Should we learn to love our shackles?
"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." Albert Camus There's already been some pretty scathing reactions to the master plan to introduce a common curriculum and assessment system into UK schools Dame Sally Coates lays out in Schools Week. Carl Hendrick describes her ideas as a dystopian nightmare and Pedro De Bruyckere sees it as a surefire way to turn education into the caricature that Ken Robinson paints it. But is [...]
You can have a voice
I am a product of social media. I've been writing this blog since June 2011 and whilst this pales next to the senescence of veteran edubloggers like Old Andrew and Tom Bennett, it does mark me as a comparatively old hand. When I began, my blog was intended simply a means of recording reflections on my classroom practice, but as I realised there was an audience out there I started to grandstand [...]
Research vs evidence
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." JK Galbraith, Economics, Peace and Laughter (1971), p. 50 Evidence is about being right, proving something, constructing an argument to support a belief. It's legalistic and limiting. Lots of folk talk about 'what works' as if there could ever really be any agreement about that. But on [...]
Pedagogy? I hate the word
If you can’t convince them; confuse them. - Harry S. Truman Pedagogy is defined as either the function or work of a teacher or as the art or science of teaching. As such, it probably seems a bit extreme to hate the word. Whilst I've always disliked it for its clunky, unlovely sound that neither here not there. I'm not going to rail against its pronunciation but rather its usage. It has become, [...]
Foxy Thinking: why we should embrace ignorance and learn to love uncertainty
"The grand perhaps! We look on helplessly, there the old misgivings, crooked questions are." Robert Browning Ted Hughes' poem The Thought Fox is an attempt to describe the mysteries of the creative process of writing a poem. We can imagine him sitting at his desk, staring in the dark, slowly become aware of a flickering presence and the awareness that "something else," an idea, "is alive". Hughes imagines this idea [...]
What I mean by 'relevance'
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant. Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt A few days ago I wrote this post about how we might make learning more durable. In it, I wrote about the importance of relevance and said of my experience of attending a speed awareness course that it "pertained to [...]
See it, own it: how to destroy a school
I went for a coffee with a former colleague a few days ago and inevitably, after some small talk, the conversation turned to a discussion of his school. He started off by confiding that the GCSE results had fallen again, before launching into a tirade about how unbearable he found teaching. One of his biggest bugbears was the school's behaviour policy. This 'policy' has been rebranded under the heading 'See it, [...]
Can we make learning permanent?
How can we know whether a student has learned something? To answer that we need a working definition of what we mean by learning and the one I've come up with is tripartite; learning is composed of retention, transfer and change. In order to know whether something has been learned we should ask ourselves three questions: Will students still know this next week, next month, next year? Will students be [...]
Around the world in 80 classrooms
A guest blog by Lucy Crehan (@lucy_crehan) I’ve spent the last two years learning about the best education systems in the world – from the inside. It was a particular moment in a year 11 Science class four years ago that set me on this journey. They had their GCSEs coming up in a few months, and we still had a lot of material to cover. Abdul, a boy who [...]
Do gender differences make a difference?
It's a well-known fact that boys underachieve. Every statistic tells us so. But ever since writing this post I've been suspicious of gender as the root cause for differences in achievement. Yes, girls outperform boys but is this due to fundamental differences in gender? Or is it more to do with expectations, perception and bias? Or is it, perhaps, an illusion? Might differences in performance be due to other, less beguiling [...]
#WrongBook extracts
For those who have as yet resisted the temptation to buy a copy of my new book, I've put together a selection of (hopefully) tempting extracts. Have a great summer y'all. 1. Cognitive dissonance 2. Fundamental attribution error 3. Availability bias 4. The halo effect 5. Overconfidence 6. 'Passive' learning 7. The purposes of education 8. How to teach 9. Evidence 10. Meta beliefs 11. Progress 12. Tacit knowledge 13. Knowledge vs [...]
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