Archive

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

Is growth mindset bollocks?

Jan 25, 2017 | Category: psychology

Like everyone else, when I first came across Carol Dweck's theory of growth mindsets I was pretty psyched. There was something so satisfyingly truthy about the way the labels 'fixed' and 'growth' mind...

#Carol Dweck #Growth mindset #Li and Bates #replication

Reading for betterment

Jan 24, 2017 | Category: reading

About 20 years ago, I read Tolstoy's uber-novel, War and Peace. The perfect set of conditions all came together: I'd just been sent a copy of the book by a friend who was keen that I read it, I was in...

#Frank Furedi #Andy Miller #War and Peace

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

Further problems with the 'thinking hard' proxy for learning

Jan 11, 2017 | Category: learning

Because learning is invisible, we can only hope to measure whether students are making progress by observing proxies. Most people now seem to agree that certain activities which routinely take place i...

#Daisy Christodoulou #Robert Coe

Why feedback fails

Jan 10, 2017 | Category: assessment

Feedback is one of the few things in education that pretty much every agrees is important and worthwhile. The need for feedback is obvious: if you were expected to learn how to reverse park a car whil...

#feedback #PISA #Kluger & DeNisi

Post-truth and the best way to teach

Jan 03, 2017 | Category: learning

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. St. Augustine We've always had a tendency to defer to what is most said most magnificently and shun tha...

The 10 most popular posts on The Learning Spy in 2016

Jan 02, 2017 | Category: blogging

Here are the 10 most viewed posts of last year. Only half of them were actually written last year and some of them are several years old. I reckon this must in part be due to the fact that there are s...