XFacebookYouTubeLinkedInEmail

Blog archive

Why do people vote Conservative?

Reason coldly of your grievances, or else depart. Shakespeare, Romeo And Juliet All my life I've been a left-leaning liberal kind of guy. I believe in social justice, equality and protecting those less fortunate than myself. As such, voting Labour - or at a push LibDem - has always seemed the unarguable moral choice. So why do so many people vote Conservative? This morning my Twitter timeline was full of outrage and anger against 'class traitors' who had betrayed their roots and voted Tory out of naked self-interest and greed. Apparently, the polls were wrong because people were too ashamed to admit [...]

2019-12-13T12:45:25+00:00May 8th, 2015|Featured|

The myth of progress

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. C. S. Lewis We tend to believe that things are getting better, that mankind is on a journey to some perfect state in which irrationality will be banished. This belief shapes and distorts our thinking. Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection is often interpreted as meaning that random biological mutations, which are then inherited and selected as being most fit for the context in which [...]

2015-05-10T14:25:04+01:00May 7th, 2015|Featured|

Endorsements – what are they worth?

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise — although the philosophers generally call it “recognition”! William James You might not have noticed (I've been the very soul of subtlety!) but I've got a new book out in June. This is my third book, and I have to say I love the process of assembling ideas, crafting them into some semblance of meaning, rethinking, redrafting, editing, proofreading. Writing is so much more than I ever thought it was before establishing a foothold in the publishing industry and I pretty much enjoy it all. The bit that terrifies [...]

2015-05-10T14:28:35+01:00May 5th, 2015|Featured|

What should written feedback look like?

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away. Arthur Schopenhauer In response to my last post, Cristina Milos pointed out that I use the term 'feedback' without providing any further clarification as to what I mean. She challenged me to explain exactly how I envisioned the feedback process taking place and to be clear about what, specifically, it ought to contain. Now of course feedback can take various different forms, but seeing as I've been exploring ways to reduce teachers' marking load, it's probably apposite to address what written feedback might look like. But, first some ground [...]

2015-05-10T14:30:56+01:00May 4th, 2015|Featured|

Two stars and a bloody wish!

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them. Jean de La Bruyère We are held hostage by our superstitious belief in the mystical power of marking to cure all educational ills. It won't. A teacher inscribing marks in students' exercise books is every bit as mundane as it sounds; in my 15 years in the classroom it rarely resulted in much. But that's not really why we mark. We mark because it's the right thing to do. Because not marking is worse than marking. This is the marking fetish. [...]

2019-11-06T19:39:23+00:00May 3rd, 2015|leadership|

April on The Learning Spy

A few readers kindly got in touch over the last week or so to complain I was writing too much and that they couldn't keep up. Instead of shutting me up, this merely served to start me wondering about producing a digest of the month's posts to make my output easier to swallow. And here, in all its relative glory, it is: 1st April - Dipsticks: It all depends on what you mean by ‘engagement’ This was both a response to comment and criticism of an earlier post which questioned the importance of students being engaged in lessons. In this post I [...]

2015-05-10T14:35:30+01:00May 1st, 2015|Featured|

The fetish of marking

Even the most valuable fetishes will turn into dusts and ashes! Mehmet Murat Ildan Fetishism hasn't always been about rubber and high heels. The word originates from the Portuguese feitico, meaning an object or charm of false power. When explorers first encountered native religions in West Africa, whatever talismans or totems the locals revered were dismissed as fetishes. A fetish has since come to mean an object or practice onto which power has been displaced from the original source. Marking seems a good example. At the most basic level, marking is a totemic symbol for the power of feedback. What we want is [...]

2015-05-10T14:49:34+01:00April 30th, 2015|assessment, myths|

Trust, accountability and why we need them both

I've been thinking a lot about trust in recent months - particularly because it seems a commodity in such short supply. If, my optimistic thinking went, teachers were trusted to do a good job, then they probably would. But, of course, there's always that nagging concern that some wouldn't. This got me thinking about why people - and specifically teachers - are trustworthy or not. Is it down to an inherent goodness? Are some people just naturally more dedicated and professional, or could it be that we're good because of the consequences of not being good? The conclusion I've arrived at is [...]

2015-05-10T14:46:48+01:00April 29th, 2015|leadership|

A few thoughts about character education

The idea that schools should be educating students' character has been gathering momentum in recent years. But the once distant drums have become increasingly urgent; politicians and professors, hucksters and headteachers, all kinds of apparatchiks - even the occasional edu-blogger - have all waded into the debate. Unusually for me, I've mainly stood back, listened and pondered. Last year I visited Kings Leadership Academy in Warrington and although I was hugely impressed by much of what I saw, philosophically I tend towards the belief that teaching character isn't really what I think education is about. But until now, I haven't really been [...]

2015-05-10T14:42:51+01:00April 27th, 2015|leadership|

A review of The Beautiful Risk of Education by Harry Webb

I blundered into a discussion of Gert Biesta's The Beautiful Risk of Education yesterday and was asked to justify my view that it's 'a bit silly'. Rather than do the hard work of writing my own critique, I have chosen the more indolent route of posting our dear departed Harry Webb's review as his Webs of Substance blog is now sadly defunct. Creation Myths The Beautiful Risk of Education doesn’t start well, but in its opening chapter it does detail an interesting elaboration of one of the central ideas of progressive education. And it details it at some length. I therefore think it is [...]

2015-05-10T14:44:33+01:00April 26th, 2015|Featured|

Slow Writing at #researchED primary literacy conference

Here are the slides I used during my researchED presentation on Slow Writing (including some we didn't get around to looking at due to my rambling incoherence.) If you want to read more about it, do please read this post. But if you'd rather watch me struggle with a monstrous hangover, Leon Cych filmed it:

2015-04-25T19:52:10+01:00April 25th, 2015|literacy|

Chicken or egg? Thoughts about thinking

Which comes first? The chicken of knowledge or the egg of thinking? Over the past few years I have been advocating the view that thinking is a very shallow experience without knowledge. It seems self-evident that you can't think about something you don't yet know. Give it a go... tricky, isn't it? But not only that, the more you know the better you can think about it. If I ask you to think about, say quantum physics, unless you know something about it you'll probably be reduced to "What's quantum physics?" or repeating quantum physics, quantum physics over and over again. [...]

2015-04-24T19:08:55+01:00April 24th, 2015|Featured|
Toggle Sliding Bar Area
Go to Top