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David Didau

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So far David Didau has created 936 blog entries.

What every teacher needs to know about teaching for social justice

2019-10-29T09:05:45+00:00February 3rd, 2018|Featured|

The marvellous Teach Secondary magazine continue to publish my articles on a regular basis but don't hold that against them; there are loads of other excellent reasons for reading. Here's a link to my latest. The world is not a fair place. Some children are born into advantage; others are not. Many children in many schools have been raised in an environment where there is access to books, where their parents value reading and education, where there are middle class dinner table conversations about current affairs and abstract concepts. Such young people have an educational advantage from the start – this [...]

12 Rules for Schools – Rule 5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

2018-02-27T10:07:54+00:00February 2nd, 2018|behaviour, Featured|

Welcome to the fifth installment in a series of posts adapting Jordan Peterson’s book, 12 Rules of Life to the context of eduction. All the posts in this series are collected here. This is not intended to be an accurate summary of Peterson’s views, it is merely what I reckon. Navigating the world is tough enough when people like you. It's nigh on impossible if everyone dislikes you. Peterson explains that not teaching children how to make friends and avoid irritating others is the cardinal sin of parenting. No one will love your children like you do, so, if you struggle with some of [...]

12 Rules for schools – Rule 4 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

2018-07-23T10:03:45+01:00January 26th, 2018|Featured|

This is the fourth in a series of posts adapting Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules of Life to the context of eduction. All the posts in this series are collected here. This is not intended as an accurate summary of Peterson’s views, it is merely what I reckon. The idea that we should only compare ourselves against a personal yardstick is good advice. As Max Ehrmann says in Disiderata, "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself." Who wants to be vain or bitter? But, as with much good advice, [...]

12 Rules for schools – Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you

2018-01-24T21:45:50+00:00January 24th, 2018|Featured|

This is the third in a series of posts adapting Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules of Life to the context of eduction. I'm linking all the posts in this series here. This is not intended as an accurate summary of Peterson's views, it is merely my hot take. Not everyone is well disposed towards us. The higher you strive, the more you seek to put your stamp upon the world, the more likely you are to attract the opprobrium of the envious and bitter. This isn't a lot of fun, but it can be managed. Usually such people broadcast their antipathy in no uncertain terms [...]

Good intentions are not good enough

2018-01-23T17:04:18+00:00January 23rd, 2018|Featured|

I genuinely believe that everyone involved in education is well-intentioned. If making money was the prime motivation I'm sure we could find other, more profitable areas to operate in. Like international arms trading. Everyone wants the best for young people, but, of course, there's little agreement on what this should look like. Human beings are tribal. We band together with those who share our ideological preferences and make those with whom we disagree the enemy. This makes a certain kind of sense. If someone dissents from our well-considered opinion about how children ought to be educated we're prone to engaging in [...]

12 rules for schools – Rule 2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

2018-01-23T15:33:40+00:00January 22nd, 2018|Featured|

This is the second in a series of posts adapting Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules of Life to the context of eduction. You can find my thoughts on Rule 1 here. Please note, Peterson talks about a lot of other stuff - much of it religious - which I'm largely ignoring. This is just my partial take. According to this study, one third of every prescription a doctor writes goes unfilled, and, over half of those people who do collect their medication won't take it correctly. Why would this be? Why would some one who felt ill enough to visit their doctor not then [...]

12 Rules for schools – Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back

2018-02-26T11:36:05+00:00January 21st, 2018|Featured|

I've just finished the Canadian academic and controversialist, Jordan Peterson's book, 12 Rules of Life: An antidote to chaos and my over-riding impression is that it's an important, erudite and thoughtful addition to the library of anyone interested in philosophy, ethics, religion, literature, psychology and the history of thought. But it's an often challenging and occasionally irritating at times. I guarantee that Peterson will say things which will annoy you. Don't let tis put you off. His wisdom and compassion underlie even his most provocative and incendiary ideas. His 12 rules are as follows: Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders [...]

Can we develop a ‘love of learning’?

2022-04-02T15:29:13+01:00January 13th, 2018|Featured|

The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus Why are some people healthier than others? This might sound like a bit of silly question. The answer is surely obvious: some people eat better and exercise more than others. But is that all there is to it? Couldn't 'healthiness' be attributed, at least in part, to our genes? Might some of us be born with a greater capacity for health than others? We know that various physical traits - eye and hair colour, height, weight, certain specific genetic disorders - absolutely are inherited, so why not a general factor of healthiness? [...]

Getting culture right Part 2: Understanding group psychology

2018-01-12T15:20:49+00:00January 12th, 2018|behaviour, psychology|

This is the second post on getting cultures right in schools. You can find Part 1, on social norms and using normative messages, here. We are essentially social animals and have evolved to thrive in groups. Although we tend to be disposed to share resources and cooperate with those we perceive as belonging to our group, we are worryingly ready to discriminate against anyone we see as an outsider. Creating a community with a sense of belonging is the ambition of all schools. In part, this involves creating a sense that students are part of an in-group – whether in a local [...]

Teaching to make children cleverer – Part 3

2018-01-10T15:11:02+00:00January 10th, 2018|curriculum|

As discussed in Part 1 of this series of posts, it seems probable that the best way to use education to increase children's cognitive capacities is to increase the quantity and the quality of what they know. In Part 2 I discussed ways we might increase the quantity of what of what children know about the world, and in this post I want to explore how we might go about selecting what to teach with an eye for quality. Any attempt to discuss improving the quality of children's knowledge will be, inevitably, subjective and partial, but every effort ought to be made to reduce [...]

Teaching to make children cleverer – Part 2

2018-01-07T11:28:33+00:00January 7th, 2018|psychology|

In my last post I reviewed those aspects on intelligence which are likely to be most malleable by teachers. Briefly, research into individual differences suggests that intelligence is fairly stable and that environmental factors - parenting and teaching - seem to wear off over time. At the same time, research into social attitudes (the rise in IQ scores over that last century) clearly demonstrates that something really is changing and that these changes have real world significance. This present us with a paradox which perhaps can be explained by saying that g (the tendency of cognitive abilities in individuals to correlate [...]

A year in blogging

2018-01-06T15:30:32+00:00January 6th, 2018|blogging|

This was my sixth year of blogging and it was a real mixed bag. For reasons of mental well-being I more or less stopped blogging in the last four months of the year and almost completely swore off social media. That said, almost 750,000 people visited the site and I managed to cobble together over 100 posts, the ten most popular of which are summarised below. 1. Is growth mindset bollocks? - 25th January A somewhat scurrilous foray into the latest failure to replicate Carol Dweck's research into the growth mindset. In summary, I don't think her research is bollocks, but I'm [...]

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