Archive

Deliberately difficult - why it's better to make learning harder

Jun 10, 2013 | Category: Featured

The most fundamental goals of education are long-term goals. As teachers and educators, we want targeted knowledge and skills to be acquired in a way that makes them durable and flexible. More specifi...

#Ofsted #Dylan Wiliam #Graham Nuthall #Kev Bartle #progress #Robert Bjork #desirable difficulties #Ebbinghaus #New Theory of Disuse #Retrieval induced forgetting

Planning Lessons - lessons I’ve learned from lessons I've taught

Jun 09, 2013 | Category: Featured

This is a summary and a drawing together of several earlier posts. I consider it a refinement of my thinking and something which is painstakingly (and grandiosely) groping its way towards a total phil...

#Zoe Elder #Dylan Wiliam #Pareto #Graham Nuthall #Robert Bjork #DIRT

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 1: Explain

Jun 26, 2013 | Category: Featured

"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process."EB White There are some definite pit falls to avoid in explaining things to kids. The biggest c...

#Daniel Willingham #David Thomas #Kris Boulton #Mr Men #The Simpsons #Wittgenstein #zooming in and out

Great teaching happens in cycles - the teaching sequence for developing independence

Jun 24, 2013 | Category: Featured

Last year I wrote a post called The Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson, which has become by far my most viewed post with almost 10,000 page views. Clearly teachers are hungry for this kind of thing. But...

#Ofsted #explaining #modelling #practise #scaffolding

Wellington Education Festival

Jun 22, 2013 | Category: training

Thank you so much to all those who squeezed in to my Deliberately Difficult session at Wellington today.[caption id="attachment_3701" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Photo by @headguruteacher[/captio...

#Education Festival #Johnny Ball #Nevile Gwynne #Wellington College

Independence vs independent learning

Jun 20, 2013 | Category: literacy

Last weekend #SLTchat was on fostering students' independence. As you'd expect, there were lots of great suggestions shared, as well as some not so great ideas. One comment I tweeted in response to th...

#Ofsted #Lee Donaghy #Daisy Christodoulou #independent learning #teacher talk #Tom Sherrington

How knowledge is being detached from skills in English

Jun 18, 2013 | Category: English

I don't normally do this. In fact, I haven't put up a post by anyone else since last August. But in this case Joe Kirby has expressed my own thoughts so articulately that there seemed little point try...

#bloom's taxonomy #knowledge #skills #Shakespeare #Joe Kirby

Thinking like a writer

Jun 04, 2013 | Category: English

How do we get better at writing? By writing.The advice I always give to students to improve their writing is to write. Often. Everyday if possible. This might be a private diary entry, an Amazon revie...

#Phil Beadle #Tom Bennett #practice #Rober Bjork

What is meta-cognition and can we teach it?

Jun 01, 2013 | Category: Featured

Meta-cognition is one of those terms that gets bandied about in educational circles as if we all know exactly what it is. And we do: it's...er...thinking about thinking, isn't it?Ever since the Educat...

#Daniel Willingham #cognitive psychology #Education Endowment Foundation #meta-cognition

Magic glasses and the Meares-Irlen syndrome

May 27, 2013 | Category: literacy

In case you missed it, I published a post on the dubious existence of dyslexia this weekend. A few people have been in touch via Twitter to tell me about the remarkable effect of Irlen lenses and that...

#dyslexia #Irens