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David Didau

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So far David Didau has created 936 blog entries.

Perverse incentives and how to counter them

2014-06-09T20:14:48+01:00June 9th, 2014|leadership|

Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder. Nikita Khrushchev Back in the good old days when the great unwashed could simply be shipped off to the colonies with nary a second thought, transportation of convicts was in the hands of private companies. These companies were compensated based on the number of prisoners shipped. As long as they were signed and sealed, no one cared over much if they were delivered and a depressing percentage of prisoners perished on-board these dreadful hulks. Eventually, the government, realising they were being short-changed and running the risk of running out of [...]

5 questions to guard against availability bias and made-up data

2014-08-18T20:41:15+01:00June 8th, 2014|myths|

The cost of bad data is the illusion of knowledge - Stephen Hawking What's more likely to kill you? A shark or a hot water tap? We've all heard stories of killer sharks, but as yet Spielberg hasn't made a thriller about killer plumbing. We reason based on the information most readily available to us. We assume that the risk of dying in a plane crash is greater than the risk of dying on our sofa because plane crashes are so much more dramatic. But we're wrong. This is the availability bias. We make decisions based on the most readily available information [...]

Ofsted: The end of the (lesson grading) affair

2014-06-04T22:11:27+01:00June 4th, 2014|Featured|

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. Ralph Waldo Emerson Back in 2011 I started to decide that grading lessons was wrong. I wasn't exactly sure how to justify this decision beyond the fact that I could see how it warped teaching, made lessons unbearably superficial and put everyone thought an awful lot of completely unnecessary stress. Since then I have put together, what I feel is a pretty convincing case on why it is wrong (on every conceivable level) to grade individual lessons. In December, after sharing these views with the thoroughly charming, 'right-leaning' chaps at [...]

How can we increase breadth and challenge?

2014-06-02T18:29:29+01:00June 2nd, 2014|English|

Over the past few days as sorry tale has unfolded. The new GCSE English literature specifications have been announced in draft form, full of sound and fury, signifying... nothing. The current GCSE lacks rigour and breadth and challenge. You're welcome to argue with this, but I think it's broadly true. Exam boards compete for business by positioning themselves as the 'easiest to get a C in' and schools, unsurprisingly considering the stakes, select the least challenging texts in the altogether understandable aim of getting as many students as possible to pass so that Ofsted will leave them alone. This is reality. [...]

Wanna play fantasy GCSE Literature specifications?

2015-12-08T19:24:35+00:00June 1st, 2014|English, Featured|

The exam boards have played their hands and they're relying on jokers rather than aces. GCSE English literature is a race to the bottom: with the overwhelming concern seemingly being how to retain schools' business by offering the most predictable, easiest texts. The biggest shock for me has been the suspicious consensus on what constitutes the canon. Every single board is specifying Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, while Jeckyll and Hyde and A Christmas Carol are available on 3 out of the 4's lists. It's not that any of the texts are bad - they're not; I've read and enjoyed all of them - but [...]

Who's to blame for the new English literature GCSEs?

2014-05-30T11:29:18+01:00May 30th, 2014|English|

The sound and fury surrounding text choices for GCSE English literature just won’t go away. The exam boards got their digs in first with Paul Dodd of OCR claiming Gove wanted to ban US authors because he "had a particular dislike for Of Mice and Men and was disappointed that more than 90% of candidates were studying it". Gove then struck back saying neither nor anyone else had banned anything: ‘”Just because one chap at one exam board claimed I didn’t like Of Mice and Men, the myth took hold that it – and every other pesky American author – had [...]

The curse of cursive: Are we fetishising joined up writing?

2014-05-29T13:06:41+01:00May 29th, 2014|literacy|

Back in 2008 I had for a Head of English position. At one point during the morning, candidates were asked what aspect of English education was most important to them. I honestly have no memory of what I came up with, but I do remember another candidate saying that for him it was handwriting. He failed to make the cut. Handwriting really doesn't matter that much in most secondary schools. As long as pupils' writing isn't an illegible scrawl, teachers tend not to care too much about what it looks like. But this isn't the case in primary schools. My daughters both [...]

A round up of some of my favourite posts so far this year

2014-05-29T15:15:05+01:00May 28th, 2014|Featured|

I was going to that thing where you round-up some of your favourite blog posts in the hope of getting a few more hits, but couldn't muster the enthusiasm. Instead, I thought I'd rip off some of the best posts I've read this year from some of the most interesting education bloggers out there. It's by no means a definitive list; I haven't spent much time honing it - these are just some of the posts I've enjoyed most so far this year. Maybe you'll like them too. They are in no particular order. More WHAT less HOW – or ‘your shepherds [...]

Whose English literature is it anyway?

2014-05-27T20:28:04+01:00May 27th, 2014|English|

Have you heard? Education Secretary, Michael Gove has personally intervened to ban the only books worth teaching in the entire canon of English literature. Twentieth century American classics like To Kill A Mockingbird, A View from the Bridge and Of Mice and Men (Not to mention one of my personal favourites, The Catcher In The Rye.) have been summarily removed from English classrooms.  Only, he hasn't. Here's what he has actually said: I have not banned anything. Nor has anyone else. All we are doing is asking exam boards to broaden – not narrow – the books young people study for GCSE. [...]

Should Ofsted judge 'quality of teaching'?

2014-05-26T13:23:05+01:00May 26th, 2014|Featured|

We all know, that as well as giving an overall grade, Ofsted give schools an individual judgement against 4 criteria: attainment, behaviour & safety, leadership & management, and quality of teaching. Theoretically it would possible to possible for a school to different grades for all four areas in one inspection. To my knowledge this has never happened. The correlation between some judgements is a lot stronger than others. There is fairly weak correlation between the behaviour grade or the leadership grade with a school's overall grade. It's reasonably common for schools to be awarded one grade higher than their overall grade in either of these categories. But [...]

A request: Have you experienced any craziness in your school?

2014-05-25T22:41:32+01:00May 24th, 2014|myths|

If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most. Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller) So. I've started work on my next book, provisionally (and provocatively) entitled, Why Everything You've Been Told About Teaching Is Wrong. Contrary to expectations I want to make is fair-minded and as lacking in ideological slant as I'm able. To achieve this I need your help. The chapter I'm currently writing is on cognitive bias, and I'd really like to use some examples of the sorts of blinkered thinking which we can be drawn into in schools. Obviously I've got lots [...]

A horror story: Does Ofsted get it wrong again?

2014-05-24T10:26:46+01:00May 23rd, 2014|Featured|

Following my the post earlier in the week on the fact that Ofsted inspectors seemingly continue to break the rule with impunity, a number of people got in touch with similar tales of woe. It certainly seems that a lot of teachers seem to be experiencing inspectors flouting the very clear instructions in the new April 2014 edition of the Inspection Handbook. Maybe someone should keep some sort of database of these instances?  I have to say that Mike Cladingbowl, the National Director of Schools seems to be doing his best to combat so-called 'rogue inspectors and yesterday tweeted this: I'd love to know [...]

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