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Learning objectives and why we need ’em

2020-02-12T21:55:33+00:00February 18th, 2012|learning|

I remember the first time I saw a learning objective being used in a lesson. My school had just been placed into Special Measures and things were looking grim. I'd only joined the school a few months previously and was wondering how to get out. Then, at an INSET event organised to rally the troops I watched a video of David Gale (a maths teacher who tweets as @reflectivemaths) writing the learning objective on his white board, questioning the class about what they might learn and then getting them to learn it. The scales fell from my eyes. That's what I [...]

The ultimate teaching technique

2020-10-03T16:19:30+01:00February 14th, 2012|learning|

UPDATE: I no longer agree with any of the following. It remains on my blog as a warning against hubris. June, 2016 Maybe it's just me, but I seem to be encountering an awful lot of people railing against 'progressive' teaching methods of late (see this for an example.) There seems to some sort of consensus that all schools are bastions of constructivist theory in action and that seldom, if ever, are teachers allowed to waffle from the front. Sadly, my experience is that many teachers still spend far too much time standing at the front of their classes talking at [...]

How effective learning hinges on good questioning

2013-07-19T11:08:43+01:00February 4th, 2012|assessment, English, learning|

Hands up who likes asking questions? Questioning is an essential part of helping students to make progress but only if it causes thinking or elicits evidence that informs our teaching. And the thing with asking questions is that while there are some kids who know how to make the system work for them and actively participate in lessons because that they way they’ll learn more, there are those who don't. Dylan Wiliam claims that the students who are sufficiently engaged to put up their hands and answer everything we ask them are “actually getting smarter. Their IQs actually go up.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtZ1pmY0VzI&feature=related [...]

Hexagonal Learning

2012-01-28T14:52:41+00:00January 28th, 2012|English, learning, SOLO|

The mantra of all successful lesson observations these days is that students should be seen to be making progress. Perhaps the best way to show that you’re having an impact on their knowledge and understanding is to show that the learning is ‘deep’. By that I mean, knowledge that transfers from students’ working memories into their long-term memories. Students understand new ideas by relating them to existing ones. If they don't know enough about a subject they won’t have a solid base from which to make connections to prior knowledge. Students are more likely to remember learning if they "make their [...]

Doubts about Dweck? The problem with praise

2013-09-22T16:03:36+01:00January 27th, 2012|learning, myths|

Back in 2010 I was introduced to Carol Dweck's research into fixed and growth mindsets and the scales fell from my eyes. It was an epiphany. A veritable Damascene conversion. And like Saul before me, I quickly became an evangelist. The basic theory is that folk with growth mindsets will make effort for its own sake and when they encounter setbacks will see them as opportunities for learning. Your fixed mindset is all about success. Failure at a task is seen as evidence of personal failure. Struggle is seen as evidence of lack of ability. This is particularly toxic as hard [...]

Is it better to be told, or to discover a fact?

2012-01-22T15:39:39+00:00January 22nd, 2012|learning|

I've read a lot of blogosphere twaddle about why students don't learn effectively in groups and the only effective method for teaching is direct instruction. My view is there needs to balance in all things and using one teaching strategy to the exclusions of all others is a bad mistake. I think it's worth reproducing this fairly lengthy quote from, John Hattie in full: Various successful methods of teaching were identified in Visible Learning, but the book also identified the importance of not rushing to implement only the top strategies; rather it is important to understand the underlying reasons for the [...]

The 'practice' of teaching

2012-01-16T20:22:57+00:00January 16th, 2012|learning, myths|

Fewer (activities); Deeper (learning); Better (student outcomes). John Tomsett, Headteacher This is not a blog post proper, just some notes on Hattie's introduction to Visible Learning for Teachers. Hattie says what we all know: there is no scientific recipe for effective teaching and learning and "no set of principles that can be applied to all students". That said, I've been engaging in some gentle elbow-digging about Learning Styles again today. For those of you who haven't read my views, I will summarise them by saying I think Learning Styles are deeply unhelpful. If anyone is interested in the dissenting view then [...]

What is learning?

2014-05-24T18:04:11+01:00January 8th, 2012|learning|

Go on, ask yourself, ask other teachers, ask some students: what is learning? It's a pretty big question isn't it? One that I might have felt hopelessly unequal to answering before reading Graham Nuthall's The Hidden Lives of Learners. This book draws together one of the most impressive attempts to find out what goes on in classrooms that I've ever come across. Briefly, Nuthall and his team wired up a range of classrooms and recorded everything that went down over several months before then transcribing these recordings and attempting to crunch the data they gathered. In doing so they learned some [...]

What is good behaviour?

2016-01-01T18:35:40+00:00January 1st, 2012|learning|

There are two schools in every school: the school of the high-status staff member, with the luxury of time and authority to cushion them from the worst classes; and the school of the supply teacher and NQT, who possess neither. Tom Bennett, Behaviour Tsar Everyone involved in teaching wants teachers to teach well. We spend a lot of time disputing what ‘teaching well’ looks like, and that’s fair enough; there are plenty of effective techniques for cat skinning. We also seem to agree that good behaviour is highly desirable, but some see it as the product of good teaching while others reckon it’s [...]

Some thoughts on Learning Styles

2017-03-17T09:34:53+00:00December 5th, 2011|learning, myths|

The rusting can of worms that is Learning Styles has been prised open again and the wriggling mess is crawling all over the educational twittersphere. And on that note I will stop extending the metaphor. A visual metaphor for the visual learners who didn't get my first sentence Last week Ian Gilbert wrote Learning Styles are dead, long live Learning Styles. He said: I have been in too many situations where young people who weren’t ‘getting it’ one way then started ‘getting it’ when we tried a different way, to dismiss the whole learning styles thing as a fad. As [...]

Why do I need a teacher if I've got Google and a granny?

2011-12-04T01:12:19+00:00December 4th, 2011|learning|

NB - Having reviewed the evidence, I am now thoroughly convinced I was wrong about all this. Instead, try reading Is it just me or is Sugata Mitra an irresponsible charlatan?  Over the summer I watched Sugata Mitra's jaw-dropping Ted Talk on Child Driven Education and was bowled over. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6wPHOorAkM This, I said to myself, could change everything. Mitra outlines the results of a series of remarkable experiments which began with embedding computers into the walls of Indian slums at child height  and then watching to see what children did with them. Unsurprisingly these computers were magnets to the street kids [...]

Why do I need a teacher if I’ve got Google and a granny?

2016-09-04T22:03:59+01:00December 4th, 2011|learning|

NB - Having reviewed the evidence, I am now thoroughly convinced I was wrong about all this. Instead, try reading Is it just me or is Sugata Mitra an irresponsible charlatan?  Over the summer I watched Sugata Mitra's jaw-dropping Ted Talk on Child Driven Education and was bowled over. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6wPHOorAkM This, I said to myself, could change everything. Mitra outlines the results of a series of remarkable experiments which began with embedding computers into the walls of Indian slums at child height  and then watching to see what children did with them. Unsurprisingly these computers were magnets to the street kids [...]

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