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David Didau

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So far David Didau has created 931 blog entries.

The power of 'best bets'

2017-01-15T17:40:00+00:00January 15th, 2017|research|

The other day I read Greg Ashman's post Why Education is like smoking which talked about the way teachers often generalise from anecdotes in the same way that when smokers are confronted with statistics about the health risks of smoking they might say things like, "Well, my nan smoked 400 cigarettes a day! She may have had bright yellow fingers but she lived to the ripe old age of 130!" Or whatever. Teachers do this sort of thing all the time. We say things like, "Well, the research may say x, but I find y works so much better for me!" Maybe it [...]

Problems with the ‘zone of proximal development’

2017-01-13T14:18:53+00:00January 13th, 2017|Featured|

It's hard to have a discussion about learning without someone sooner or later chipping in with the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) to support their position. This might, in part, be because Vygotsky is one of the very few theorists covered in many teachers' training, but it's also because it feels intuitively right. Briefly, most people use ZPD to suggest that there is a 'Goldilocks Effect' where the level of challenge for a child is 'just right. If work is too easy, it's argued, then no learning will take place, and if it's too hard, then it [...]

Should students be overlearning?

2017-01-12T21:28:45+00:00January 12th, 2017|Featured|

In my last post I outlined my concerns with the idea of 'thinking hard' being a good proxy for learning. Briefly, thinking hard about a problem appears to be an inefficient way to alter long-term memory structures. This means that it's perfectly possible to struggle with a difficult exercise, successfully complete it, and still not have learned how to repeat the process independently. The problem is that 'thinking hard' exhausts limited working memory reserves. In fact - as Daisy Christodoulou states in Making Good Progress? - the evidence on 'overlearning' seems to suggest that repeating a task to the point where almost no thought [...]

Further problems with the ‘thinking hard’ proxy for learning

2017-01-11T19:26:25+00:00January 11th, 2017|learning|

Because learning is invisible, we can only hope to measure whether students are making progress by observing proxies. Most people now seem to agree that certain activities which routinely take place in lessons are, in the words of Robert Coe, 'poor proxies for learning'. Rob has suggested that a better proxy might be 'thinking hard'. This seemed sensible and, like many others, I've embraced the idea, but the harder I think about this the less sure I am. In this post I began considering of the limitations of think hard as a good proxy for learning but was still wedded to the [...]

Why feedback fails

2017-05-28T13:40:02+01:00January 10th, 2017|assessment|

Feedback is one of the few things in education that pretty much every agrees is important and worthwhile. The need for feedback is obvious: if you were expected to learn how to reverse park a car whilst wearing a blindfold you would be very unlikely to learn how to go about this without causing damage either to your car, or to the environment. In order to learn you would need to see where you were going and what happened when you turned the wheel. We get this sort of trial and error feedback all time; we act and then observe the effects of [...]

Post-truth and the best way to teach

2017-01-03T10:25:55+00:00January 3rd, 2017|learning|

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. St. Augustine We've always had a tendency to defer to what is most said most magnificently and shun that which is badly uttered but now it's a thing. To much fanfare, 'post-truth' has entered the lexicon and now we have a made-to-measure term for the emotively uttered truism that turns out not to be er... true. Deliberate falsehoods would be much easier to combat because, as Hannah Arendt put it, "The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of [...]

The 10 most popular posts on The Learning Spy in 2016

2017-01-02T18:29:35+00:00January 2nd, 2017|blogging|

Here are the 10 most viewed posts of last year. Only half of them were actually written last year and some of them are several years old. I reckon this must in part be due to the fact that there are so many links to some of my older posts knocking around on t'internet and so, because my views have changed, I've taken the opportunity to rewrite some of them fairly extensively. I wonder if you can guess which ones? 10. 5 things every new (secondary) teacher should know about reading (August 2016) 9 Bottom sets and the scourge of low-level disruption (November 2016) 8. Is growth [...]

The most interesting books I read last year

2017-01-02T14:54:23+00:00January 1st, 2017|Featured|

I put together a round up of my favourite reads of 2015 and some people seemed to like it. So, in typically opportunistic manner, I though I'd repeat the exercise. Here are some of the books I found most interesting in 2016: Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens was one of the books I most enjoyed last year so I was trilled to see Harari had a new one out. Homo Deus is subtitled 'a brief history of tomorrow' and, while acknowledging that predictions about the future are most noticeable for how wrong they tend to be, suggests a variety [...]

My favourite posts of 2016 on The Learning Spy

2016-12-31T10:58:09+00:00December 31st, 2016|blogging|

Here follows a selection of some of what I consider to be my best posts of 2016. I've learned not to be surprised that what I think is my best writing is rarely appreciated by others and this is certainly reflected in the selection below; almost all of these posts went largely unnoticed by the reading public. In a desperate attempt to rectify this injustice I once again foist them before you for your consideration. January Can anyone teach? Well, that depends on what you think education is for - The role of the teacher is a continual battleground between the various [...]

My favourite blog posts of 2016

2016-12-30T13:30:22+00:00December 30th, 2016|blogging|

Here follows my extremely partial take on some of the blog post I have most enjoyed reading this year Heather Fearn - Reading fluency and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ My only continuing niggle with Heather's blog is that she stubbornly refuses to add a 'follow by email' widget and, seeing as I can't make head not tail of RSS feeds and the like, I often miss her posts much too often. That said, pretty much everything she writes is ace and I really should make more of an effort. This one, on the haphazard way reading is taught in secondary schools [...]

Last one in: My return to Michaela

2016-12-16T16:24:01+00:00December 16th, 2016|Featured|

I had an afternoon free in London on Monday (what luxury!) and arranged to pop in to Michaela Community School to see what, if anything, had changed since my last visit in May 2015. I hadn't realised it at the time but my blog was one of the very first written about a visit to the school and marked something of a watershed. Hard to believe now, what with a series of high profile education debates and the launch of their manifesto, The Michaela Way, but staff had been operating under radio silence and blogging was verboten. Headteacher, Katherine Birbalsingh laughingly [...]

Struggle and success

2017-03-14T22:24:39+00:00December 9th, 2016|learning|

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Albert Camus The gods of ancient Greece punished Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, for his hubris by condemning him to an eternity of pushing a huge rock up a hill only to have it roll down again as soon as he got it to the top. One can only imagine that Sisyphus was not a happy chap. Pushing a boulder up a hill with no prospect of ever reaching the top has become the very image of futility. Most people only persist with something difficult [...]

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