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We don’t know what we don’t know: the uses of humility

Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all the possible changes of life. George Arliss In my last post I challenged the widely-held belief that teachers' judgements are generally sound and suggested instead that we are routinely beset by very predictable but unconscious bias. Two criticisms emerged that I want to address. Firstly, some commenters noted that it's impossible to prevent teachers making judgments and that, in essence, a large part of the act of teaching is making judgements about pupils' learning. As such, any attempt to remove subjective bias from teaching is fundamentally flawed. [...]

2020-07-20T13:37:31+01:00November 5th, 2015|leadership, psychology|

Why teacher assessment is less fair than standardised testing

Tests Guns don't kill people, rappers do Goldie Lookin Chain I spent the day yesterday at the Department for Education thinking about how best to cut down on the "unnecessary workload" associated with marking. Today I spent far too much time bandying words with children's writer, Michael Rosen about the value of testing over teacher assessment. It strikes me that both experiences offer an opportunity to set out my objections to teacher assessment and my support for standardised testing. Let's start with teacher assessment. My first concern is that any expectation on teachers to assess students' work adds to their workload. If we're [...]

2021-08-10T12:07:55+01:00November 4th, 2015|assessment|

Five techniques for overcoming overconfidence and improving decision-making

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. Bertrand Russell Every successful leader will have one thing in common: they trust their judgement. And why not? Their intuitions must have proved their worth otherwise they wouldn’t be successful, right? Well, maybe not. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests that “the amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn’t terribly large.” Kahneman’s paper, co-authored with Gary Klein, Conditions for Intuitive: Expertise A Failure to Disagree, argues that overconfidence is at the [...]

2020-01-21T18:39:02+00:00November 3rd, 2015|leadership, psychology|

October on The Learning Spy

Here's what I got up to in October. The major themes this month were accountability and teachers' judgement. Books I read which I found particularly interesting were Beyond the Checklist and Matthew Syed's Black Box Thinking. I also found time to reread Conditions for Intuitive: Expertise A Failure to Disagree by Gary Klein & Daniel Kahneman. 4th October Intelligent Accountability - a manifesto for improving the ways in which teachers are held accountable in an attempt to support teachers in being good as opposed to looking good. 5th October What can education learn from aviation? - expanding on the intelligent accountability theme bu contrasting the way accountability works in [...]

2015-11-01T11:07:11+00:00November 1st, 2015|blogging|

In praise of signposts

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. C. S. Lewis If you're not sure which way to go, a sign post is very useful. A quick glance confirms either you're headed in the right direction or you're not.If you are facing in the right direction, all you have to do is keep on walking. Obviously you wouldn't expect a signpost to contain much information about your destination; that's not what they're for. This post makes the point that teachers rely on signposts to decide whether they're teaching [...]

2015-10-31T15:50:10+00:00October 31st, 2015|research|

The closed circle: Why being wrong is so useful

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others. Fyodor Dostoevsky A closed circle argument is one where there is no possibility of convincing an opponent that they might be wrong. They are right because they're right. Imagine you wake to find yourself in a psychiatric ward, deemed by all and sundry to be mad. Any attempt to argue that you are not, in point of fact, mad, is evidence that you are 'in denial'. Any evidence you cite in support of your sanity is dismissed as an elaborate attempt to buttress your denial. There is no way out of [...]

2016-06-15T22:55:21+01:00October 30th, 2015|psychology|

Is growth mindset pseudoscience?

Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. Carl Sagan What's the difference between science and pseudoscience? The basis of all reputable science is prediction and falsification: a claim has to be made which we can then attempt to disprove. If we can't disprove it, the claim holds and we accept the theory as science. If the claim doesn't hold, we've learned something, we move one, we make progress. That's science. Pseudoscience doesn't work like that. It makes claims, sure, but they're so [...]

2017-01-06T19:41:55+00:00October 24th, 2015|research|

From Scared Straight to Reading Wrong

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alters things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end? Francis Bacon In 1978, Scared Straight! won the Academy Award for the best documentary film. It followed a group of teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks who, as part of a new crime reduction programme, were taken to a maximum security prison to be threatened, humiliated and intimidated by a bunch of murderers and rapists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri7G7xHj5LE The premise [...]

2015-10-24T10:56:16+01:00October 24th, 2015|reading, research|

Is school a straightjacket? A response to David Aaronovitch

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.  Igor Stravinsky In yesterday's Times, David Aaronovitch wrote an opinion piece headlined, Pupils aren't just another brick in the wall. His argument was that schools "force" children into cohorts depending on their age and abilities and that this is a "straightjacket". Many aspects of schooling are, he claims, based on the flawed assumption that children develop at the same time and in the same way. Clearly, they don't. We are, of course, unique, just like snowflakes, but [...]

2015-10-23T11:59:05+01:00October 23rd, 2015|Featured|

How can we teach problem solving?

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem. G. K. Chesterton In an uncertain future, the ability to solve novel problems will become increasingly in demand. Now, some folk might, correctly, point out that we're hard-wired to problem solve. We can't not attempt to solve problems when we have an idea of what the answer might be. However, we tend to be much worse at solving problems when we have no idea what the solution might look like. Everyone, regardless of their ideological beliefs about education, will surely agree that problem-solving is a [...]

2015-10-18T18:28:32+01:00October 18th, 2015|Featured|

Assessment: evolution vs. design

Optimization hinders evolution. Alan J. Perlis   As we all know, the DfE decided to ditch National Curriculum levels from September 2014 without plans for a replacement. Some have reacted to this with glee, others despair. On the one hand, we have Tim Oates, an assessment expert and advocate for the removal of levels, saying We need to switch to a different conception of children’s ability. Every child needs to be capable of doing anything dependent on the effort they put in and how it’s presented to them. Levels get in the way of this... The new national curriculum really does [...]

2015-10-16T20:57:38+01:00October 13th, 2015|research|

Is teaching a 'wicked' game?

What a wicked game you play to make me feel this way. Chris Isaak, Wicked Game Ok, I've cheated a bit. In this paper Robin M Hogarth identifies what he calls 'kind' and 'wicked' domains. A kind domain is one which provides accurate and reliable feedback, a wicked domain is one where feedback on performance is absent or biased. Hogarth cites two examples. First a kind domain: The meteorologist is well-placed to develop accurate intuitions. She has much knowledge about how weather systems develop as well as access to much current information on which she can base her forecasts; she also [...]

2015-10-12T22:34:44+01:00October 12th, 2015|leadership|
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