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 [...]
Easy is easy, hard is hard
Recently, I had the ill luck to be present for a friend's five-year-old daughter's birthday party. To add to the naturally generated mayhem of putting 30 small children in a space with fizzy drinks and sweets, my friend had shelled out on a children's entertainer called Johnny G - or something along those lines. Johnny has nailed down a repertoire certain to appeal to the unsophisticated palettes of the very young; [...]
Practice vs. talent: Five principles for effective teaching
Are we the way we are because of our natures or is talent just the product of hard work? Which matters more natural ability of practice? A few years ago my mother reminded me of my struggles with learning to read. Apparently, one of my primary teachers had written home with the bad news that I was mentally subnormal and would probably never learn to read. My mum wasn’t having [...]
Is resilience even a thing?
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell. G. K. Chesterton Resilience - being able to bounce back from setbacks and cope with challenges - seems an obviously good thing. If we can make ourselves, and our children, more resilient, then we definitely should. Trouble is, it doesn't seem we can. In 1907, William James - often dubbed the grandfather of modern psychology wrote the following [...]
Everyone values critical thinking, don’t they?
NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring [...]
Why group socialisation theory argues against grammar schools
My last post was written to explain why I thought 'grammar schools for all' was probably an unworkable idea. I introduced Judith Rich Harris's group socialisation theory to support my arguments, but may have done so in a way which muddied the water. Katherine Birbalsingh picked up from reading my post that I was inadvertently advancing an argument which leant support to those advocating for more academic selection at the [...]
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