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December on The Learning Spy

December has traditionally been a bit of a fallow period as far as this blog is concerned, but this year, despite the inevitable Christmas lull I continued to churn out posts. Here they are in all their rather tawdry glory. 3rd December - Marking: What (some) Ofsted Inspectors (still) want An expression of frustration at the continued inability of some Ofsted inspectors to free their minds from the shackles of bias, prejudice and personal preference. 3rd December - Why I ♥ blogging (and believe there is hope for Ofsted) An expression of satisfaction and relief that the upper echelons of Ofsted continue to see sense and strive mightily [...]

2015-12-30T00:54:42+00:00December 30th, 2015|blogging|

Phonics is not a cure for cancer

Do antibiotics work? Well, that rather depends on what you've got. If you've got a viral infection like influenza antibiotics will be useless. To fight viral infections you need to use antiviral drugs. Does that mean antibiotics don't work? Of course not. If you're suffering from a bacterial infection like brucellosis then an antibiotic might well be effective. This, I hope, is straightforward. So if I conducted a piece of research which found that antibiotics are ineffective because they don't cure viral infections that would be a bit stupid, right? Well, for some reason, professor of education Stephen D Krashen seems to have done something very similar. [...]

2022-01-03T08:36:27+00:00December 30th, 2015|reading, research|

Only phonics? A reader replies to Michael Rosen Part 2

Following yesterday's post from Jacqui Moller-Butcher in which she responds to Michael Rosen's anti-phonics arguments, one of the complaints that has repeatedly emerged is the idea that phonics is not the only important aspect of teaching children to read. Indeed not. Take this comment from John Hodgson for example: No-one knowledgable in teaching the reading of English would deny the value of a grasp of characteristic letter-sound correspondences. This is not the same as arguing that ‘phonics’ (a term that denotes a more or less intense focus on such correspondences) is the only important thing, and that children are being denied the gift [...]

2016-09-11T17:31:40+01:00December 29th, 2015|reading|

Reading for pleasure: A reader replies to Michael Rosen Part 1

Back in July I wrote this post on how we might encourage children to read for pleasure to which children's author Michael Rosen left a long & detailed comment critiquing my ideas. The comment included this statement: When children are deemed to be ‘not reading’ i.e. being unable to pass the Phonics Screening Check, some teachers are being asked to do more of the same, rather than do anything different, nor to investigate whether there are multiple reasons for a) not passing the phonics screening check or b) finding out whether some children can read pretty well but fail the PSC anyway. [...]

2015-12-29T09:02:55+00:00December 28th, 2015|Featured, reading|

A roundup of my least popular posts of 2015

I love blogging and I'm chuffed beyond reason when a post captures the imagination and pings around the internet for a few days. But I'm always taken unawares by what's popular and what's not. Some of my posts seem to get thousands of views whereas others are only read by a small but select group of loyal readers. Possibly this is because they're a bit crap, but, not to be defeated, I'm hopeful that a roundup of some of the posts I most enjoyed writing but sank without a trace might do something to spark a modicum of interest.  1. A defence of [...]

2015-12-27T17:16:11+00:00December 27th, 2015|blogging|

My five favourite blogs of 2015

It's been some time since I put one of these lists together (The last time I seem to remember getting a fair bit of flak for indulging my gender bias.) and it seems high time to praise some of the best writing and ideas the edublogging community has produced over the past year. There have been plenty of excellent contenders but on balance, these have been my five favourite education blogs of 2015: Filling the pail  Greg Ashman, formerly known as Harry Webb, is an expat science teacher and school leader Down Under. He's produced a remarkable output this year. The combination of [...]

2015-12-26T13:43:12+00:00December 26th, 2015|Featured|

On fragility: why systems fail

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb argues that the opposite of fragile is not, as is commonly supposed, robust or resilient. These are merely neutral conditions. The antonym of fragile doesn't seem to exist in English, hence the neologism, antifragile. If something fragile is damaged by chaos, stress and challenge and something resilient or robust is immune, then something possessing antifragility is enhanced. The best, perhaps only, way to thrive in an uncertain world is to learn from the antifragile and shun the merely robust. Evolution is a good example of an antifragile system: chaos, stress and challenge provoke the flourishing of random mutations which benefit [...]

2015-12-26T12:07:08+00:00December 24th, 2015|leadership|

The most interesting books I read this year

For no particular reason other than that it's almost the years' end and making lists always seems appropriate as December draws to a close, and in no particular order, here are ten of the most interesting books I read over the course of 2015. Intelligence by Stuart Richie For anyone new to the study of intelligence, Richie's eminently readable little book is the perfect primer. In it he details exactly what intelligence is and isn't, why it matters and experts defuses some of the most abiding myths surrounding this most controversial of human characteristics. The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam [...]

2015-12-21T08:56:39+00:00December 20th, 2015|reading|

Why I like ‘tick n flick’

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Ockham Tick n flick - the practice of flicking through students' exercise books and ticking to indicate that they have been read (or at least seen) is widely used as a pejorative term for the laziest type of marking undertaken only by the most feckless, morally bankrupt of teachers - generally gets a bad press. Perhaps this is unsurprising; in the worst cases it suggests a hurried post-hoc skim through pages of work in order to give the unconvincing appearance that books are being marked. No one [...]

2015-12-16T14:40:28+00:00December 16th, 2015|Featured|

Outstanding is the enemy of good

Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, To mar the subject that before was well? Shakespeare In our efforts to be the best, are we eroding our ability to be good? Everyone tends to agree that high expectations are best and, of course, no one rises to a low expectation, but sometimes our expectations are unrealistically high. Sometimes we take the self-flagellating view that only the best is good enough. There are some who might argue that 'good enough' eliminates better and best and others still who counter that our understanding of 'good enough' is always subject to a raising of our collective [...]

2015-12-14T16:14:13+00:00December 13th, 2015|Featured|

Student voice: windmills of the mind

Pray look better, Sir … those things yonder are no giants, but windmills. Cervantes Does it matter if students like their teachers? Is it worth knowing if students don't maths or hate PE? Should students be asked to evaluate the quality of their lessons? It sometimes seems that the clamour of 'what students want' drowns out even the presumed demands of 'what Ofsted want'. Students' opinions might be interesting but should they be used to judge the effectiveness of teachers? Certainly some school leaders appear to think so. An anonymous blog on the Labour Teachers site* reveals the extent of the rise of this [...]

2015-12-12T23:27:30+00:00December 12th, 2015|leadership, learning|

Rubrics warp teaching and assessment

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations. Machiavelli In a recent blog post, children's author, Michael Rosen has suggested how teachers should teach, assess and share students' writing. He has helpfully broken his thoughts into three areas: teaching & assessment, editing, and sharing. In this post, I'm going to consider his ideas on the teaching and assessment of 'good writing'. Rosen points out that schools teach children to write for exams and that writing for exams is not the same thing as writing well. This is, of course, true; we teach what's assessed and [...]

2017-08-16T02:35:38+01:00December 11th, 2015|writing|
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