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David Didau

About David Didau

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So far David Didau has created 936 blog entries.

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 [...]

Why group socialisation theory argues against grammar schools

2017-04-30T15:56:09+01:00April 30th, 2017|Featured|

My last post was written to explain why I thought 'grammar schools for all' was probably an unworkable idea. I introduced Judith Rich Harris's group socialisation theory to support my arguments, but may have done so in a way which muddied the water. Katherine Birbalsingh picked up from reading my post that I was inadvertently advancing an argument which leant support to those advocating for more academic selection at the age of 11. Reading her response has helped to clarify my thinking and, to ensure that my arguments can't be used in this way I feel I need to write a [...]

Why ‘grammar schools for all’ won’t work

2017-04-30T14:23:13+01:00April 30th, 2017|psychology|

A better, but overlong, title for this would be "Why grammar schools don't work for all and why 'grammar schools for all' (probably) won't work". At the birth of the comprehensive school movement, prime minster Harold Wilson made his well-known rallying cry, "Grammar schools for all'! Every child, no matter their background, or academic potential could go to a school which would share the values of the selective Grammar schools. It was a lovely idea and, as we all know, it failed to materialise. The reality, for very many children, became secondary moderns for all. Of course Wilson was well-intentioned; of [...]

Are you fooling yourself? Education and epidemiology

2017-04-29T19:00:32+01:00April 29th, 2017|research|

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman Epidemiology is the science of trying to find out what makes people healthier. Epidemiologists look at data to identify causal links between improved health and other factors. It is a correlational science which means that it can never really prove a causal link it can only suggest that a connection between two or more variables is unlikely to be caused by chance. Correlation is a tricksy business. Perfect correlations tend not [...]

The promise and danger of neuroscience

2017-04-26T19:57:13+01:00April 25th, 2017|myths, psychology|

With the advent of increasingly inexpensive access to brain imaging technology, neuroscience has entered a fascinating period of rapid advancement. The ability to generate images of what’s going on in our brains is hugely exciting, and the enthusiasm for trying to apply this science to education should come as no surprise. However, neuroscience is probably the ‘wrong level of description’ to provide meaningful insight into classroom practice: observing the actions of particular groups of neurons, or activity in various regions in the brain is a long way from teaching a classroom full of children. Concepts like neuroplasticity, or findings about the [...]

What do teachers think differentiation is?

2017-07-15T22:11:41+01:00April 24th, 2017|research|

In Why Knowledge Matters, ED Hirsch Jr sets out the case against differentiated instruction, saying, "the attempt to individualize the content of the language arts curriculum has been a quixotic idea that has put teachers under enormous pressure to achieve the impossible." He explains further: When a teacher is attending to the individual needs of one student  in a class of twenty, nineteen are not receiving the teacher's attention. all sorts of techniques conspire to obscure that fact - group work, isolated seatwork on boring work sheets, and "independent study' with choice of books from the leveled-reader bin.(p. 72) In What If [...]

Is “our knowledge” different from theirs?

2017-04-14T14:15:34+01:00April 14th, 2017|Featured|

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. C. S. Lewis Over on the Progressive Teacher blog, my case against 'neo-progressivism' has been critiqued. This is much to be welcomed and, as the anonymous author embraces rather than tries to deny that there is a debate, I want to do it the courtesy of a considered response. In it, my position is described as follows: "students should acquire knowledge, then use that knowledge as [...]

A summary of my arguments about education

2017-08-16T13:59:14+01:00April 13th, 2017|psychology|

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew. Oliver Goldsmith A tradition without intelligence is not worth having. T. S. Eliot Debating ideas in education - and anywhere else - is essential if we want to improve the lot of children and society. Over the past 6 years of so I've learned huge amounts from taking part in this back and forth and have, as well as becoming a good deal more knowledgeable, become a lot more adept at thinking critically about the ideas I encounter. My views have changed a [...]

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