Reading for betterment
About 20 years ago, I read Tolstoy's uber-novel, War and Peace. The perfect set of conditions all came together: I'd just been sent a copy of the book by a friend who was keen that I read it, I was in my third year of an English literature degree and fairly convinced of the benefits of reading improving books, and I was ill and was living in a world where [...]
Humans can’t multitask
One of the highlights of my day at researchED Amsterdam was hearing Paul Kirschner speak about edu-myths. He began his presentation by forbidding the use of laptops or mobile phones, explaining that taking notes electronically leads to poorer recall than handwritten notes. The benefits of handwritten over typed notes include better immediate recall as well as improved retention after 2 weeks. In addition, students who take handwritten notes are more like to [...]
The power of 'best bets'
The other day I read Greg Ashman's post Why Education is like smoking which talked about the way teachers often generalise from anecdotes in the same way that when smokers are confronted with statistics about the health risks of smoking they might say things like, "Well, my nan smoked 400 cigarettes a day! She may have had bright yellow fingers but she lived to the ripe old age of 130!" Or [...]
Problems with the ‘zone of proximal development’
It's hard to have a discussion about learning without someone sooner or later chipping in with the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) to support their position. This might, in part, be because Vygotsky is one of the very few theorists covered in many teachers' training, but it's also because it feels intuitively right. Briefly, most people use ZPD to suggest that there is a 'Goldilocks Effect' [...]
Should students be overlearning?
In my last post I outlined my concerns with the idea of 'thinking hard' being a good proxy for learning. Briefly, thinking hard about a problem appears to be an inefficient way to alter long-term memory structures. This means that it's perfectly possible to struggle with a difficult exercise, successfully complete it, and still not have learned how to repeat the process independently. The problem is that 'thinking hard' exhausts limited working [...]
Further problems with the ‘thinking hard’ proxy for learning
Because learning is invisible, we can only hope to measure whether students are making progress by observing proxies. Most people now seem to agree that certain activities which routinely take place in lessons are, in the words of Robert Coe, 'poor proxies for learning'. Rob has suggested that a better proxy might be 'thinking hard'. This seemed sensible and, like many others, I've embraced the idea, but the harder I think [...]
Why feedback fails
Feedback is one of the few things in education that pretty much every agrees is important and worthwhile. The need for feedback is obvious: if you were expected to learn how to reverse park a car whilst wearing a blindfold you would be very unlikely to learn how to go about this without causing damage either to your car, or to the environment. In order to learn you would need to see [...]
Post-truth and the best way to teach
A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. St. Augustine We've always had a tendency to defer to what is most said most magnificently and shun that which is badly uttered but now it's a thing. To much fanfare, 'post-truth' has entered the lexicon and now we have a made-to-measure term for the emotively uttered truism that turns out not to be er... true. [...]
The 10 most popular posts on The Learning Spy in 2016
Here are the 10 most viewed posts of last year. Only half of them were actually written last year and some of them are several years old. I reckon this must in part be due to the fact that there are so many links to some of my older posts knocking around on t'internet and so, because my views have changed, I've taken the opportunity to rewrite some of them fairly [...]
The most interesting books I read last year
I put together a round up of my favourite reads of 2015 and some people seemed to like it. So, in typically opportunistic manner, I though I'd repeat the exercise. Here are some of the books I found most interesting in 2016: Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens was one of the books I most enjoyed last year so I was trilled to see Harari had a new one [...]
My favourite posts of 2016 on The Learning Spy
Here follows a selection of some of what I consider to be my best posts of 2016. I've learned not to be surprised that what I think is my best writing is rarely appreciated by others and this is certainly reflected in the selection below; almost all of these posts went largely unnoticed by the reading public. In a desperate attempt to rectify this injustice I once again foist them [...]
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