blogging

Here's all the stuff I wrote last month. Knock yourself out. 3rd November Five techniques for overcoming overconfidence & improving decision-making - more wisdom from messrs Kahneman & Klein 4th November Tests don’t kill people - standardised tests are great but they seem to cause people to behave stupidly 5th November We don’t know what we don’t know: the uses of humility - I'm a big fan of humility. In fact, I think it's possibly the number 1 leadership quality 8th November Using threshold concepts to think about curriculum design - my attempt to ruin the researchEd English & Literacy gig in Swindon 9th November If writing is magic, grammar [...]

The destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not. Robert Green Ingersoll Every now and then, someone pops up (usually a relative!) to tell me something I've written is crap. This is wounding. Like everyone else who blogs, I'm convinced of my own genius and sagacity. Anyone who's critical is clearly a fool. Except sometimes someone like Andrew Old comes along who, despite his many and various failings as a human being, is no fool. As an example of the kind of arguments we used to enjoy, take a look at the comment thread on this [...]

Here's what I got up to in October. The major themes this month were accountability and teachers' judgement. Books I read which I found particularly interesting were Beyond the Checklist and Matthew Syed's Black Box Thinking. I also found time to reread Conditions for Intuitive: Expertise A Failure to Disagree by Gary Klein & Daniel Kahneman. 4th October Intelligent Accountability - a manifesto for improving the ways in which teachers are held accountable in an attempt to support teachers in being good as opposed to looking good. 5th October What can education learn from aviation? - expanding on the intelligent accountability theme bu contrasting the way accountability works in [...]

Last month was a bit on the patchy side. I blogged like fury, then nothing for a week. Anyway, here's my output over the month including the last, dying days of August: Can we make learning permanent? 30th August - Revisiting my experiences of speeding school and musings on how learning might be made stickier. See it, own it: how to destroy a school 31st August - My despair at some of the stupider attempts to bring order to the chaos that is a secondary school. What I mean by ‘relevance’ 31st August - On the mistakes teachers make when thinking about what's relevant. [...]

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 and share my views on any and every aspect of education that popped up between my crosshairs. I started to realise that not only were teachers implementing some of my ideas [...]

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. Bertrand Russell If there's one tip I might offer on how to think better it would this: try to explore rather than confirm your biases. I have spent a lot of time actively seeking out evidence which disconfirms my biases and then having a really [...]