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David Didau

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So far David Didau has created 936 blog entries.

Workload, retention & accountability: One policy to rule them all

2015-11-22T09:52:46+00:00November 22nd, 2015|leadership, workload|

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies. Rudyard Kipling There's a lot wrong with the way schools are held to account which result in perverse incentives for school leaders to treat teachers less well than we might want. There are also huge fears about a recruitment and retention crisis in education:  Teachers seem to be leaving the profession in droves and new cannon-fodder is failing to step up to the plate in sufficient numbers. Teachers feel overworked and under-appreciated. The two reasons most often cited for leaving the profession are unnecessary workload and poor behaviour management [...]

What every teacher needs to know about…Zero Tolerance

2016-06-07T16:09:00+01:00November 21st, 2015|behaviour|

My latest column for the wonderful folk at Teach Secondary magazine looks at the ins and outs of "Zero Tolerance" behaviour systems. There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Edmund Burke If you’re going to manage children’s behaviour you need a healthy balance of carrot and stick. Positive reinforcement is great, but at some point children confront us with behaviour that requires sanctioning. After many years of the education system tolerating woefully low standards of behaviour (we all have our particular horror stories) the pendulum has swung to the right. More and more schools are adopting a ‘zero-tolerance’ [...]

The Illusion of Knowing

2017-04-18T23:41:37+01:00November 20th, 2015|leadership|

Knowledge, n.: The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. Ambrose Bierce Advanced Learning has commissioned me to write a piece about the uses and abuses of data in schools. My thesis, if that's not too grand a term, is that while data can be extraordinarily useful in helping us make good decisions, too much data leads, inexorably, to overload. When we have too much data we start doing silly things with it, just because we have it. The cost of bad data is the conviction that we have figured out all the possible permutations and know exactly what we're doing [...]

Comparison is easy

2021-08-02T16:40:12+01:00November 19th, 2015|assessment, English|

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike. Jacob Bronowski Judging the quality of a thing in isolation is hard. Is this wine good? What about this restaurant? This cheese? This television programme? This child’s essay? But just because we’re bad at making meaningful judgements doesn’t mean we’re aware of experiencing any uncertainty. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and as cognitive psychologist and psychophysicist (who knew that was a thing?) Donald Laming puts it, "In such a state of mind people are unable to resist extraneous suggestion." The [...]

Essay writing: style and substance

2017-01-15T10:19:18+00:00November 17th, 2015|English, writing|

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable. George Eliot As with most subjects, the step up from GCSE to A level English literature is tough. You can get a pretty good grade at GCSE without developing a critical style or understand much about the art of constructing an academic essay. Students' work is routinely littered with stock phrases such as "I know this because" and "this shows" all of which shift the focus from having to think about subject content in sophisticated ways to simply learning a collection of fail-safe formulas. Of the 4 [...]

Rethinking assessment Part 2: the Einstellung effect

2015-11-16T12:53:55+00:00November 15th, 2015|assessment|

As I set out here, Dr Chris Wheadon has come up with a beautifully simple solution to assessing students' essays which requires no rubrics, very little marking time and produces extremely reliable results with no attendant loss of validity. It relies on the cumulative power of comparative judgement and represents the future of assessment for subjects which rely on essay length answers to open-ended questions. If you doubt me, the reason might be that your experience of, and sense of success with, mark schemes has blinded you to better alternatives. Imagine you have 3 water jars, each with the capacity to hold a different, fixed [...]

Rethinking assessment Part 1: How can we tell if students are making progress?

2020-06-19T19:15:58+01:00November 15th, 2015|assessment|

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? Stanislaw J. Lec For some time now I've been of the opinion that the way we normally think of progress is based on a myth. Part of the problem is that because we tend to believe that we can see learning we routinely miss the fact that what students can do here and now tells us relatively little about what they can elsewhere and later. We assume  In What If Everything We Knew About Education Was Wrong? I argue that Progress is just a metaphor. It doesn’t really describe objective reality; it provides [...]

In praise of dignity and justice

2015-11-11T20:21:35+00:00November 11th, 2015|blogging|

They'll ask me how I got her I'll say I saved my money They'll say isn't she pretty that ship called dignity Dignity, Deacon Blue In Microaggression and Moral Cultures, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argue that we are at a turning point in the way we understand morality. In the past, morality was a matter of honour. Honour had to be earned in some way - whether through an accident of birth, the acquisition of wealth, good works, or public reputation - and respect was seen as honour's due. A lack of due deference to those possessing honour was an insult [...]

How to deal with criticism

2018-01-23T01:31:30+00:00November 9th, 2015|blogging|

The destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not. Robert Green Ingersoll Every now and then, someone pops up (usually a relative!) to tell me something I've written is crap. This is wounding. Like everyone else who blogs, I'm convinced of my own genius and sagacity. Anyone who's critical is clearly a fool. Except sometimes someone like Andrew Old comes along who, despite his many and various failings as a human being, is no fool. As an example of the kind of arguments we used to enjoy, take a look at the comment thread on this [...]

If writing is magic, grammar is alchemy

2020-04-17T13:54:42+01:00November 9th, 2015|writing|

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. Gertrude Stein Writing is the technological innovation that has most changed the way we think and how we learn. It allows us the send our thoughts across time and space, and peer back in the past to see how people lived and thought thousands of years before we were born. We have access to all that has been recorded and preserved from all over the world. This is magic, but of a very prosaic [...]

Using threshold concepts to think about curriculum design

2015-11-09T20:10:49+00:00November 8th, 2015|planning|

Thank you so much to everyone who helped out, presented, turned up on a wet Saturday or just joined in from afar on our creaky Livestream (I'm particularly devastated that Professor Ray Land's keynote will be lost to posterity!) I will, in due course, write something which pulls together the experience of organising Saturday's #researchED's first subject-specific conference, but for now, here are the slides you've all been clamouring for (actually no one has asked, but in case you were vaguely interested.) What if everything you knew about curriculum design was wrong? from David Didau You can also watch me try [...]

We don’t know what we don’t know: the uses of humility

2020-07-20T13:37:31+01:00November 5th, 2015|leadership, psychology|

Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all the possible changes of life. George Arliss In my last post I challenged the widely-held belief that teachers' judgements are generally sound and suggested instead that we are routinely beset by very predictable but unconscious bias. Two criticisms emerged that I want to address. Firstly, some commenters noted that it's impossible to prevent teachers making judgments and that, in essence, a large part of the act of teaching is making judgements about pupils' learning. As such, any attempt to remove subjective bias from teaching is fundamentally flawed. [...]

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