Archive

Active filters: Category: leadership Clear all

The problem with book monitoring

Nov 26, 2015 | Category: leadership

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.Albert Camus Most schools these days routinely monitor students' exercise books in an attempt to extrapolate the quality of teaching. In some ways this is po...

#book monitoring

Workload, retention & accountability: One policy to rule them all

Nov 22, 2015 | Category: leadership

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies. Rudyard Kipling There's a lot wrong with the way schools are held to account which result in perverse incentives for schoo...

#workload

We don't know what we don't know: the uses of humility

Nov 05, 2015 | Category: leadership

Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all the possible changes of life. George Arliss In my last post I challenged the widely-held belief that teachers' judgements are g...

#Daniel Kahneman #Gary Klein #intuition

Five techniques for overcoming overconfidence and improving decision-making

Nov 03, 2015 | Category: leadership

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. Bertrand Russell Every s...

#Daniel Kahneman #Gary Klein

The Illusion of Knowing

Nov 20, 2015 | Category: leadership

Knowledge, n.: The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.Ambrose Bierce Advanced Learning has commissioned me to write a piece about the uses and abuses of data in schools. My thesis,...

#knowledge #data

Is teaching a 'wicked' game?

Oct 12, 2015 | Category: leadership

What a wicked game you play to make me feel this way. Chris Isaak, Wicked Game Ok, I've cheated a bit. In this paper Robin M Hogarth identifies what he calls 'kind' and 'wicked' domains. A kind domain...

#Matthew Syed #narrative fallacy #Robin Hogarth

"Works for me!" The problem with teachers' judgement

Oct 11, 2015 | Category: leadership

It is with our judgments as with our watches: no two go just alike, yet each believes his own. Alexander Pope One of the difficulties inherent in challenging teachers' judgments is that when those...

#Daniel Kahneman #intelligent accountability

Why sacrificing chickens will not help us evaluate teachers' performance

Sep 16, 2015 | Category: leadership

Intellectually, philosophically, morally, the argument over whether teachers' performance should be evaluated by grading their teaching by means of a lesson observation has been won. Ofsted have accep...

#lesson grading

Equality is unfair

Oct 08, 2015 | Category: leadership

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.Erich Fromm In my firs...

#Daniel Pink #fairness #equality #Steve Moore

The melody of education: what should we be accountable for?

Oct 06, 2015 | Category: leadership

Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end, it would not have reached its goal. A parable.Nietzsche This is the third in...

#accountability #Eric Kalenze #purpose of education