Archive

Romanticism & the Enlightenment: Meta-beliefs in education

Feb 06, 2016 | Category: myths

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." James Baldwin Before...

#Dorothy Bishop #Enlightenment #meta beliefs #Romanticism

Reading difficulty is a teaching problem not an intelligence problem

Feb 04, 2016 | Category: literacy

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personal...

#glue ear #Keith Stanovich #phonics

More guff on creativity

Feb 03, 2016 | Category: myths

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. (One of my favourite fake Einstein quotes.) What is it about creativity that makes so many otherwise sensible people say such silly thin...

#creativity #Jim al Khalili

Learning about learning: What every teacher needs to know

Feb 03, 2016 | Category: psychology

When I trained to be teacher I was told little or nothing about how children learn. Because a lot of what we intuitively suppose about the process of learning is often flatly contradicted by cognitive...

January on The Learning Spy

Feb 02, 2016 | Category: Featured

Here, for your delight and edification, are the blogs I wrote during January:1st January - New Year’s resolutions for teachers and school leaders Make this year better than last!2nd January - Varietie...

Some assumptions about scripted lessons

Jan 31, 2016 | Category: Featured

"So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and struc...

#Carl Sagan #Richard Feynman #Direct Insruction #scripts

Scripts: whose lesson is it anyway?

Jan 31, 2016 | Category: learning

When I was 16, Whose Line Is It Anyway? first aired on UK television. The show, hosted by Clive Anderson, asked four comedians to ad lib responses to various prompts and scenarios, much of it shouted...

#direct instruction #Project Follow Through #Siegfried Engelmann #Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Proof of progress - Part 1

Jan 30, 2016 | Category: assessment

Measuring progress is a big deal. I've written before about the many and various ways we get assessment wrong but, increasingly, I'm becoming convinced there are some ways we might get it right. As re...

#Chris Wheadon #comparative judgement

Is it a 'sin' to tell teachers how to teach?

Jan 27, 2016 | Category: learning

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderated use rather than total abstinence. Samuel Butler According to a recent TES article, Professor John...

What's the difference between character and personality?

Jan 25, 2016 | Category: Featured

The recent Sutton Trust report on character education, A Winning Personality, concludes that extroversion correlates strongly with career success. It recommends that schools focus their efforts on imp...

#Sutton Trust #Annie Murphy Paul #character #Judith RIch Harris #Jubilee Centre #personality