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A research journal for teachers by teachers

What difference does education research make to teachers? Precious little. Thousands of papers are published every year and very little changes in classrooms. Recent attempts by the Education Endowment Foundation to synthesise and simply research so it can be easily consumed by busy teachers is laudable, but leads to problems. When someone else has does the thinking it relieves of the need to think for ourselves and all too often we end up saying, "the research shows..." without any real idea what it actually shows. So what to do? What would be great is if teachers had the time and expertise [...]

2015-01-13T20:05:08+00:00January 13th, 2015|Featured|

The Unit of Education

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Lord Kelvin A lot of education research is an attempt to measure the effects of teaching (or teachers) on learning (or pupils.) But is this actually possible? Let’s first think about measurement in a very practical sense. Schools limit admission based on a sometimes very strict catchment area – if you want to make sure that your children attend a particular school you need to live within the catchment. For some very oversubscribed schools this can be a radius of less than a mile. If I measure the distance between my front door and [...]

2015-01-10T21:12:36+00:00January 8th, 2015|Featured|

What’s it like being a new teacher?

I've been very fortunate to spend time with a variety of new teachers over the past few years. Whether they're on PGCE placements, NQTs, RQTs or Teach First participants they are all, without exception, impressive, hardworking, compassionate, dedicated and brimming with enthusiasm about the difference they hope to make. There is however one consistently ugly blot on this bright landscape. It's not the workload - they're up for that. They're still young and supple enough to cope with the absurd demands placed on a teacher's time. It's not even pupils' sometimes stunningly insolent, casually vindictive and plain bone idle behaviour - they went into [...]

2020-02-09T16:45:53+00:00January 6th, 2015|leadership|

Do we really have a growth mindset?

The ladder of life is full of splinters, but they always prick the hardest when we’re sliding down. Samuel Clemens I spoke at a Growth Mindset conference with Olympian and sports journalist Matthew Syed today. Needless to say, he got star billing. I took the view that whilst we may all profess to value a growth mindset in pupils we have a very fixed mindset to teaching and education. Syed made the point that there are important differences between how the aviation industry and surgeons treat failure. When an aeroplane crashes, airlines go to great lengths retrieve the black box flight recorder in order to [...]

2015-01-06T00:34:51+00:00January 5th, 2015|leadership|

Are children better than adults?

There is no sinner like a young saint. Aphra Behn I just read this post on why Teaching is Wonderful and while teaching is wonderful (if astonishingly gruelling) I take issue with the argument presented that children are better than adults. Now obviously children are ace. (I have two of my own and they are - usually - delightful.) The only thing I really miss about not being a classroom teacher are the often hilarious and heart-warming daily interactions with kids. But they're no better than anyone else. Children are not naturally good. They can be as mean-spirited, spiteful and selfish as, well, anyone else. Children, like [...]

2015-01-04T21:10:33+00:00January 4th, 2015|Featured|

Some suggested New Year's resolutions

For I am full of spirit and resolve to meet all perils very constantly. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Having read this post from Jo Facer (@readingthebooks), I am inspired. Particularly by these bits: We think we know our students, and in some ways, perhaps we do. But in other ways, we can never know them. We can never know the struggles they face, we can never know what their formative years have done to them, and we can never know their true potential. We just need to keep raising the bar. All teachers want the best for their students, but that aspiration [...]

2015-01-01T13:59:38+00:00January 1st, 2015|Featured|

Thinking with and about

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think. Robert Henri How we think is astonishingly complex and I don't want to pretend I have any real understanding of the processes involved, but It does seem clear that we can't think about something we don't know. If I wanted to think, say, about molecular biology, my thoughts will be strictly limited. I know molecules are very small particles (but I'm not sure how, or if, they differ from particles in physics) and so I assume that molecular biology must be the biology at a microscopic level. Further, I know [...]

2016-06-12T12:11:40+01:00December 30th, 2014|Featured|

A review of 2014

I wrote 125 posts in 2014 bringing the running total to 336 posts. Here are the ten most popular this year: Why do so many teachers leave teaching? (February 2013) The Cult of Outstanding™: the problem with ‘outstanding’ lessons (January 2014) Work scrutiny – What’s the point of marking books? (January 2013) Marking is an act of love (October 2013) Where lesson observations go wrong  (July 2013) What is good behaviour? (January 2012) Slow Writing: how slowing down can improve your writing (May 2012) Why AfL might be wrong, and what to do about it (March 2014) Building challenge: differentiation that’s quick and works (January 2013) What I learned from my visit to [...]

2014-12-31T22:26:35+00:00December 28th, 2014|Featured|

New book: What if everything you know about education is wrong?

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. - Oliver Cromwell I haven't been posting much lately but that's not to say I haven't been busy writing. I'm delighted to tell you I've now finished my new book and wanted to take the opportunity to share the contents before it's listed on Amazon the whole thing is inevitably cheapened by sales figures. In it I pose the question, What if everything you know about education is wrong? Just to be clear, I'm not saying you, or anyone else is wrong, I'm just asking you to [...]

2014-12-17T19:11:14+00:00December 17th, 2014|Featured|

The Secret of Numeracy (across the curriculum)

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns… The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test. GH Hardy As some readers will no doubt be aware, I'm no mathematician. It might then seem presumptuous to take a view on the teaching of numeracy, but I think the fact that I'm not naturally numerate gives me a perspective that other, more mathematically minded thinkers might lack. My first, rather trite observation is that numeracy is not [...]

2014-12-11T10:25:06+00:00December 10th, 2014|Featured|

Revisiting lost learning by Gerald Haigh

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting. - William James As teachers, we tend to do all in our power to prevent students from forgetting what we have taught them. This seems entirely correct and not open to debate: forgetting is clearly the enemy of learning. Well, according to Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, the way our memories work is a good deal more complex than that. For all practical purposes our capacity to store new information appears limitless - our brains have sufficient space to comfortably store every experience we're likely to have over [...]

2014-11-30T10:06:16+00:00November 30th, 2014|learning|

Why ‘triple marking’ is wrong (and not my fault)

You can't blame celebrity edubloggers for teachers' unreasonable workloads - Albert Einstein In his indefatigable efforts to get schools and teachers to recognise that much of what is done in the name of demonstrating progress for Ofsted's benefit is a pointless waste of time, apparently, Ofsted's National Director, Mike Cladingbowl has been blaming me for inventing 'triple marking'.[i] This is an accusation I refute. As I understand it, the phenomena of 'triple marking' of goes something like this: You mark students' work They act on your marking You mark students' work again. The logic is that in responding to students' responses to [...]

2020-05-02T22:15:05+01:00November 29th, 2014|leadership|
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