Archive

How do we know pupils are making progress? Part 3: Assessment

Mar 26, 2019 | Category: assessment

In Part 1 of this series I set out the problems with making predictions about students’ progress by drawing a ‘flight path’ between KS2 and KS4, then, in Part 2, I explained how thinking about the cur...

#Deep Ghataura #fundamental measurement #Stanley Stevens

How do we know pupils are making progress? Part 2: The curriculum

Mar 24, 2019 | Category: curriculum

In my last post, I set out the problems with making predictions about students' progress by drawing a 'flight path' between KS2 and KS4. Instead, I will argue, we should address three interlinked aspe...

#progression models

How do we know pupils are making progress? Part 1: The madness of flight paths

Mar 23, 2019 | Category: assessment

Schools are desperate to find ways to predict students' progress from year to year and between key stages. Seemingly, the most common approach to solving this problem is to produce some sort of 'fligh...

#Ofsted #Amanda Spielman #Flightpaths

If you tolerate this then your children will be next

Mar 16, 2019 | Category: behaviour

What kinds of poor behaviour should we tolerate? How much should we tolerate? There's a wellspring of opinion that zero tolerance is too much, that we ought to tolerate some poor behaviour, but how mu...

#no excuses #zero-tolerance #Jeremy Hardy

Ofsted and deeper learning: it's like learning, but deeper

Mar 13, 2019 | Category: Featured

Recently, I was contacted by a school who wanted some help working on 'deeper learning'. I asked them what they meant to which they replied, "Oh, we were hoping you'd tell us!" According to the school...

What do students think about marking?

Mar 03, 2019 | Category: Featured

Over the past year or so, I've been doing some very informal research into students' attitudes and opinions with some of the schools I work with on an ongoing basis.Two years ago I wrote 2 posts summa...

#marking #feedback

How do children learn to speak?

Feb 08, 2019 | Category: language

In chapter 2 of my book, Making Kids Cleverer, I discuss, David Geary's theory of biologically primary and secondary knowledge. Human beings seem to have various universal behaviours and characteristi...

#Judith RIch Harris #Stephen Pinker #David Geary #Daniel Everett #Jeremy Lent #Kevin Laland #language acquisition

The Epistemology of English

Feb 07, 2019 | Category: English

For some time now I've been thinking about how epistemology* - how knowledge is accumulated and divvied up - in English as an academic discipline. While I'm not at all sure that I've accomplished anyt...

#English #epistemology #Natalie Haynes #Robert Eaglestone

What's wrong with Ofsted's definition of learning?

Feb 04, 2019 | Category: Featured

As everyone already knows, Ofsted have published a draft of the new Inspection Framework which is currently undergoing a process of consultation. Amazingly, one of the most contentious aspects of the...

#Ofsted #Robert Bjork #long-term memory #Paul Kirschner #John Sweller #William James #Hermann Ebbinghaus

Does creativity have a dark side?

Jan 30, 2019 | Category: Featured

Of course it’s desirable that students are able to identify problems, generate potential solutions, evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies, and then communicate with others about the value o...

#creativity