After almost 8 years of blogging, I find myself becoming more erratic and less concerned about updating the site. That said, I still manage to write 61 posts over the course of 2018. These are the post that got the most hits over the past year.

5. “It’s all about relationships” 11th November

Of course the relationships between teachers and students matter, but maybe they matter less than many would like to believe. This post was written in response to a school leader claiming that at his school there are no behaviour problems in either the English or maths departments because the teachers in those departments give up their lunch times to work on their relationships with students. I think there’s a lot wrong with this view.

4. How to explain… schema 31st October

This short post went through the explanation of schema I tend to give when I talk about the interactions between working and long-term memory.

3. Why do some children struggle with reading? 20th September

Every now and then I wade into the dyslexia debate and in this post I offer various alternative cause that might explain why so many children seem to have reading difficulties.

2.The nail in Growth Mindset’s coffin? 6th March

Everyone loves a bit of controversy. Whenever I write about my issues with growth mindset I seem to get a ton of hits and this post, in which I summarised the results of two new meta-analyses on the effects of mindset interventions, was no exception.

1. The death of my father 21st March

I rarely write about anything not at least tangentially connected to education but no one close to me had died before I wrote this. You never know how you’re going to react and I was surprised to discover how cathartic it was to write about the difficult relationship I’d had with my dad. This was our first Christmas without him and it brought a lot of these feelings back to the surface. I was gratified that so many of you seemed to take something positive from having written it.

As ever, thank you for reading. See you again next year.