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20 psychological principles for teachers #2 Prior knowledge

2015-06-01T09:40:24+01:00May 26th, 2015|psychology|

This is the second in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology For Pre-k–12 Teaching And Learning. This time it's the turn of Principle 2 – What students already know affects their learning to come under the microscope. You can see the other principles here. Students' minds are not a blank slate; when they arrive at school they already know stuff. According to Nuthall, whenever teachers begin a new topic, students already know about half of what they're told - it's just that they each know a different 50%. Obviously enough, this prior knowledge affects how students acquire new knowledge [...]

Is it possible to get assessment right?

2015-05-31T11:18:35+01:00May 23rd, 2015|assessment|

No. After my last blog on how to get assessment wrong, various readers got in touch to say, OK smart arse, what should we do? Well, I'm afraid the bad news is that we'll never get assessment right. Or at least, it's impossible for assessment to give us anything like perfect information on student's progress or learning. We can design tests to give us pretty good information of students' mastery of a domain, but as Amanda Spielman, chair of Ofsted said at researchED in September, the best we can ever expect from GCSEs is to narrow student achievement down to + or [...]

The fetish of marking

2015-05-10T14:49:34+01:00April 30th, 2015|assessment, myths|

Even the most valuable fetishes will turn into dusts and ashes! Mehmet Murat Ildan Fetishism hasn't always been about rubber and high heels. The word originates from the Portuguese feitico, meaning an object or charm of false power. When explorers first encountered native religions in West Africa, whatever talismans or totems the locals revered were dismissed as fetishes. A fetish has since come to mean an object or practice onto which power has been displaced from the original source. Marking seems a good example. At the most basic level, marking is a totemic symbol for the power of feedback. What we want is [...]

New book: What if everything you know about education is wrong?

2014-12-17T19:11:14+00:00December 17th, 2014|Featured|

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. - Oliver Cromwell I haven't been posting much lately but that's not to say I haven't been busy writing. I'm delighted to tell you I've now finished my new book and wanted to take the opportunity to share the contents before it's listed on Amazon the whole thing is inevitably cheapened by sales figures. In it I pose the question, What if everything you know about education is wrong? Just to be clear, I'm not saying you, or anyone else is wrong, I'm just asking you to [...]

Questions that matter: method vs practice

2014-02-05T08:51:25+00:00February 4th, 2014|Featured|

We talk a lot these days about pedagogy, but what do we actually mean? Obviously, we know what the dictionary definition is: the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept, but I think we're far more concerned about methodology than we are about practice. I just came across this list of questions that should preoccupy teachers on Barry Smith's blog and thought they were so useful that they might bear repeating: What do my kids find hard? Why? How can I teach differently so the hard bits become accessible? How can I do that without dumbing down? [...]

Principled curriculum design: the English curriculum

2014-07-29T21:27:26+01:00December 16th, 2013|English, Featured|

The tragedy of life is that one can only understand life backwards, but one must live it forwards Søren Kierkegaard Back in March 2013, I wrote about the principles underlying my redesign of a Keys Stage 3 English curriculum. It received a mixed response. Since then Joe Kirby and Alex Quigley have published their ideas on redesigning this area of the curriculum and have, in different ways, influenced my thinking. Recently, I've presented my ideas on the English curriculum to over 100 English teachers and the consensus seems to be that there is no consensus. Having thought quite a bit about [...]

Redesigning a curriculum

2013-12-03T09:25:15+00:00March 25th, 2013|English, Featured, learning, planning|

Effective reform must start with the understanding that the curriculum is the central focus and the central business of schools. Effective curricula are the sina que non of the system that is capable of delivering a quality education to all kids. Siegfried Engelmann At the start of the year I foolishly asked what the good people of Twitter would like me to write about. The message came back, loud and clear, that you wanted to know my thoughts on the Key Stage 3 curriculum. Well, whadda you know? Through my usual process of bathing in ideas until good and clean, I [...]

Reading List

2018-03-23T14:33:46+00:00February 16th, 2012|

Books Obviously, I'd be a fool not to recommend my own books, but these are some of the works which have inspired me to become a more thoughtful teacher: (sorted alphabetically by author last name) Philip Adey & Justin Dillon (ed) Bad Education: Debunking Myths in Education Kathryn Asbury & Robert Plomin G is for Genes: The Impact of Genetics on Education and Achievement   Isabelle Beck, Margaret G. McKeown and Linda Kucan Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction Tom Bennett Teacher Proof: Why research in education doesn’t always mean what it claims, and what you can do about it Ron Berger An Ethic of Excellence: Building a [...]

Why using the curriculum as your progression model is incompatible with ‘measuring progress’

2021-09-11T15:10:11+01:00September 11th, 2021|assessment, curriculum|

Our capacity to misunderstand complex ideas leads, inexorably, to the lethal mutation of those ides. In my last post I set out why the apparently simple and obvious notion of 'using the curriculum as a progression model' often goes wrong but I underplayed some key points about the use of numbers. Tucked away in that post are two ideas that need some amplification and explanation. Firstly, in relation to the way in which summative assessments are scored: I should note that the key assumption underpinning this assessment model is not that tests should discriminate between students so we can place them [...]

Why ‘using the curriculum as a progression model’ is harder than you think

2022-11-13T14:39:04+00:00September 8th, 2021|assessment, curriculum|

Since first hearing the idea that the curriculum should be the model of progression on Michael Fordham's blog, I immediately and instinctively felt that this was right. Of course, I said to myself, we will know whether students are making progress if they are learning more of the curriculum. Voila! And, like many others, I left the notion as a self-evident truth that required no further explanation. Once it is understood to be true, the scales will fall from the eyes of those espousing flightpaths, Age Related Expectations and incoherent statements of progress and all will be well. (See here and [...]

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