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What's the point of school?

Mar 14, 2017 | Category: Featured

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate Schools have only ever existed in cultures where culturally specific knowledge...

#Steven Pinker #evolutionary psychology #AS Neill

Some videos of me saying stuff about education

Mar 10, 2017 | Category: Featured

Recently, Swedish education magazine, Lärarnas Tidning interviewed me about my views on various aspects of education. For those interested in seeing me do a very poor Stewart Lee impersonation, they'v...

What's so great about making mistakes?

Mar 15, 2017 | Category: Featured

To err is human.Alexander Pope Making mistakes is an inevitable part of life. We're all wrong about something at some point. Equally obviously, contending with failure, learning to drag ourselves up b...

#failure #Daniel Dennett #mistakes

Do we want 'deeper learning' classrooms?

Mar 09, 2017 | Category: Featured

It's very easy to present a false dichotomy to make our own beliefs and choices seem more desirable than the alternatives. Consider this infographic from the Hewlett Foundation which has been doing th...

#21st Century Learning #deeper learning #Hewlett Foundation

War and Peace in education

Feb 02, 2017 | Category: Featured

After a long flight, I've finally finished rereading War and Peace and, if you were in any doubt, it is a masterpiece. I found so much I'd either entirely forgotten or hadn't understood from my first...

#War and Peace #Leo Tolstoy

Knowing the names of things

Jan 30, 2017 | Category: Featured

Many people have written many thousands of words about the difference between knowledge and understanding, but I think Richard Feynman nails it here: You can know the name of a bird in all the languag...

#Richard Feynman

Problems with the 'zone of proximal development'

Jan 13, 2017 | Category: Featured

It's hard to have a discussion about learning without someone sooner or later chipping in with the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) to support thei...

#Dylan Wiliam #Vygotsky #zone of proximal development #Seth Chaiklin

Should students be overlearning?

Jan 12, 2017 | Category: Featured

In my last post I outlined my concerns with the idea of 'thinking hard' being a good proxy for learning. Briefly, thinking hard about a problem appears to be an inefficient way to alter long-term memo...

#Daisy Christodoulou #mastery #K Anders Ericsson #overlearning

The most interesting books I read last year

Jan 01, 2017 | Category: Featured

I put together a round up of my favourite reads of 2015 and some people seemed to like it. So, in typically opportunistic manner, I though I'd repeat the exercise. Here are some of the books I found m...

Last one in: My return to Michaela

Dec 16, 2016 | Category: Featured

I had an afternoon free in London on Monday (what luxury!) and arranged to pop in to Michaela Community School to see what, if anything, had changed since my last visit in May 2015. I hadn't realised...

#Katherine Birbalsingh #Michaela School