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What’s the point of school?

2017-03-14T15:58:31+00:00March 14th, 2017|Featured|

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate Schools have only ever existed in cultures where culturally specific knowledge has outpaced universal folk knowledge. What is universal - speech, recognising distinctions between the properties of inanimate objects and plants and animals, cooperating in groups, etc. -  is clearly the result of evolutionary adaptions; if it wasn't it wouldn't be universal. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognise objects or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these things are much [...]

Some videos of me saying stuff about education

2017-03-10T17:51:05+00:00March 10th, 2017|Featured|

Recently, Swedish education magazine, Lärarnas Tidning interviewed me about my views on various aspects of education. For those interested in seeing me do a very poor Stewart Lee impersonation, they've posted a few short clips on their YouTube channel. Here they are: 1. The importance of explicit instruction   2. Why 'grit' doesn't make much sense   3. Professionalism   4. Why teachers need to have high expectations of children's behaviour   5. How evidence can change minds   6. The appeal of gimmicks

Do we want ‘deeper learning’ classrooms?

2021-06-26T18:54:57+01:00March 9th, 2017|Featured|

It's very easy to present a false dichotomy to make our own beliefs and choices seem more desirable than the alternatives. Consider this infographic from the Hewlett Foundation which has been doing the rounds: What's being implied is that the 'deeper learning' classroom somehow better prepares children for being scientists in the 'science lab' than 'traditional' classrooms. Maybe we're also supposed to assume that the 'deeper learning' classroom is a better preparation for all workplaces? The infographic's designers use heavy-handed attempts to make the 'traditional' classroom' look less appealing. The walls are grey, there are fewer windows and there's a shelf of [...]

War and Peace in education

2017-02-02T20:34:19+00:00February 2nd, 2017|Featured|

After a long flight, I've finally finished rereading War and Peace and, if you were in any doubt, it is a masterpiece. I found so much I'd either entirely forgotten or hadn't understood from my first reading over 20 years ago. What particularly struck me was the final chapter from the Second Epilogue. Throughout the book, Tolstoy has been advancing his theory of history as being far more than the will and actions of 'great men'. We are, he rather thinks, all slaves to circumstance and our attempts at writing history are mere post hoc rationalisations of what happened. In this final [...]

Knowing the names of things

2017-11-27T17:52:07+00:00January 30th, 2017|Featured|

Many people have written many thousands of words about the difference between knowledge and understanding, but I think Richard Feynman nails it here: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. This is sometimes used to belittle the idea that knowing what things are called is useful. Of course I agree that [...]

Problems with the ‘zone of proximal development’

2017-01-13T14:18:53+00:00January 13th, 2017|Featured|

It's hard to have a discussion about learning without someone sooner or later chipping in with the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) to support their position. This might, in part, be because Vygotsky is one of the very few theorists covered in many teachers' training, but it's also because it feels intuitively right. Briefly, most people use ZPD to suggest that there is a 'Goldilocks Effect' where the level of challenge for a child is 'just right. If work is too easy, it's argued, then no learning will take place, and if it's too hard, then it [...]

Should students be overlearning?

2017-01-12T21:28:45+00:00January 12th, 2017|Featured|

In my last post I outlined my concerns with the idea of 'thinking hard' being a good proxy for learning. Briefly, thinking hard about a problem appears to be an inefficient way to alter long-term memory structures. This means that it's perfectly possible to struggle with a difficult exercise, successfully complete it, and still not have learned how to repeat the process independently. The problem is that 'thinking hard' exhausts limited working memory reserves. In fact - as Daisy Christodoulou states in Making Good Progress? - the evidence on 'overlearning' seems to suggest that repeating a task to the point where almost no thought [...]

The most interesting books I read last year

2017-01-02T14:54:23+00:00January 1st, 2017|Featured|

I put together a round up of my favourite reads of 2015 and some people seemed to like it. So, in typically opportunistic manner, I though I'd repeat the exercise. Here are some of the books I found most interesting in 2016: Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens was one of the books I most enjoyed last year so I was trilled to see Harari had a new one out. Homo Deus is subtitled 'a brief history of tomorrow' and, while acknowledging that predictions about the future are most noticeable for how wrong they tend to be, suggests a variety [...]

Last one in: My return to Michaela

2016-12-16T16:24:01+00:00December 16th, 2016|Featured|

I had an afternoon free in London on Monday (what luxury!) and arranged to pop in to Michaela Community School to see what, if anything, had changed since my last visit in May 2015. I hadn't realised it at the time but my blog was one of the very first written about a visit to the school and marked something of a watershed. Hard to believe now, what with a series of high profile education debates and the launch of their manifesto, The Michaela Way, but staff had been operating under radio silence and blogging was verboten. Headteacher, Katherine Birbalsingh laughingly [...]

So, I’ve been reinstated by Twitter

2016-12-09T00:14:20+00:00December 8th, 2016|Featured|

Without a word of explanation, my Twitter account unsuspended itself this evening. In case you didn't get round to noticing, I'd been suspended the day before. Thank you so much to the veritable legion of supporters who inundated @twitter with requests to get me off the naughty step - it almost brought a tear to my jaundiced, cynical old eyes. I also have to thank some blue-ticked big hitters from the edupress for going straight to the top: https://twitter.com/RichardA/status/806957477086527488 https://twitter.com/Ed_Dorrell/status/806958309639159808 But have I learned anything from the experience? Probably not. It was odd and strangely liberating  to read tweets about myself without being able [...]

So, I’ve been suspended by Twitter

2016-12-08T00:32:09+00:00December 7th, 2016|Featured|

This afternoon various people started text messaging me to ask why my Twitter account had been suspended. Needless to say, the news came as something of a surprise. No one from Twitter had contacted me and, after filing a complaint, I've been left kicking my heels and speculating. The two competing theories are 1) that this guy complained about me (seems unlikely that Twitter would take him seriously) or 2) that I've breached some sort of ethical code for posting 4 or 5 30 second clips from the Pixies concert I attended the previous evening. (Again, this seems unlikely as there's [...]

PISA 2015: some tentative thoughts about successful teaching

2017-03-06T08:14:28+00:00December 6th, 2016|Featured|

Despite all the eminently sensible caveats offered by Sam Freedman, PISA provides a fascinating lens through which to view the world of education. The most interesting of the PISA documents I've had a chance to look at today is Policies and Practices for Successful Schools. It's a long document and a great many policies and practices are addressed, but the most interesting to me is the section on how science is taught (pp 65-77). As the report says, "How science is taught at school can make a big difference for students." In order to work out what sorts of activities regularly occur [...]

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