How can school inspection get what it wants?
I read a great piece by Dr Becky Allen in Schools Week this morning on inherent unreliability of school inspections. In it she makes the point that human beings are incapable of making reliable, high stakes judgements due to our adaptive reliance on heuristics and our inability to adequately introspect about our biases and preferences. But despite the dangers, she says, "This is not to say that school inspection should [...]
Is it worth trying to memorise facts?
We can only think about what we know and, no mater how intelligent we might be, we cannot think about something about which we are ignorant. But how well do we need to know things? Is there any point to memorising facts? I had an interesting discussion with some primary maths teachers recently about the benefits of memorising certain basic maths facts. While pretty much everyone agreed that if children had memorised number [...]
War and Peace in education
After a long flight, I've finally finished rereading War and Peace and, if you were in any doubt, it is a masterpiece. I found so much I'd either entirely forgotten or hadn't understood from my first reading over 20 years ago. What particularly struck me was the final chapter from the Second Epilogue. Throughout the book, Tolstoy has been advancing his theory of history as being far more than the will [...]
Knowing the names of things
Many people have written many thousands of words about the difference between knowledge and understanding, but I think Richard Feynman nails it here: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the [...]
Is growth mindset bollocks?
Like everyone else, when I first came across Carol Dweck's theory of growth mindsets I was pretty psyched. There was something so satisfyingly truthy about the way the labels 'fixed' and 'growth' mindset could explain why children failed or succeeded at school. I wanted to believe that something as simple as telling children their brains are 'like a muscle' and showing them a cartoon about synapses forming could make them cleverer. And if praising [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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