Archive

Why mini-plenaries are a waste of time

Oct 01, 2016 | Category: learning

Plenary is an interesting word. It originally meant absolute, without reservation or qualification. The pope used to offer plenary indulgences to crusaders absolving them in advance of any sin they co...

#mini-plenary #plenary

Is our behaviour a choice?

Sep 29, 2016 | Category: behaviour

Arguments about free will date back to ancient Greece, but the scientific consensus now tends towards the belief that free will is an illusion. It's become an article of faith in the life sciences tha...

#behaviour #Reading #free will

What causes the gender gap in education?

Sep 25, 2016 | Category: Featured

In the 1940s the Belgian philosopher Albert Michotte identified our tendency to believe we could see causality. His book, The Perception of Causality, published in French in 1945 showed how certain ve...

#Albert Michotte #boys underperfomance #Perception of causality

Better teaching through chemistry?

Sep 14, 2016 | Category: Featured

One of my favourite books of last year was Yuval Noah Harari's magnificent Sapiens. It looks like his new tome, Homo Deus, is going to be just as fascinating if the rest of it lives up to the first co...

#ADHD #Yuval Noah Harari #modafinil #Ritalin

What's the job of a teacher?

Sep 13, 2016 | Category: Featured

One of the sessions I attended at researchED last Saturday was a debate on whether there really is a mental health crisis amongst young people. There were lots of interesting points made and the debat...

#researchED #mental health #social services

Do we teach children to love reading? Part 2

Sep 13, 2016 | Category: reading

In my last post I wrote about sociologist, Frank Furedi's views on reading and whether we do a good job of fostering a love of reading in young people. In this post I want to explore his view that rea...

#Michael Rosen #Frank Furedi #Ruth Mishkin

Do we teach children to love reading? Part 1

Sep 12, 2016 | Category: reading

This sounds like a really obvious question but, after listening to Frank Furedi at researchED on Saturday and subsequently reading his book, The Power of Reading: from Socrates to Twitter, I've realis...

#Reading #researchED #Frank Furedi #instrumentalism

The Trouble with Transfer - my #rED16 slides

Sep 10, 2016 | Category: learning

Today saw another triumphant outing for Tom Bennett's grassroots conference, researchED. This year I ran a session investigating the research into how we transfer what we learn between different conte...

#researchED #Paul Kirschner

Go Compare!

Sep 09, 2016 | Category: assessment

Another one from Teach Secondary, this one from their assessment special. This time it's an over view of Comparative Judgement.Human beings are exceptionally poor at judging the quality of a thing on...

#Daniel Kahneman #Donald Laming #comparative judgement

What every teacher needs to know about... seating plans

Sep 09, 2016 | Category: planning

Remarkably, the rather excellent Teach Secondary magazine haven't yet seen through me and are still running my half-baked ramblings. Here's this month's pale offering.It is a truth universally acknowl...

#seating plans #Teach Secondary