Archive

Reframing the debate: It's not what you do, it's why you do it

May 23, 2017 | Category: Featured

For the past few years I've regularly railed against anyone who claims that either there is no debate about the best way to teach, or that said debate isn't worth having because the vast majority of t...

#debate #Kathryn Ecclestone #therapeutic education

Conscious and unconscious minds: Implications for teaching and learning literacy

Jul 15, 2017 | Category: Featured

This is a guest post by Hugo Kerr who got in touch with the offer that this appear first on the blog. What Hugo refers to as the 'unconscious mind' is, I think, largely analogous with my interpretatio...

Beware the nuance trap

Jul 15, 2017 | Category: Featured

In possibly the best titled academic paper of the year, Kieran Healy argues that nuance is, contrary to popular belief, a bad thing. He makes it clear he's not arguing against nuance per se, but again...

#Kieran Healy #nuance

If not knowledge, what?

Jul 14, 2017 | Category: Featured

knowledge /ˈnɒlɪdʒ/ noun facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. "a thirst for knowledge" awareness...

#knowledge #Aristotle

What is a broad and balanced curriculum?

Jul 08, 2017 | Category: curriculum

Historically, the curriculum schools have taught hasn't really mattered that much. Then, when the National Curriculum was introduced in the late 1980s, committees of experts had made all the decisions...

#Amanda Spielman #broad and balanced curriculum #Michael Fordham

Two types of learning - which one is best?

Jul 04, 2017 | Category: learning

Evolutionary biologists think of learning as being either social or asocial. Social learning is essentially copying - what is everyone else doing? - whereas asocial learning is accrued by interacting...

#asocial learning #Richard Laland #social learning

Put down your crystal balls

Jul 03, 2017 | Category: assessment

Many of the schools I visit and work with feel under enormous pressure to predict what their students are likely to achieve in their next set of GCSEs. In the past, this approach sort of made sense. O...

#Ofsted #GCSE #Amanda Spielman #Nicholas Nassim Taleb #predicted grades

Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer

Jun 25, 2017 | Category: Featured

Here are the slides I used in the talk I gave at this year's Education Festival: Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer from David Didau The antipathy of very many otherwise sensible...

#intelligence #IQ

A Novice→Expert Model of Learning

Jun 21, 2017 | Category: learning

Every artist was first an amateur.Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the best understood principles of cognitive psychology is that novices learn and think differently to experts. These labels are domain-spec...

#experts and novices #Dreyfus model of skill acquisition #Reservoir Dogs #Senecan tragedy

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue's model of learning? Part 2: The meta analyses

Jun 18, 2017 | Category: learning

To help us better understand how we learn, John Hattie & Gregory Donoghue propose a new conceptual model of learning. I've already written about my concerns with the metaphor of depth in Part 1. In th...

#transfer #deep learning #Hattie & Donoghue