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Some questions for the College of Teaching

2016-08-31T13:32:43+01:00August 30th, 2016|Featured|

So, plans for the College of Teachers are gathering pace. It increasingly looks like it's going to be a thing, whether teachers want it or not. I'm not against a College per se, but I do have some questions which I think need answering before we go too much further or invest any more than the £5 million the government has already handed over. 1. What is it actually for? I've read lots of speculation about what role the College of Teachers might have from being a body to represent teachers interests to a regulatory institution which invents and enforces standards it believes [...]

Praise for #PsychBook

2016-08-13T11:18:28+01:00August 13th, 2016|Featured|

My new book, co-written with the quite marvellous Nick Rose, has landed. What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology is a whistle-stop tour of what we consider to be the most useful and important psychological principles teachers ought to be aware of. In case you're wondering whether it's for you, maybe you'll find the following opinions persuasive: This is a must-read book for every beginning teacher. And even the most experienced teachers will also find many new and useful things here. I certainly did. Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London In an era when policy makers [...]

Developing expertise #5 Explore connections

2016-07-20T12:20:17+01:00July 20th, 2016|Featured|

This is the fifth post in this series detailing ways teachers might go about training their intuition in order to make better judgements and acquire real expertise. You can read the previous posts here. We should always be on the lookout for similarities, analogous situations and anything which reminds us of other areas of our practice. When we conscious build on the similarities we spot we can explore why they’re similar and consider how we could make use of the information. There’s a tendency in education to look at research findings and say, “That won’t work with my students.” It might not, [...]

Developing expertise #4 Acknowledge emotions

2016-07-16T14:57:53+01:00July 16th, 2016|Featured, training|

In previous posts I've discussed how creating the right environment, seeking better feedback and creating 'circuit breakers' could help us the develop the kind of expertise required to hone our intuition. This post discusses the role of emotions and how we could change the way we respond to our feelings. Our emotions provide us with important and useful data, but much of this information is misleading and requires conscious processing. We tend to be all too willing to go with our guts, trust hunches and do what 'feels right' without much understanding of where our emotions comes from or what they might be really telling us. Whilst our emotions can feel more [...]

A response to the Education Select Committee: Why Amanda Spielman should run Ofsted

2016-07-08T11:58:49+01:00July 7th, 2016|Featured|

So. The Education Select Committee has rejected Amanda Spielman as the next Chief Inspector. Andrew Old has already summarised why he feels Amanda would have been a terrific appointment here and I agree with him entirely. The purpose of this post is to reflect on quite serious flaws in the Select Committee's reasoning. In the document detailing their decision, they claim that they sought to "test Ms Spielman’s professional competence and personal independence" and were "left with significant concerns about her suitability for the post of HMCI." These are their particular gripes: First: Ms Spielman did not demonstrate the passion for the [...]

School improvement: Can you buck the trend?

2016-12-31T16:26:22+00:00July 4th, 2016|Featured, leadership|

In my last post I discussed the natural volatility of GCSE results and the predictably random nature of results over the long-term. I ended by saying, "The agenda for school improvement has to move away from endlessly pouring over data looking for patterns that don’t exist. We need to find new – better – ways to hold schools to account and come up with new definitions of what school improvement means." Interestingly, two readers got in touch to cite the example of Michaela School as a potential outlier. Obviously, Michaela's first cohort are still a number of years away from sitting [...]

Where now for school improvement?

2016-07-04T16:04:16+01:00July 3rd, 2016|Featured|

In the past, school improvement was easy. You could push pupils into taking BTECs or Diplomas (sometimes with 100% coursework) equivalent to multiple GCSEs; you could organise your curriculum to allow for early entry and multiple resits; you could bend the rules on controlled assessment and a whole host of other little tricks and cons intended to flatter and deceive. Now what have we got? PiXL Club? As Rob Coe laid bare in Improving Education: A Triumph of Hope over Experience, school improvement has been a tawdry illusion. Evidence from international comparisons, independent studies and national exams tell a conflicting and unsavoury tale. As [...]

Telling better stories

2016-06-21T21:26:21+01:00June 21st, 2016|Featured|

None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story. Steven Pinker, My Genome, My Self Stories are one of the most important ways we have of trying to make sense of the world. We look  at all the coincidences, connections, curiosities and contradictions that surround us and weave them into a plausible narrative in which everything makes sense and inconsistencies are explained away. This incredibly useful skill enables us to interpret an otherwise incomprehensible world - without narrative there would be little way for us to make meaning of our [...]

The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education

2023-04-22T10:31:17+01:00June 17th, 2016|Featured|

Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology. Nietzsche Maybe those bored by debating the purpose of education feel the way they do because everyone keeps saying the same things over and over with the result that we all become a little more convinced of our own rightness. Perhaps this is because of the way the debate has been framed? The Great Educational Debate has always been framed as being between Traditionalists and Progressives. While no one is ever happy with attempts to try to pin down these positions, they can be summarised thus: Of course it's [...]

Why I'm optimistic about the new Chief Inspector

2016-06-14T14:17:05+01:00June 14th, 2016|Featured|

Guardian journalist and ex-teacher, Michelle Hanson thinks education in the UK is "going down the pan". In this article she tells us the memory of working as a teacher still makes her "feel a bit queasy" whenever she so much as walks past a school. I can only imagine what kind of horrors she might have endured and I have nothing but sympathy for the many thousands of teachers who, like Michelle, have chosen to get out of the classroom and do something less injurious to their mental health. She's absolutely right to point out that the "preparation, planning, note-taking, sudden irrational initiatives, testing [...]

Seven tools for thinking #7: Beware of ‘deepities’

2018-02-10T09:10:28+00:00June 11th, 2016|Featured|

This is the last of my posts on Daniel Dennett's tools for thinking outlined in Intuition Pumps. You can read the others here. Everyone wants to find meaning in their actions and the events which surround them; the idea that stuff just happens and there is no deeper meaning can be alarming. As such we are attracted to the profound. The Barnum effect - named after the American circus entertainer P.T. Barnum by the psychologist Paul Meehl in his essay Wanted - a Good Cookbook - is the observation that when we encounter vague, general statements we're inclined to leap on them and say, [...]

Seven tools for thinking #6 Don’t waste time on rubbish

2016-06-16T14:27:59+01:00June 9th, 2016|Featured|

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. Paul Graham Science fiction writer and critic, Ted Sturgeon coined what's become known as Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap." This is sometimes taken to be an excuse for throwing up one's hands in disgust at the paucity of original thought and beauty in the world, but that's not what Sturgeon intended. Speaking at a science fiction convention in 1951, what he actually said was this: When people talk about the mystery novel, they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.  When they talk about the western, they say there’s The [...]

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