My favourite blog posts of 2016
Here follows my extremely partial take on some of the blog post I have most enjoyed reading this year Heather Fearn - Reading fluency and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ My only continuing niggle with Heather's blog is that she stubbornly refuses to add a 'follow by email' widget and, seeing as I can't make head not tail of RSS feeds and the like, I often miss her posts much too [...]
Last one in: My return to Michaela
I had an afternoon free in London on Monday (what luxury!) and arranged to pop in to Michaela Community School to see what, if anything, had changed since my last visit in May 2015. I hadn't realised it at the time but my blog was one of the very first written about a visit to the school and marked something of a watershed. Hard to believe now, what with a [...]
Struggle and success
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Albert Camus The gods of ancient Greece punished Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, for his hubris by condemning him to an eternity of pushing a huge rock up a hill only to have it roll down again as soon as he got it to the top. One can only imagine that Sisyphus was [...]
So, I’ve been reinstated by Twitter
Without a word of explanation, my Twitter account unsuspended itself this evening. In case you didn't get round to noticing, I'd been suspended the day before. Thank you so much to the veritable legion of supporters who inundated @twitter with requests to get me off the naughty step - it almost brought a tear to my jaundiced, cynical old eyes. I also have to thank some blue-ticked big hitters from the edupress for [...]
So, I’ve been suspended by Twitter
This afternoon various people started text messaging me to ask why my Twitter account had been suspended. Needless to say, the news came as something of a surprise. No one from Twitter had contacted me and, after filing a complaint, I've been left kicking my heels and speculating. The two competing theories are 1) that this guy complained about me (seems unlikely that Twitter would take him seriously) or 2) [...]
PISA 2015: some tentative thoughts about successful teaching
Despite all the eminently sensible caveats offered by Sam Freedman, PISA provides a fascinating lens through which to view the world of education. The most interesting of the PISA documents I've had a chance to look at today is Policies and Practices for Successful Schools. It's a long document and a great many policies and practices are addressed, but the most interesting to me is the section on how science is [...]
Making a mockery of marking: The new GCSE English Language mocks
The following is a guest post from the mastermind of Comparative Judgement, Dr Chris Wheadon. The marking of English Language is likely to be extremely challenging this year. English Language has long form answer questions, typically with 8, 16 and 24 mark responses. Ofqual’s research suggests the following range of precision is normal across GCSE and A level: 8 mark items: +/- 3 marks 16 mark items: +/- 4 marks 24 mark [...]
Is criticising learning styles an attack on the poor?
Richard Olsen is a PhD candidate at Monash University studying "pedagogical capacity, effectiveness and quality in a changing world". He recently linked to this Australian Research Summary of Learning Styles saying, "Attacking learning styles isn't about learning styles, rather promoting instruction & learning as recalling facts." This is an interesting idea and not one I'd encountered before. He goes further, claiming, "the sustained attacks on learning styles are really attacks on [...]
Hirsch vs Engelmann: “No scientific basis for Direct Instruction”?
No one seems clear who first said it, but it's become an abiding truth of journalism that, "If a dog bites a man, that is not news. But if a man bites a dog that is news." To publish an article in which an octogenarian educationalist says basically what he's been saying for the last few decades would not be news. But if said educationalist were to bite another well-known bastion [...]
Less marking, more feedback: A challenge and a proposal
I've been arguing for some time that if teachers spent less time marking (by which I mean writing comments on students' work) then they might have a lot more time for giving meaningful feedback which actually helps develop more flexible, durable learning. This is a message that tends to play well with harried, over burdened teachers but often fills school leaders with horror. The fear is that because some teachers [...]
Marking is an act of folly
Contrary to popular belief, marking and feedback are not the same thing. Clearly they're connected - and, ideally most marking has the intention of giving feedback - but the process of marking or giving marks does not, in and of itself, equate with feedback. Those who see marking as an essential component of a teachers' role should wonder why, in many parts of the world - particularly east Asian countries which [...]
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