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Foxy Thinking: why we should embrace ignorance and learn to love uncertainty

"The grand perhaps! We look on helplessly, there the old misgivings, crooked questions are." Robert Browning Ted Hughes' poem The Thought Fox is an attempt to describe the mysteries of the creative process of writing a poem. We can imagine him sitting at his desk, staring in the dark, slowly become aware of a flickering presence and the awareness that "something else," an idea, "is alive". Hughes imagines this idea as a fox which makes his way into his mind at first tentatively: "Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf" and then take hold with startling [...]

2024-07-18T17:41:23+01:00September 5th, 2015|Featured|

What I mean by 'relevance'

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant. Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt A few days ago I wrote this post about how we might make learning more durable. In it, I wrote about the importance of relevance and said of my experience of attending a speed awareness course that it "pertained to my everyday experience of driving a car as well as my experience of running the risk of a fine and a driving ban." I went on to say, Clearly, we can't create or [...]

2015-08-31T22:05:07+01:00August 31st, 2015|psychology|

See it, own it: how to destroy a school

I went for a coffee with a former colleague a few days ago and inevitably, after some small talk, the conversation turned to a discussion of his school. He started off by confiding that the GCSE results had fallen again, before launching into a tirade about how unbearable he found teaching. One of his biggest bugbears was the school's behaviour policy. This 'policy' has been rebranded under the heading 'See it, own it'. Essentially, this means that when teachers see students flouting the school rules they must then own the consequences and enforce the appropriate sanction. There are no whole school systems to [...]

2019-11-10T15:44:05+00:00August 31st, 2015|behaviour|

Can we make learning permanent?

How can we know whether a student has learned something? To answer that we need a working definition of what we mean by learning and the one I've come up with is tripartite; learning is composed of retention, transfer and change. In order to know whether something has been learned we should ask ourselves three questions: Will students still know this next week, next month, next year? Will students be able to apply what they have been learning in a new context? How will this transform a students’ understanding of the world? Of course, I can't prove that I'm right about [...]

2015-08-31T21:32:07+01:00August 30th, 2015|learning, psychology|

Around the world in 80 classrooms

A guest blog by Lucy Crehan (@lucy_crehan) I’ve spent the last two years learning about the best education systems in the world – from the inside. It was a particular moment in a year 11 Science class four years ago that set me on this journey. They had their GCSEs coming up in a few months, and we still had a lot of material to cover. Abdul, a boy who was quick to grasp concepts but slow to do classwork, put up his hand. “Miss, why do we sneeze?” My first instinct was frustration. Here we were with the whole of [...]

2015-07-22T10:49:38+01:00July 22nd, 2015|Featured|

Do gender differences make a difference?

It's a well-known fact that boys underachieve. Every statistic tells us so. But ever since writing this post I've been suspicious of gender as the root cause for differences in achievement. Yes, girls outperform boys but is this due to fundamental differences in gender? Or is it more to do with expectations, perception and bias? Or is it, perhaps, an illusion? Might differences in performance be due to other, less beguiling causes? There's no doubt that boys and girls are biologically different. But, as Gertrude Stein put it, “A difference to be a difference must make a difference.” Do the very obvious [...]

2023-02-13T15:37:26+00:00July 18th, 2015|psychology|

#WrongBook extracts

For those who have as yet resisted the temptation to buy a copy of my new book, I've put together a selection of (hopefully) tempting extracts. Have a great summer y'all. 1. Cognitive dissonance 2. Fundamental attribution error 3. Availability bias 4. The halo effect 5. Overconfidence 6. 'Passive' learning 7. The purposes of education 8. How to teach 9. Evidence 10. Meta beliefs 11. Progress 12. Tacit knowledge 13. Knowledge vs understanding    

2015-07-18T14:54:19+01:00July 17th, 2015|Featured, writing|

What's the point of parents' evenings?

Earlier today I read this post on the purpose of parents' evenings by David James. It's an excellent exploration of some of the vagaries and oddness of being either side of the table, but ultimately it doesn't answer the question: What are parents' evenings for? This is something my wife explained a number of years ago. For some reason neither of us can remember, I was allowed to attend our daughters' parents evening alone. Being a teacher I felt fairly confident of my role in proceedings: to hold the teachers to account. I scrutinised their books, looked carefully for the impact [...]

2015-07-15T13:09:57+01:00July 15th, 2015|Featured|

Reading is a rebel act: on the role of school libraries

"My library was dukedom large enough" The Tempest, Shakespeare "The act of poetry is a rebel act." Farewell to English, Michael Harnett Some people are never happy. After writing my last post on how it might be possible to get students to read more, one commentator criticised that there was no mention of school librarians. Well, it was a blog post: the list of things which went unmentioned dwarfed what was written about. This post seeks to rectify that omission. Changing the culture of a school is a big ask. By the time they reach secondary school, many children are aware that reading isn't [...]

2015-07-13T18:24:44+01:00July 13th, 2015|reading|

How do you get students to read for pleasure?

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." Marcel Proust Reading seems to make us smarter. Here's Keith Stanovich explaining why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF6VKmMVWEc&feature=youtu.be&t=45s For most people, this is uncontroversial. We talk a lot about the power of books and the need to get more children to read for pleasure. But how do you get students to read for pleasure? I have no idea. Neither does anyone else, not really. This is an endemic conundrum which troubles most teachers and many parents. But it's a bit of an odd question [...]

2024-06-16T12:34:57+01:00July 11th, 2015|reading|

What if I'm wrong? @HeyMissSmith savages #WrongBook

Several people have very kindly written about why they like my new book, What if everything you know about education is wrong? but refreshingly, Jane Manzone (@HeyMissSmith) has reached entirely different conclusions. To be fair, I suggested that Jane review the book for Schools Week because I thought she'd have a very different take from most of the other people who'd read and helped me shape my ideas. I knew she'd take issue with much of it but honestly I didn't really expect quite such withering scorn. After all, no one, not even Sir Ken, spends months of their life chiseling away [...]

2015-07-08T21:28:03+01:00July 8th, 2015|writing|

20 psychological principles for teachers #20 Interpretation

This is the 20th and final post in my series on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning and the third of three posts examining how to assess students’ progress: "Making sense of assessment data depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation." "I wish we had more assessment data!" said no sane school leader ever. We're awash with data produced by oceans of assessment. As with so much else in life, the having of a thing is not its purpose. Analysing spreadsheets and graphs becomes like gazing, dumbly, into a crystal ball. We need to know how to interpret what these data [...]

2015-07-05T09:56:48+01:00July 5th, 2015|assessment, psychology|
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