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Seven Theses on Education

2016-11-28T00:03:32+00:00November 28th, 2016|Featured|

Dennis Hayes, professor of education at Derby University and co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education recently wrote the following Facebook post: Seven Theses on Education 1. Education is solely concerned with knowledge and understanding (not about character building or happiness) 2. Education is not training (i.e. not about skills or ‘learning objectives’) 3. Education is an end in itself and not a means to another end (such as ‘social justice’) 4. Education is universal (for all) (you can’t teach if you think some children can only learn in certain ways or can only reach a certain (low)level) 5. Education [...]

Can thinking hard be incidental? A conversation with Daniel Willingham

2016-11-27T17:08:36+00:00November 27th, 2016|Featured|

For some time now, Rob Coe has been suggesting that a good proxy for students learning in lessons is that they "have to think hard". This seemed eminently sensible and I've written about this formulation on a number of occasions, most recently here. I saw Rob speak at a conference on Friday and tweeted the following: "Learning happens when you have to think hard." How many minutes do children spend in a day really thinking hard? Asks @ProfCoe — David Didau (@LearningSpy) November 25, 2016 Rob suggested the answer might be as little as 10 minutes a day and that this [...]

Context isn’t king

2016-11-21T16:26:09+00:00November 21st, 2016|Featured|

It's become quite fashionable recently to say that there's no best way to teach because what works depends on the context in which you teach. This is a considerable improvement on asserting that [insert half-baked, debunked practice of your choosing] is the best way and then penalising teachers for not doing it, but it's still a bit of a cop-out. I'm not claiming context doesn't matter - of course it does - but it isn't nearly as important as some would have us believe. Clearly, the context of schooling in different countries varies greatly and most right-thinking people acknowledge that 'policy tourism [...]

What do we mean by ‘skills’?

2017-04-14T20:39:12+01:00November 10th, 2016|Featured|

Any definition of skills depends on knowledge. Joe Kirby has written persuasively about skills and knowledge forming a double helix - inseparably intertwined and mutually interdependent. This is definitely a more helpful way to think, but it might be even better to abandon the term 'skills' altogether. Is riding a bike a skill? Well, if we mean is it a set of procedures, which we can master to the point that we're able to cycle without having to think about it then, yes it is. Is essay writing a skill? Well, it's not the same sort of thing as riding a bike, but yes, it's another set of [...]

How to observe a lesson

2016-10-11T21:44:37+01:00October 6th, 2016|Featured|

Recently, I was asked by a school to give some feedback on their lesson observation pro forma. My advice was that they shouldn't use it. They were a bit flummoxed (and probably a bit annoyed) as they'd spent quite a while trying to make sure it guided observers to look for the things they felt were especially important for teachers to include. This, I explained, was the problem. If we tell teachers what good looks like we undermine their expertise. Rather than doing what they genuinely believe is in their students' best interests, they'll simply do what you tell them to do. Instead [...]

Why Ofsted inspectors shouldn’t give advice

2016-10-01T21:52:21+01:00October 1st, 2016|Featured|

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the recent Learning First conference in Wolverhampton, but I did manage to follow some of the tweets. This one in particular caught my attention: Marilyn Mottram HMI talking about what Ofsted are looking for #LearningFirst pic.twitter.com/MJDrm3cUkf — school data updates (@jpembroke) October 1, 2016 As you can see by reading the thread below the tweet, it's possible that Marylin Mottram didn't actually say this was what Ofsted were looking for, but that's certainly what was inferred by some members of the audience. In response, I tweeted the following: As long as Ofsted 'look for' instead [...]

What causes the gender gap in education?

2016-09-26T13:27:25+01:00September 25th, 2016|Featured|

In the 1940s the Belgian philosopher Albert Michotte identified our tendency to believe we could see causality. His book, The Perception of Causality, published in French in 1945 showed how certain very simple visual sequences carry the appearance of causal connectedness. Click this link for an example. This paper is a good recent update on how illusions of causality bias our judgement. Human beings are natural pattern seekers. We see shapes in clouds, faces in wallpaper and meaning where there is just random noise. In particular, we believe we can see causes when all we can actually see are effects. In teaching, [...]

Better teaching through chemistry?

2016-09-14T22:27:00+01:00September 14th, 2016|Featured|

One of my favourite books of last year was Yuval Noah Harari's magnificent Sapiens. It looks like his new tome, Homo Deus, is going to be just as fascinating if the rest of it lives up to the first couple of chapters. The book charts some of humanity's possible futures but is also an attempt to force readers to rethink their thoughts of the future by exploring and understanding our history. One of the most compelling ideas to surface so far concerns education. Harari pints out what anyone on edu-Twitter knows well: Whether in ancient China or Victorian Britain, everybody has his or [...]

What’s the job of a teacher?

2016-09-14T09:02:41+01:00September 13th, 2016|Featured|

One of the sessions I attended at researchED last Saturday was a debate on whether there really is a mental health crisis amongst young people. There were lots of interesting points made and the debate was slightly less polarised than you might expect, but it still turned out fairly predictably with one side saying the crisis is one we've created by pathologising normal feelings and behaviour and the other saying that young people are increasingly vulnerable and that the modern world is an increasingly scary place to live in. The bit I found particularly interesting was when one speaker made the point [...]

What’s the big deal about school uniform?

2016-09-08T07:21:24+01:00September 7th, 2016|behaviour, Featured|

Is there any evidence that school uniform affects learning? In a word, no. Or, rather I should say, I'm not aware of any beyond weak testimonials offered by uniform manufactures and the personal anecdotes of true believers. Where there is reputable research, it's equivocal. So, why do schools make such a big deal about uniforms? Well, although it would very difficult to conduct a study which isolated the effects of wearing particular clothes on student achievement, it's probably a lot easier to look at how uniforms might affect social norms and in-group/out-group behaviours. There's a lot of research on how institutional [...]

Fun is being “killed off”! Really?

2016-09-06T21:01:46+01:00September 6th, 2016|Featured|

Every now and then, children's author Michael Rosen writes a snarky open letter to whomever happens to be education secretary of the day castigating them for his bugbear du jour. His latest offering makes the hyperbolic accusation that Justine Greening is "killing off painting, pottery, thinking … and fun." What an evil witch! What are the grounds for Michael's claim? Well, firstly he identifies several potentially ill-thought out approaches to education currently mandated in many primary schools such as ability grouping within classes* and a state of semi-permanent testing which some misguided souls mistakenly believe to be the best way to educate children. I too abhor these practices [...]

Are teachers cursed with knowledge?

2023-06-11T12:11:53+01:00September 5th, 2016|Featured|

The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. Chip Heath, Made to Stick How much do teachers need to know? In my last post I proposed that an effective teacher - one who is warm, friendly and a great speaker - is minimally effective if they have nothing to teach. The Dr Fox (or Ken Robinson) Effect shows that even though we love charismatic teachers, we don't learn much from them unless they are also knowledgeable about the subject they're teaching. Following a prolonged and protracted debate [...]

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