Here, for your delight and edification, are the blogs I wrote during January:
1st January – New Year’s resolutions for teachers and school leaders
Make this year better than last!
2nd January – Varieties of boredom
How and why some varieties of boredom might not be a bad thing but others are dreadful.
5th January – Can anyone teach? Well, that depends on what you think education is for
An exploration of the idea that anyone can teach.
9th January – What every teacher needs to know about… Edtech
In which I conclude that technology is great but ‘edtech’ is a bit crap.
11th January – Big data is bad data
When it comes to analysing data maybe less is more.
23rd January – Is it what you do or the way that you do it?
Whilst it might be true that you can do anything well, something are inherently better than others.
24th January – Why ‘mastery learning’ may prove to be a bad idea
Mastery learning sounds great but what do we actually mean?
25th January – What’s the difference between character and personality?
Personality is an elusive concept but character is probably worse.
27th January – Is it a ‘sin’ to tell teachers how to teach?
No. Sometimes it’s fine.
28th January – A definition of learning
As I keep getting asked what I mean by learning, it seemed like a good idea to have a post dedicated to my definition.
28th January – John Hattie and the magical power of prediction
In which I explore Hattie’s confusion about ‘self-reported grades’.
29th January – Ouroboros: a review
My review of Greg Ashman’s book.
30th January – Proof of progress – Part 1
First in a series of posts about the process of using Comparative Judgement.
31st January – Scripts: whose lesson is it anyway?
Might scripting ‘perfect’ lessons be a good idea?
31st January – Some assumptions about scripted lessons
In which I deal with some of the most predictable assumptions pertaining to scripted lessons.
A pretty prodigious month, David! I particularly enjoyed returning to your definition of learning. It’s probably not really groundbreaking stuff for you (you’ve said it before in so many ways) but I felt that it crystallised a lot of your thoughts in quite an accessible format. I think that I agree with a lot of your conclusions but (ironically) it’s taking them a while to embed into my day-to-day thinking. Meanwhile, I’m becoming quite a fan of the concept of character education – you asked about possible reading here – are you following the University of Birmingham’s work much here? For example, I’ve just read their book about the Knightly Virtues project which was run across a lot of primary schools with a seeming amount of (admittedly self-reported) success. Interested to hear your thoughts on this…