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David Didau

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So far David Didau has created 931 blog entries.

So, I’ve been reinstated by Twitter

2016-12-09T00:14:20+00:00December 8th, 2016|Featured|

Without a word of explanation, my Twitter account unsuspended itself this evening. In case you didn't get round to noticing, I'd been suspended the day before. Thank you so much to the veritable legion of supporters who inundated @twitter with requests to get me off the naughty step - it almost brought a tear to my jaundiced, cynical old eyes. I also have to thank some blue-ticked big hitters from the edupress for going straight to the top: https://twitter.com/RichardA/status/806957477086527488 https://twitter.com/Ed_Dorrell/status/806958309639159808 But have I learned anything from the experience? Probably not. It was odd and strangely liberating  to read tweets about myself without being able [...]

So, I’ve been suspended by Twitter

2016-12-08T00:32:09+00:00December 7th, 2016|Featured|

This afternoon various people started text messaging me to ask why my Twitter account had been suspended. Needless to say, the news came as something of a surprise. No one from Twitter had contacted me and, after filing a complaint, I've been left kicking my heels and speculating. The two competing theories are 1) that this guy complained about me (seems unlikely that Twitter would take him seriously) or 2) that I've breached some sort of ethical code for posting 4 or 5 30 second clips from the Pixies concert I attended the previous evening. (Again, this seems unlikely as there's [...]

PISA 2015: some tentative thoughts about successful teaching

2017-03-06T08:14:28+00:00December 6th, 2016|Featured|

Despite all the eminently sensible caveats offered by Sam Freedman, PISA provides a fascinating lens through which to view the world of education. The most interesting of the PISA documents I've had a chance to look at today is Policies and Practices for Successful Schools. It's a long document and a great many policies and practices are addressed, but the most interesting to me is the section on how science is taught (pp 65-77). As the report says, "How science is taught at school can make a big difference for students." In order to work out what sorts of activities regularly occur [...]

Making a mockery of marking: The new GCSE English Language mocks

2016-12-05T13:38:59+00:00December 5th, 2016|assessment|

The following is a guest post from the mastermind of Comparative Judgement, Dr Chris Wheadon. The marking of English Language is likely to be extremely challenging this year. English Language has long form answer questions, typically with 8, 16 and 24 mark responses. Ofqual’s research suggests the following range of precision is normal across GCSE and A level: 8 mark items: +/- 3 marks 16 mark items: +/- 4 marks 24 mark items: +/- 6 marks So, when an 8 mark item is marked, for the same response, it is normal for one marker to give 4 marks, while another will give 7 [...]

Is criticising learning styles an attack on the poor?

2017-04-09T18:14:09+01:00December 4th, 2016|myths|

Richard Olsen is a PhD candidate at Monash University studying "pedagogical capacity, effectiveness and quality in a changing world". He recently linked to this Australian Research Summary of Learning Styles saying, "Attacking learning styles isn't about learning styles, rather promoting instruction & learning as recalling facts." This is an interesting idea and not one I'd encountered before. He goes further, claiming, "the sustained attacks on learning styles are really attacks on feminist pedagogy, pedagogy of the poor and inquiry." I was curious enough about this to ask him what feminist pedagogy is. He didn't tell me. In fact his only interaction with [...]

Hirsch vs Engelmann: “No scientific basis for Direct Instruction”?

2018-09-25T12:59:56+01:00December 2nd, 2016|research|

No one seems clear who first said it, but it's become an abiding truth of journalism that, "If a dog bites a man, that is not news. But if a man bites a dog that is news." To publish an article in which an octogenarian educationalist says basically what he's been saying for the last few decades would not be news. But if said educationalist were to bite another well-known bastion of traditional education? Publish and be damned! So, in a recent article about the nonsense of selecting what to teach based on whether material is cognitively 'age appropriate', ED Hirsch Jr [...]

Less marking, more feedback: A challenge and a proposal

2016-12-01T16:18:59+00:00December 1st, 2016|leadership|

I've been arguing for some time that if teachers spent less time marking (by which I mean writing comments on students' work) then they might have a lot more time for giving meaningful feedback which actually helps develop more flexible, durable learning. This is a message that tends to play well with harried, over burdened teachers but often fills school leaders with horror. The fear is that because some teachers are lazy, good-for-nothing loafers they'll simply take this as an opportunity to shuttle off to the pub every evening and their students will be even more neglected. I can certainly understand [...]

Marking is an act of folly

2016-12-04T17:26:15+00:00November 30th, 2016|leadership|

Contrary to popular belief, marking and feedback are not the same thing. Clearly they're connected - and, ideally most marking has the intention of giving feedback - but the process of marking or giving marks does not, in and of itself, equate with feedback. Those who see marking as an essential component of a teachers' role should wonder why, in many parts of the world - particularly east Asian countries which seem to do very well in international comparisons - teachers do not routinely mark students' work. If it were essential this would not be possible. Anglophone countries - and the UK [...]

More good proxies for learning

2016-11-28T22:40:07+00:00November 28th, 2016|learning|

A few days ago, I wrote about a brief online discussion I had with Dan Willingham on the importance of thinking hard. In the comments, Greg Ashman pointed out that thinking hard cannot be the only way in which learning happens, how else, he asks, would we explain the success of Zig Englemann's Direct Instruction programme? Although I'm not totally convinced that students receiving Direct Instruction don't have to think hard, it's certainly true to say that they're not expected to struggle. Think also about rote memorisation. Most people would probably agree that memorising your times tables doesn't requires thinking hard. [...]

Seven Theses on Education

2016-11-28T00:03:32+00:00November 28th, 2016|Featured|

Dennis Hayes, professor of education at Derby University and co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education recently wrote the following Facebook post: Seven Theses on Education 1. Education is solely concerned with knowledge and understanding (not about character building or happiness) 2. Education is not training (i.e. not about skills or ‘learning objectives’) 3. Education is an end in itself and not a means to another end (such as ‘social justice’) 4. Education is universal (for all) (you can’t teach if you think some children can only learn in certain ways or can only reach a certain (low)level) 5. Education [...]

Can thinking hard be incidental? A conversation with Daniel Willingham

2016-11-27T17:08:36+00:00November 27th, 2016|Featured|

For some time now, Rob Coe has been suggesting that a good proxy for students learning in lessons is that they "have to think hard". This seemed eminently sensible and I've written about this formulation on a number of occasions, most recently here. I saw Rob speak at a conference on Friday and tweeted the following: "Learning happens when you have to think hard." How many minutes do children spend in a day really thinking hard? Asks @ProfCoe — David Didau (@LearningSpy) November 25, 2016 Rob suggested the answer might be as little as 10 minutes a day and that this [...]

Context isn’t king

2016-11-21T16:26:09+00:00November 21st, 2016|Featured|

It's become quite fashionable recently to say that there's no best way to teach because what works depends on the context in which you teach. This is a considerable improvement on asserting that [insert half-baked, debunked practice of your choosing] is the best way and then penalising teachers for not doing it, but it's still a bit of a cop-out. I'm not claiming context doesn't matter - of course it does - but it isn't nearly as important as some would have us believe. Clearly, the context of schooling in different countries varies greatly and most right-thinking people acknowledge that 'policy tourism [...]

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