Seven tools for thinking #4: Answering rhetorical questions
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. E. E. Cummings Everyone likes a rhetorical question, don't they? Do they? Think about it. Try answering it. Do you think everyone really does like rhetorical questions? Some people do, but everyone? Maybe some people hate them? You can see where this kind of thinking can take you. It might result in navel gazing, but, equally, it might help us spot some [...]
Seven tools for thinking #3: The “surely” klaxon
Rumack: Can you fly this plane and land it? Striker: Surely you can't be serious? Rumack: I am serious. And don't call me Shirley. Airplane, 1980 It's natural to want to build consensus. We're all guilty of sometimes assuming that what we think is true or reasonable will be thought true and reasonable by everybody else. Often though, what we decide is true is just wishful thinking. Sometimes this is [...]
Seven tools for thinking #2: The principle of charity
Ah! What a divine religion might be found if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith! - Percy Bysshe Shelley A few weeks ago I wrote about the philosopher, Daniel Dennett's recommendation that we value our mistakes, learn from them, and never make the same mistake again. The second of Dennett's seven tools for thinking from Intuition Pumps is to respect your opponent. This is something I really [...]
Top Gun for Teachers
On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world. They succeeded. Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it: TOP GUN. As I'm sure you know, [...]
The limits of growth mindset
What's the difference between success and failure? Effort, of course! As everyone now knows, all you need to ensure you're a success is a shed-load of hard work and the belief that you can do anything you set your mind to! Yay! I want to be an astronaut! This is mindsets-lite: the undifferentiated and naive belief that the right kind of thinking leads to wonderful things. Like most well-intentioned educational fads, there's [...]
Why I think table top mats are better than wall displays
A couple of days ago I posted an article exploring why I'm not keen on teaching being expected to spend time putting on displays in their classrooms. This made some people happy 🙂 but a few people were sad 🙁 . One criticism was that some displays contain important information that can be covered up so that students can be tested to see whether they've memorised it. This is the Bananarama [...]
What every teacher needs to know about… classroom display
Once again the finest monthly publication for secondary teachers, Teach Secondary, have demeaned themselves by publishing another of my sloppily put together rants. This month my barrel scraping has reached a new as I quibble about such harmless trivia as teachers putting up posters. Sorry. The firmly established, yet largely unexamined, position on classroom display is that there’s nothing quite so magical as a classroom plastered in beautiful display work and nothing half so bleak [...]
Coming soon…What every teacher needs to know about psychology
Over the past few months, Nick Rose and I have been working together on a new book which sets out what, in our admittedly biased opinion, every teacher ought to know from the field of psychology. Luckily, Nick is a psychology teacher (with a background in para-psychological research. Yes, really!) so at least one of us knows what we're talking about. We think the book is important because over the past few [...]
Triple impact feedback on the EEF marking review
1.The EEF publish a review of the evidence of marking. 2. I give them some feedback. 3. The EEF respond to my criticisms. 4. Well... we could go on for ever. Feel familiar? James Richardson and Robbie Coleman, say they'd be happy "if people took the current lack of evidence on marking as the key finding of the report." So would I. Unfortunately, I don't think that will be the case. Teachers [...]
Seven tools for thinking #1: Use your mistakes
"The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself." - Daniel Dennett. I've been rereading the philosopher, Daniel Dennett's wonderfully erudite manual for making and improving on mistakes, Intuition Pumps. The first - and maybe most important - of his seven tools for thinking is that we should use our mistakes*. Now, there's a lot written in praise of mistakes and failure; some of it [...]
A marked decline? The EEF’s review of the evidence on written marking
Question: How important is it for teachers to provide written feedback on students' work? Answer: No one knows. This is essentially the substance of the Education Endowment Foundation's long-awaited review on written marking. The review begins with the following admission: ...the review found a striking disparity between the enormous amount of effort invested in marking books, and the very small number of robust studies that have been completed to date. While the evidence [...]
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