Right brain/left brain bollocks
I'm frequently sent unsolicited emails from chancers and PR companies asking me to guest post this or publicise that. Some even go to the trouble of addressing their requests to me personally rather than some generic pleas for attention. My normal practice is to ignore this unwanted correspondence unless it seems to come from an actual human being who has actually engaged with the content of the blog, in which case [...]
Is education a zero-sum game?
Opportunity makes a thief. Francis Bacon A zero-sum game is one in which there is a winner and a loser; if you haven't won, you've lost. The term derives from game theory and economics and describes a situation in which one person's gain utility (the ability to satisfy his or wants) is exactly balanced by another's loss of utility. In The Uses of Pessimism, Scruton points out that much wrong-heading thinking and [...]
The best case fallacy or, why we balls things up
OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white. A pessimist applied to God for relief. "Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness," said God. "No," replied the petitioner, "I wish you to create something that would justify them." "The world is all created," said God, "but you have overlooked something -- the mortality of the optimist." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary In The Uses of [...]
What to do about literacy
Over the last couple of years I've visited over 100 schools and practically none of them have got literacy right. Now obviously I only get asked to talk to schools who feel they can improve - maybe there are loads of schools out there who have got it right and they're just keeping quiet, But I doubt it. But if schools are struggling to implement literacy policies that actually have [...]
Curiosity: the knowledge gap
Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Samuel Johnson We're all, to some extent, naturally curious - we long to unpick out that which is mysterious, troublesome and uncertain. That's not to say we're all equally curious about everything. We tend to be particularly incurious about what is settled, quotidian and neatly tied off. The novelist, Anatole France thought that, "The whole art of [...]
Dipsticks: It all depends on what you mean by 'engagement'
Yesterday I wrote a post - Does Engagement Actually Matter? - detailing some very interesting findings on the links between intrinsic motivation, enjoyment and attainment. It turns out that the more motivated you are and the more you enjoy learning the less likely you are to achieve. Who knew? The report about which I was writing sets out its terms thus: Student engagement refers to the intensity with which students apply themselves [...]
Does engagement actually matter?
Suggesting that student engagement might actually be a bad thing tend to get certain people's dander up. There was a mild spat recently about Rob Coe reiterating that engagement was a 'poor proxy' for learning. Carl Hendrick unpicked the problem further: This paradox is explored by Graham Nuthall in his book ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners,’ (2007) in which he writes: “Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with [...]
Back to school
In December 2013 I left the classroom for a life of swashbuckling and adventure. There were as many push factors as there were pull and I was very nervous about whether I'd be able to make a living - after all, I'm just a teacher with a big gob. I needn't have worried. It's been the most marvellous adventure. I've been able to travel the length and breadth of the country [...]
NEW BOOK: Foreword by Robert A Bjork
As some readers will no doubt be aware, I've written a new book. I've been fascinated by Robert Bjork's research into learning and memory ever since first encountering it back in February 2013, so of course, when I began the process back of writing this book I wrote to Professor Bjork to let him know I intended to cannibalise his work in order to make various points about what teachers [...]
Using Threshold Concepts to design a KS4 English curriculum
The big change a-coming for curriculum design is that the final vestiges of modularity will soon have been licked clean from the assessment spoon; from September it will linearity all the way. Many English teachers have never worked in such a system and there's widescale panic about how exactly we can expect children to retain the quantity of textual information they will need to know in order to have something to [...]
How could we improve accountability?
If accountability is the solution, what's the problem? It's become axiomatic that you can't remove accountability from education and that teachers must always be held to account. Why? Because they're feckless scoundrels and can't be trusted further than you can throw an interactive whiteboard. Education has been reduced to teachers vs. the rest of the world. Here's how some of those struggles play out: Teachers vs. government - Education policy [...]
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