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The problem with book monitoring

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way. Albert Camus Most schools these days routinely monitor students' exercise books in an attempt to extrapolate the quality of teaching. In some ways this is positive and reflects the growing recognition that we can tell much less than we might believe about teaching quality by observing lessons. On the whole I'm in favour of looking at students' work, but, predictably, book monitoring goes wrong for pretty much the same reasons lesson observation doesn't work. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with observing lessons, work scrutiny or any of the other practices used to [...]

2020-01-02T17:17:02+00:00November 26th, 2015|leadership|

Is it just me or is Sugata Mitra an irresponsible charlatan?

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power. Ralph Waldo Emerson When I first saw physicist, Sugata Mitra speak about his Hole in the Wall experiments in India I was astonished. Not only was he as  self-deprecatingly warm and funny as Sir Ken Robinson on a major charm offensive, the content of what he was saying blew any of SKR's woolly rhetoric out of the water. Basically, his claim was, is, that children can teach themselves anything. All they need is access to the internet and teachers to stay the heck away [...]

2016-09-28T17:57:14+01:00November 23rd, 2015|myths|

Workload, retention & accountability: One policy to rule them all

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies. Rudyard Kipling There's a lot wrong with the way schools are held to account which result in perverse incentives for school leaders to treat teachers less well than we might want. There are also huge fears about a recruitment and retention crisis in education:  Teachers seem to be leaving the profession in droves and new cannon-fodder is failing to step up to the plate in sufficient numbers. Teachers feel overworked and under-appreciated. The two reasons most often cited for leaving the profession are unnecessary workload and poor behaviour management [...]

2015-11-22T09:52:46+00:00November 22nd, 2015|leadership, workload|

What every teacher needs to know about…Zero Tolerance

My latest column for the wonderful folk at Teach Secondary magazine looks at the ins and outs of "Zero Tolerance" behaviour systems. There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Edmund Burke If you’re going to manage children’s behaviour you need a healthy balance of carrot and stick. Positive reinforcement is great, but at some point children confront us with behaviour that requires sanctioning. After many years of the education system tolerating woefully low standards of behaviour (we all have our particular horror stories) the pendulum has swung to the right. More and more schools are adopting a ‘zero-tolerance’ [...]

2016-06-07T16:09:00+01:00November 21st, 2015|behaviour|

The Illusion of Knowing

Knowledge, n.: The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. Ambrose Bierce Advanced Learning has commissioned me to write a piece about the uses and abuses of data in schools. My thesis, if that's not too grand a term, is that while data can be extraordinarily useful in helping us make good decisions, too much data leads, inexorably, to overload. When we have too much data we start doing silly things with it, just because we have it. The cost of bad data is the conviction that we have figured out all the possible permutations and know exactly what we're doing [...]

2017-04-18T23:41:37+01:00November 20th, 2015|leadership|

Comparison is easy

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike. Jacob Bronowski Judging the quality of a thing in isolation is hard. Is this wine good? What about this restaurant? This cheese? This television programme? This child’s essay? But just because we’re bad at making meaningful judgements doesn’t mean we’re aware of experiencing any uncertainty. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and as cognitive psychologist and psychophysicist (who knew that was a thing?) Donald Laming puts it, "In such a state of mind people are unable to resist extraneous suggestion." The [...]

2021-08-02T16:40:12+01:00November 19th, 2015|assessment, English|

Essay writing: style and substance

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable. George Eliot As with most subjects, the step up from GCSE to A level English literature is tough. You can get a pretty good grade at GCSE without developing a critical style or understand much about the art of constructing an academic essay. Students' work is routinely littered with stock phrases such as "I know this because" and "this shows" all of which shift the focus from having to think about subject content in sophisticated ways to simply learning a collection of fail-safe formulas. Of the 4 [...]

2017-01-15T10:19:18+00:00November 17th, 2015|English, writing|

Rethinking assessment Part 2: the Einstellung effect

As I set out here, Dr Chris Wheadon has come up with a beautifully simple solution to assessing students' essays which requires no rubrics, very little marking time and produces extremely reliable results with no attendant loss of validity. It relies on the cumulative power of comparative judgement and represents the future of assessment for subjects which rely on essay length answers to open-ended questions. If you doubt me, the reason might be that your experience of, and sense of success with, mark schemes has blinded you to better alternatives. Imagine you have 3 water jars, each with the capacity to hold a different, fixed [...]

2015-11-16T12:53:55+00:00November 15th, 2015|assessment|

Rethinking assessment Part 1: How can we tell if students are making progress?

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? Stanislaw J. Lec For some time now I've been of the opinion that the way we normally think of progress is based on a myth. Part of the problem is that because we tend to believe that we can see learning we routinely miss the fact that what students can do here and now tells us relatively little about what they can elsewhere and later. We assume  In What If Everything We Knew About Education Was Wrong? I argue that Progress is just a metaphor. It doesn’t really describe objective reality; it provides [...]

2020-06-19T19:15:58+01:00November 15th, 2015|assessment|

In praise of dignity and justice

They'll ask me how I got her I'll say I saved my money They'll say isn't she pretty that ship called dignity Dignity, Deacon Blue In Microaggression and Moral Cultures, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argue that we are at a turning point in the way we understand morality. In the past, morality was a matter of honour. Honour had to be earned in some way - whether through an accident of birth, the acquisition of wealth, good works, or public reputation - and respect was seen as honour's due. A lack of due deference to those possessing honour was an insult [...]

2015-11-11T20:21:35+00:00November 11th, 2015|blogging|

How to deal with criticism

The destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not. Robert Green Ingersoll Every now and then, someone pops up (usually a relative!) to tell me something I've written is crap. This is wounding. Like everyone else who blogs, I'm convinced of my own genius and sagacity. Anyone who's critical is clearly a fool. Except sometimes someone like Andrew Old comes along who, despite his many and various failings as a human being, is no fool. As an example of the kind of arguments we used to enjoy, take a look at the comment thread on this [...]

2018-01-23T01:31:30+00:00November 9th, 2015|blogging|

If writing is magic, grammar is alchemy

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. Gertrude Stein Writing is the technological innovation that has most changed the way we think and how we learn. It allows us the send our thoughts across time and space, and peer back in the past to see how people lived and thought thousands of years before we were born. We have access to all that has been recorded and preserved from all over the world. This is magic, but of a very prosaic [...]

2020-04-17T13:54:42+01:00November 9th, 2015|writing|
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