How not to disagree: Swearing & insults
If you don't like swearing this post's probably not for you. I'm a big fan of profanity and, much to the chagrin of my family, I swear immoderately. There are times when nothing else quite expresses the depth of one's feelings or conveys a point with suitable emphasis. I enjoy the judicious use of most swear words and, suitably combined, they can even achieve a certain caustic beauty. Back in the mists [...]
What does the Theory of Multiple Intelligences tell us about how to teach?
As I explained here, the scientific consensus is that intelligence is general. That is, if you are good at verbal comprehension, you'll also tend to be good perceptual organisation, and if you're good at maths, you're also likely to be good at English. This is counter-intuitive. Most people believe that mental abilities trade off against each other and the doing well in one area means doing poorly in another. Of course, [...]
Reframing the debate: It's not what you do, it's why you do it
For the past few years I've regularly railed against anyone who claims that either there is no debate about the best way to teach, or that said debate isn't worth having because the vast majority of teachers either don't know there's a debate or don't care about it. While this may or may not be true, some of the people I've interacted with in this time have, like me, come to [...]
What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 2: The effects of education
In Part 1 of this series I laid out why IQ matters and that, far from being a banal measure of merely of how well some people do in a series of irrelevant tests, IQ actually has real power to predict people's life chances. What seems incontrovertibly true is that a higher IQ leads to a better life. This could easily seem like a counsel of despair if it automatically meant [...]
What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 1: Why IQ matters
Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not. Montaigne Although it’s become a truism to say we know relatively little about how our brains work, we know a lot more now than we used to. Naturally, everything we know is contingent and subject to addition, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or pretend we don’t know enough to draw some fairly clear conclusions. Despite [...]
Should teachers do what children want?
Every weekday morning, my daughters both moan about having to get up for school. They moan about their teachers and they moan about homework. Given free rein, they would spend all day every day watching BuzzFeed video channels, making Spotify playlists, watching Netflix and taking online quizzes. It's not that they're lazy, it's just that they'd really rather not have to learn maths, science and geography. They're both moderately conscientious, [...]
The problem with problem solving (or, why I struggle to reset my clock)
When the clocks went forward in March and we arrived in British Summer Time, I made an abortive attempt to change the time on my car's clock. I knew, from having eventually changed it six months ago, that this is a process entirely within my grasp and yet, after about 10 minutes of frustrated fumbling, I'd only succeeded in moving the time forward by 20 minutes. I gave up and resigned [...]
Why parents should support schools
Like all parents, I want the best for my children. When they're unhappy, I'm unhappy. When they suffer injustice, I'm incensed. When their school makes a decision I disagree with, my first reaction is to get in touch and point out where they've gone wrong and what they should do about it. When she was in primary school, my eldest daughter had a teacher who believed in the power of collective [...]
Can we improve school interviews? Part 3: The interview lesson
In Part 1 of this series I reviewed some of the evidence on what makes for effective interviews, and in Part 2 I looked specifically at creating a less biased, more structured formal interview. In this post I'm going to lay out my thoughts on the usefulness of the interview lesson. One of the peculiarities of teaching is that teaching a sample lesson has become a ubiquitous part of the [...]
Can we improve school interviews? Part 2: Intuition vs. statistical prediction
In Part 1 I reviewed some of the research around the best way to recruit and how this might apply to school recruitment. One of the suggestions I made was that schools should "design an interview format around no more than six qualities or attributes and come up with a short list of questions for each attribute. Then score each interview on a scale of 1-5 for each of the metrics [...]
Can we improve school interviews? Part 1: A brief review of the research
Recruitment for most employers is straightforward: you advertise, read through applications, invite the people you like in for an interview, think about it for a bit and then enter into negotiations with whoever you most want to employ. In education it's different. Schools are weird. When I was first told how school recruitment works on my PGCE I couldn't believe it, "They do what?" For any non teachers, school recruitment [...]
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