Castle Shakespeare: Why study the Bard?
Let me give you, let me share with you, the City of Invention. For what novelists do... is to build the Houses of the Imagination, and where houses cluster together there is a city... Let us look round the city: become acquainted with it, make it our eternal, our immortal home. Looming over everything, of course, the heart of the City, is the great Castle Shakespeare. You see it whichever [...]
How to be an English teacher: designing an English PGCE
From September I will be teaching a small group of prospective English teachers what I think they need to know in order to do a decent job as part of the new BPP University PGCE course. I was very flattered to be asked to be involved, particularly as I have no special expertise and no track record at all in higher education, but thrilled beyond reason at the idea of [...]
Why I don’t think emojis should be studied in school
I have nothing against emojis, just as I have nothing against kittens, turpentine or billiards. I'm more than happy for anyone who's minded to stroke kittens, drink turps and swan around with a billiards cue. Equally, I have no problem whatsoever with people peppering their texts or tweets with smiley faces or grinning turds; each to her own. But, despite my laissez-faire approach to emoji in general life, I'm afraid [...]
Beware the nuance trap
In possibly the best titled academic paper of the year, Kieran Healy argues that nuance is, contrary to popular belief, a bad thing. He makes it clear he's not arguing against nuance per se, but against the tendency to make ...some bit of theory “richer” or “more sophisticated” by adding complexity to it, usually by way of some additional dimension, level, or aspect, but in the absence of any strong [...]
Conscious and unconscious minds: Implications for teaching and learning literacy
This is a guest post by Hugo Kerr who got in touch with the offer that this appear first on the blog. What Hugo refers to as the 'unconscious mind' is, I think, largely analogous with my interpretation of long-term memory. There are echoes of Daniel Kahneman's system 1 and 2 and Jonathan Haidt's elephant and rider in these ideas. I'm not sure I agree with all his ideas and proposals, [...]
If not knowledge, what?
knowledge /ˈnɒlɪdʒ/ noun facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. "a thirst for knowledge" awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. "the programme had been developed without his knowledge" Those of us who talk about putting knowledge at the heart of education might not be talking about the same thing. In a recent post, I wrote [...]
What is a broad and balanced curriculum?
Historically, the curriculum schools have taught hasn't really mattered that much. Then, when the National Curriculum was introduced in the late 1980s, committees of experts had made all the decisions for us. As more and more schools have academised and won free of the strictures of the National Curriculum, you might have expected a flowering of thought about how best to structure and select what children should be taught, but [...]
Two types of learning – which one is best?
Evolutionary biologists think of learning as being either social or asocial. Social learning is essentially copying - what is everyone else doing? - whereas asocial learning is accrued by interacting with the environment through trial and error. All learning is either social or asocial; we either learn through mimicry or experimentation, innovation or observation. When thinking about how to teach, it's worth considering the role of evolution in shaping the [...]
Put down your crystal balls
Many of the schools I visit and work with feel under enormous pressure to predict what their students are likely to achieve in their next set of GCSEs. In the past, this approach sort of made sense. Of course there was always a margin for error, but most experienced teachers just knew what a C grade looked like in their subject. Also, when at least half of students' results were [...]
Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer
Here are the slides I used in the talk I gave at this year's Education Festival: Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer from David Didau The antipathy of very many otherwise sensible people to the concept of intelligence is really quite remarkable. This aversion seems only to be increased by bringing up the subject of IQ tests. The idea that IQ tests are only useful for showing how [...]
‘Understanding’ and Occam’s razor
At the beginning of the 20th century, physicists Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein both concluded independently that measurements of light speed would be the same for all observers. But while both arrived at the same results from their equations, Lorentz’s explanation relied on changes that take place in ‘the ether’. Because Einstein's paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies made no reference to a mysterious, undetectable substance, his explanation was accepted [...]
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