XFacebookYouTubeLinkedInEmail

David Didau

About David Didau

This author has not yet filled in any details.
So far David Didau has created 931 blog entries.

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 2: The effects of education

2017-05-22T15:24:05+01:00May 22nd, 2017|psychology|

In Part 1 of this series I laid out why IQ matters and that, far from being a banal measure of merely of how well some people do in a series of irrelevant tests, IQ actually has real power to predict people's life chances. What seems incontrovertibly true is that a higher IQ leads to a better life. This could easily seem like a counsel of despair if it automatically meant that children with lower IQs lived shorter, less fulfilled lives. Thankfully, there is something we can do and in this post I want to show the effects education has on raising IQ. [...]

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 1: Why IQ matters

2017-05-22T15:14:22+01:00May 21st, 2017|psychology|

Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not. Montaigne Although it’s become a truism to say we know relatively little about how our brains work, we know a lot more now than we used to. Naturally, everything we know is contingent and subject to addition, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or pretend we don’t know enough to draw some fairly clear conclusions. Despite the many myths surrounding it, intelligence is a good candidate for being the most well researched and best understood characteristic of the human brain. It’s also probably the most stable construct [...]

Should teachers do what children want?

2018-01-05T23:32:17+00:00May 19th, 2017|behaviour, leadership|

Every weekday morning, my daughters both moan about having to get up for school. They moan about their teachers and they moan about homework. Given free rein, they would spend all day every day watching BuzzFeed video channels, making Spotify playlists, watching Netflix and taking online quizzes. It's not that they're lazy, it's just that they'd really rather not have to learn maths, science and geography. They're both moderately conscientious, reasonably hardworking girls who never put a foot wrong in school. On parents' evenings, we're regaled with tales of how good their attitude to school is and how much progress they're [...]

The problem with problem solving (or, why I struggle to reset my clock)

2017-05-14T10:28:40+01:00May 14th, 2017|psychology|

When the clocks went forward in March and we arrived in British Summer Time, I made an abortive attempt to change the time on my car's clock. I knew, from having eventually changed it six months ago, that this is a process entirely within my grasp and yet, after about 10 minutes of frustrated fumbling, I'd only succeeded in moving the time forward by 20 minutes. I gave up and resigned myself to having a clock that is 20 minutes fast for the foreseeable future.  This has resulted in a few moments of confusion and panic over the past few weeks. Things [...]

Why parents should support schools

2017-05-14T12:10:29+01:00May 13th, 2017|behaviour|

Like all parents, I want the best for my children. When they're unhappy, I'm unhappy. When they suffer injustice, I'm incensed. When their school makes a decision I disagree with, my first reaction is to get in touch and point out where they've gone wrong and what they should do about it. When she was in primary school, my eldest daughter had a teacher who believed in the power of collective punishment, and, as a well-behaved, hard-working pupil she was made to suffer for the poor behaviour of some of the other children in her class. This struck both her and me [...]

Can we improve school interviews? Part 3: The interview lesson

2017-05-11T17:48:54+01:00May 11th, 2017|psychology|

In Part 1 of this series I reviewed some of the evidence on what makes for effective interviews, and in Part 2 I looked specifically at creating a less biased, more structured formal interview. In this post I'm going to lay out my thoughts on the usefulness of the interview lesson. One of the peculiarities of teaching is that teaching a sample lesson has become a ubiquitous part of the interview process. The received wisdom is that we can work out a lot of what we want to know about a prospective employee's teaching ability by watching them teach a class [...]

Can we improve school interviews? Part 2: Intuition vs. statistical prediction

2020-02-27T09:11:40+00:00May 10th, 2017|psychology|

In Part 1 I reviewed some of the research around the best way to recruit and how this might apply to school recruitment. One of the suggestions I made was that schools should "design an interview format around no more than six qualities or attributes and come up with a short list of questions for each attribute. Then score each interview on a scale of 1-5 for each of the metrics you’ve come up with." In this post I will go into more detail about exactly what that might look like. I'm basing these suggestions on the ideas of Daniel Kahneman and [...]

Can we improve school interviews? Part 1: A brief review of the research

2020-02-27T09:05:58+00:00May 9th, 2017|leadership|

Recruitment for most employers is straightforward: you advertise, read through applications, invite the people you like in for an interview, think about it for a bit and then enter into negotiations with whoever you most want to employ. In education it's different. Schools are weird. When I was first told how school recruitment works on my PGCE I couldn't believe it, "They do what?" For any non teachers, school recruitment works like this: All candidates for the job are invited in to the school on the same day. Candidates have to plan a lesson for a class they know almost nothing about [...]

Easy is easy, hard is hard

2017-05-09T10:16:34+01:00May 8th, 2017|behaviour|

Recently, I had the ill luck to be present for a friend's five-year-old daughter's birthday party. To add to the naturally generated mayhem of putting 30 small children in a space with fizzy drinks and sweets, my friend had shelled out on a children's entertainer called Johnny G - or something along those lines. Johnny has nailed down a repertoire certain to appeal to the unsophisticated palettes of the very young; he has an impressive array of fart and burp gags and makes very creative use of the word 'poo'. The kids loved him and their delighted shrieks echoed his every flatulent [...]

Practice vs. talent: Five principles for effective teaching

2017-05-07T17:06:30+01:00May 6th, 2017|Featured|

Are we the way we are because of our natures or is talent just the product of hard work? Which matters more natural ability of practice? A few years ago my mother reminded me of my struggles with learning to read. Apparently, one of my primary teachers had written home with the bad news that I was mentally subnormal and would probably never learn to read. My mum wasn’t having any of that. She took me out of school and spent all day every day forcing me to read the entire Janet and John reading scheme. My memories of this are [...]

Is resilience even a thing?

2018-01-26T22:25:42+00:00May 3rd, 2017|Featured, psychology|

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell. G. K. Chesterton Resilience - being able to bounce back from setbacks and cope with challenges - seems an obviously good thing. If we can make ourselves, and our children, more resilient, then we definitely should. Trouble is, it doesn't seem we can. In 1907, William James - often dubbed the grandfather of modern psychology wrote the following in an article for the journal Science: Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of [...]

Everyone values critical thinking, don’t they?

2019-10-19T22:30:02+01:00May 2nd, 2017|Featured|

NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir! Charles Dickens, Hard Times Gradgrind was a fictional character. Dickens invented him as a caricature of what was no doubt some fairly awful teaching in [...]

Toggle Sliding Bar Area
Go to Top