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May on The Learning Spy

Blimey, but May was a busy month! I wrote more posts than ever before - a ridiculous 29, and had more views than any other months with 90,590 views. Anyhoo, I did this last month and 4 people got in touch to say they'd like me to do it again, so this is for them. Here follows a brief run down of what I wrote about. Two stars and a bloody wish! 3rd May (4,244 views) I started the month by continuing where I left off at the end of April by writing about marking and took aim at the execrable process widely [...]

2015-06-02T18:31:28+01:00June 1st, 2015|Featured|

20 psychological principles for teachers #8 Creativity

In this, the eighth in a series of posts examining a report on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning, I take a closer look at Principle 8: “Student creativity can be fostered." Of all the psychological principles I've read about, this seems the weakest. The report starts badly: "Creativity—defined as the generation of ideas that are new and useful in a particular situation—is a critical skill for students in the information-driven economy of the 21st century." Anything suggesting the 21st century demands fundamentally different skills than previous centuries is guaranteed to get my back up, but the idea that [...]

2015-06-07T10:44:11+01:00May 31st, 2015|psychology|

20 psychological principles for teachers #7 Self-regulation

In this, the seventh in a series of posts examining a report on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning, I take a closer look at Principle 7: "Students’ self-regulation assists learning, and self-regulatory skills can be taught." Before getting into the thorny matter of whether self-regulation can be taught, we need to be clear about what we actually mean by the term. Rather than attempting a definition, the report merely says self-regulation helps students to master curriculum content and includes, "attention, organization, self-control, planning, and memory strategies". Psychologists define self-regulation as the ability to control our behaviour and impulses in [...]

2015-06-01T21:24:13+01:00May 31st, 2015|psychology|

20 psychological principles for teachers #6 Feedback

In this, the sixth in a series of posts examining the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning, I cast a critical eye over Principle 6: “Clear, explanatory, and timely feedback to students is important for learning." The fact that feedback is important is regularly used to wallop teachers. This has been accepted as a self-evidently truth. And by and large it's true. There are, however, a few points worth making that appear widely overlooked. Feedback is, for instance, not the same as marking. In the abstract to their seminal 2007 paper, The Power of Feedback, Hattie & Timperley make the [...]

2015-06-01T21:25:26+01:00May 30th, 2015|psychology, research|

Ofsted inspections to be higher stakes: for inspectors!

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Mathew 7:7 Sometimes life takes a surreal twist. In January 2014 I predicted Ofsted would stop grading lessons within a maximum of two years. I was wrong. Grades had been scrapped by June the same yearGrades had been scrapped by June the same year! I then got a call from Sean Harford to cast eye over the new Inspection Handbook and was stunned to find that all my advice had been taken on board. Now today, after suggesting for [...]

2015-05-29T06:49:48+01:00May 28th, 2015|Featured|

20 psychological principles for teachers #5 “Learning is dependent on practice”

This is the fifth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 5: “Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice.” Whenever the going got tough, my mum always used to remind me that 'practice makes perfect'. Well, I'm delighted to say it turns out she's wrong. Sorry mum. Practice makes permanent. What we repeatedly practice we get good at, and if we practice doing the wrong things, we'll get good at them. So, while practice is certainly necessary for us to acquire long-term knowledge and [...]

2016-02-04T10:08:30+00:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

20 psychological principles for teachers #4 Context

This is the fourth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 4: "Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated." The fact that learning occurs in context is well established. Our ability to retrieve information is heavily context dependent - we link it to related subject matter, times, places, people and feelings. I've written before about the variation effect and troubling finding that students often struggle to transfer what they have been taught from one [...]

2015-06-29T14:55:29+01:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

20 psychological principles for teachers #3 Development

This is the third in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. This time it’s the turn of Principle 3: Students’ cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development to come under the microscope.  Most teachers' understanding of cognitive development begins and ends with Jean Piaget. Piaget's theory that all children pass through a predetermined sequence of developmental stages has bewitched and bedevilled education for almost a century, guiding how we structure schools and curriculums. Here's a brief summary of Paiget's four stages: Sensory-Motor (0-2) In the beginning, a child's understanding of the [...]

2015-07-07T20:02:04+01:00May 27th, 2015|psychology|

20 psychological principles for teachers #2 Prior knowledge

This is the second in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology For Pre-k–12 Teaching And Learning. This time it's the turn of Principle 2 – What students already know affects their learning to come under the microscope. You can see the other principles here. Students' minds are not a blank slate; when they arrive at school they already know stuff. According to Nuthall, whenever teachers begin a new topic, students already know about half of what they're told - it's just that they each know a different 50%. Obviously enough, this prior knowledge affects how students acquire new knowledge [...]

2015-06-01T09:40:24+01:00May 26th, 2015|psychology|

20 psychological principles for teachers #1 Mindsets

We are what we believe we are. Benjamin Cardozo A few weeks ago I posted a brief summary of The Coalition for Psychology for Schools and Education's report, Top 20 Principles From Psychology For Pre-k–12 Teaching And Learning. Since then I've been reading through the research they cite to see how far I agree with their conclusions. First up for investigation is Principle 1 - Students’ beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning. Much of what the report says will be familiar to anyone who's come across Carol Dweck's Mindset. "Students who believe intelligence is malleable and [...]

2015-06-01T09:39:30+01:00May 25th, 2015|psychology|

Is it possible to get assessment right?

No. After my last blog on how to get assessment wrong, various readers got in touch to say, OK smart arse, what should we do? Well, I'm afraid the bad news is that we'll never get assessment right. Or at least, it's impossible for assessment to give us anything like perfect information on student's progress or learning. We can design tests to give us pretty good information of students' mastery of a domain, but as Amanda Spielman, chair of Ofsted said at researchED in September, the best we can ever expect from GCSEs is to narrow student achievement down to + or [...]

2015-05-31T11:18:35+01:00May 23rd, 2015|assessment|

How to get assessment wrong

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Søren Kierkegaard With the freedom to replace National Curriculum Levels with whatever we want, there's a wonderful opportunity to assess what students can actually do rather than simply slap vague, ill-defined criteria over students' work and then pluck out arbitrary numbers as a poor proxy for progress. But there's also an almost irresistible temptation to panic, follow the herd and get things badly wrong. Levels are by no means the worst we could do - in fact there was [...]

2015-05-21T10:45:22+01:00May 20th, 2015|assessment|
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