Featured

The talk I gave a this year's researchED national conference was, I'm afraid to say, shameless promotion for my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. Each of the slides represents an incredibly brief potted summary of the book's ten chapters. The book will be published some time in the coming months and, as the release date approaches, I'll write a series of posts that expands on each chapter. For now I hope this sufficiently whets your appetite to pre-order a copy. Making Kids Cleverer - ResearchED 2018 from David Didau

Today I listened to Paul Smith, CEO of Future Academies, talk about his ambition for the young people who attend the schools in his Trust. He said he wanted them to be able to go to a 'nice' restaurant, feel confident about ordering and be able to have a 90 minutes conversation about current affairs. This might seem a pretty modest wish, but I have taught very many children who may never have this kind of experience. I never really thought about my ambition for children in quite this way before. I'm not sure that going to a restaurant is exactly [...]

Yesterday, I wrote a post explaining that important as the quality of teaching in a school is, there are other, more important things on which to concentrate. In response, Katharine Birbalsingh, head mistress of Michaela School tweeted this: I agree with lots of this but @DavidDidau misses a, if not THE most important thing: kids need to love their teacher. They need to be inspired. When a kid loves their teacher, they’ll work & work for them both inside & outside the classroom. And hard work is what counts. https://t.co/5g4qivJxvc — Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) July 8, 2018 Did I miss a [...]

As John Tomsett says in his latest blog, "It is generally accepted that the quality of teaching is the most influential factor in determining the rate at which pupils make progress in their learning – broadly speaking, the better the teaching, the more progress pupils make over time."[i] Here, I want to argue that teaching, important as it is, only comes third (or maybe fourth) on the list of things I think make the most difference "in determining the rate at which children make progress in their learning." A bold claim? Let's see. My contention is that the single most important [...]

Balance is an obviously good thing, isn't it? After all, who wants to be unbalanced? "What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?" asked the mathematician Henri Poincaré. "It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details." Lovely.  A lack of balance implies disunity, disharmony and, maybe, disorder. But is balance always good? In education, those who are made uncomfortable [...]

I normally round up my favourite reads at the end of the year but I've read so many really excellent books so far this year that I decided to put them out there now. Who knows? Maybe you'll consider picking one of them up to peruse over the summer. In no particular order... Factfulness: 10 reasons we're wrong about the world - and why things are better than you think, Hans Rosling Sadly, Hans Rosling died last year. If you've never heard of him before have a look at some of his videos. The Swedish statistician and epidemiologist was an expert communicator [...]

In my last post I argued that thinking about English as a 'skills based' subject is counter-productive. One response to this was to say, "Hang on, what about practice. If you can practise something you become more skilled at it, so how can you say English isn't a skills-based subject?" It seems obvious that "just knowing" something is different from practising it. Pretty much anything we do can be improved through practice. But, the role of practice changes depending on whether you think English is a skills based subject or not. In the skills-based approach it makes sense to practise the [...]