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 [...]
What might be a good proxy for learning?
Professor Rob Coe's speech, From Evidence to Great Teaching, at the ASCL conference last Friday seemed to generate quite a bit of energy on Twitter, as did Carl Hendrick's post on engagement. Coe has been referring to the idea that we confuse learning with various 'poor proxies' since the publication of Improving Education. These are the proxies of which he speaks: It's small wonder, perhaps, that so many get so upset [...]
Collective punishment
Collective punishment is the punishment of a group for the actions of an individual. The logic is that if one terrorist (or freedom fighter) launches some kind of attack on an oppressor, then reprisals will be visited on his or her community. The threat of such retaliation is intended to quell civil disobedience before it even occurs through peer pressure: if I know you are planning something the authorities will [...]
Learning is invisible – my slides from #LEF15
For all those who asked for my slides after my presentation of the London Festival of Education at the IOE, here you go: #LFE15 Learning is invisible from David Didau For all those who weren't there, here's a commentary: The idea that learning may not be visible isn't widely accepted and in order to challenge beliefs without annoying people, I began by the perceptual and cognitive illusions to which we all [...]
Landmark: a million thank yous
I began blogging in July 2011. In January 2012 I signed up with Google Analytics and have clocked up over 2 million pageviews since. The story so far... Then in July 2013 I shifted the site over to Wordpress and on Tuesday broke the million views mark according to their figures too. About to clock over... Since I started writing there's been an awful lot of [...]
Should group work be imposed?
I recently posted some thoughts on what group work is and isn't good for. At no point did I say it was good for nothing (although predictably my opinion was caricatured as 'hating' group work) and I have never claimed that it cannot work. Some of the criticisms I received were as follows: - Group work is better than lecturing. I'm not sure I can even be bothered responding to [...]
Why (the hell) should students work in groups?
In a recent TES article James Mannion and Neil Mercer make the following claim: In not using group work, students are denied the chance to develop skills that can not only help them perform better in schools, but which are also vital for their future employment prospects – not to mention the realisation of a more fully participatory democracy. First, let me state that I see nothing inherently wrong with pupils [...]
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