don't think I'm alone in this. Over the past few years I've discovered an awful lot through reading various books and academic papers which has given me the ability to start thinking [...]

2016-03-02T08:34:17+00:00February 3rd, 2016|psychology|

January on The Learning Spy

Here, for your delight and edification, are the blogs I wrote during January: 1st January - New Year’s resolutions for teachers and school leaders  Make this year better than last! 2nd January - Varieties of boredom  How and why some varieties of boredom might not be a bad thing but others are dreadful. 5th January - Can anyone teach? Well, that depends on what you think education is for An exploration of the idea that anyone can teach. 9th January - What every teacher needs to know about… Edtech In which I conclude that technology is great but 'edtech' is a bit crap. 11th January [...]

2016-02-03T08:36:34+00:00February 2nd, 2016|Featured|

Some assumptions about scripted lessons

"So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language." Michael Polanyi In this post I wrote about the fact that one of the tenets of Direct Instruction (note the capitals!) is scripted lessons which aim for 'flawless communication'. Let me be clear at the outset: I am not advocating the use of scripted lessons, nor am I claiming DI is the best way to teach. What I am suggesting is that [...]

2016-01-31T22:24:10+00:00January 31st, 2016|Featured|

Scripts: whose lesson is it anyway?

When I was 16, Whose Line Is It Anyway? first aired on UK television. The show, hosted by Clive Anderson, asked four comedians to ad lib responses to various prompts and scenarios, much of it shouted out by audience members. The whole thing was completely unscripted with the comedians having to make everything up on the spot. The results were anarchic; always daft and occasionally hilarious. I'd never seen anything quite like it and I was in awe of the quickness of their brains and the way the could conjure a laugh out of almost anything. Here's a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIIJ7PNpXCc&ab_channel=RyanHamill [...]

2025-04-09T09:27:17+01:00January 31st, 2016|learning, planning|

Proof of progress – Part 1

Measuring progress is a big deal. I've written before about the many and various ways we get assessment wrong but, increasingly, I'm becoming convinced there are some ways we might get it right. As regular readers will know, I'm interested in the potential of comparative judgement (CJ) and have written about it here and here. Greg Ashman mentions the process obliquely in his new book: When we measure on an absolute scale using a set of criteria, we introduce the possibility of all students scoring 9 or 10 out of 10, particularly if we have trained them well. However, what is really of [...]

2016-03-10T23:03:10+00:00January 30th, 2016|assessment|

Ouroboros: a review

I've been following Greg Ashman's writing for some years and have always been struck by his clarity, precision, humour and single-minded sense of purpose. I haven't always agreed with everything he's written but I've been persuaded by an awful lot. Naturally, when I discovered he was writing a book I was keen to read it. The concept or conceit of Ouroboros is that education is constantly eating its own tail. New ideas are old ideas repackaged for a new market; lessons are not learned; the past is forgotten and the future is always new and exciting. As Greg says in his introduction, this [...]

2016-01-29T09:40:28+00:00January 29th, 2016|Featured|

John Hattie and the magical power of prediction

"Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous." Hyman G. Rickover — Speech to US Naval Post Graduate School, March 16, 1954 In this post I picked up on a rather odd comment made by Professor Hattie at a recent conference: ...tests don’t tell kids about how much they’ve learnt. Kids are very, very good at predicting how well they’ll do in a test.” Are they? In my response I argued that he's wrong: Most students are novices – they don’t yet know much about the subject they’re studying. Not only do they not know much, they’re unlikely to know the value of what they do know [...]

2016-01-29T09:47:09+00:00January 28th, 2016|research|

A definition of learning

"For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences." Cervantes Learning (n) 1. the retention and transfer of knowledge 2. a change in the way the world is understood I'm often asked what I mean when I talk about 'learning' so, although I've written about it many times before, I thought it might be useful to have a post dedicated to my definition. Learning is tripartite: it involves retention, transfer and change. It must be durable (it should last), flexible (it should be applicable in [...]

2016-07-21T19:49:18+01:00January 28th, 2016|learning|
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