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From Scared Straight to Reading Wrong

2015-10-24T10:56:16+01:00October 24th, 2015|reading, research|

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alters things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end? Francis Bacon In 1978, Scared Straight! won the Academy Award for the best documentary film. It followed a group of teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks who, as part of a new crime reduction programme, were taken to a maximum security prison to be threatened, humiliated and intimidated by a bunch of murderers and rapists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri7G7xHj5LE The premise [...]

Intelligent Accountability

2016-10-05T20:44:27+01:00October 4th, 2015|Featured, leadership|

The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law. - Emma Goldman So many teachers I speak to are afraid to make nuanced professional judgements. When I make suggestions on how they could manage workload, organise classroom, speak to students, select curriculum content or plan lessons very often I'm confronted with,"That sounds like a great idea but I wouldn't be allowed to do it." Too many school systems have become blunt instruments used to [...]

The Science of Learning

2015-09-30T19:02:36+01:00September 30th, 2015|psychology|

Loyal readers may remember my attempts to wade through the Top 20 Principles of Psychology for Teaching & Learning report from the APA. If you haven't already read it, don't bother. This remarkably concise digest, produced by Deans for Impact does the job much better. Well-informed readers probably won't learn anything new, but I've not come across another document which presents the evidence so clearly and gives such unambiguous advice to teachers. Basically, a group of American independent school heads, ably supported by Daniel Willingham and Paul Bruno, have summarised pretty much everything a busy teacher ought to know about how children learn, remember, solve [...]

Reactions to #WrongBook

2015-07-04T12:23:59+01:00July 4th, 2015|writing|

In addition to the pre-publication reviews from some of the most eminent thinkers in education and psychology such as professors Dylan Wiliam, Robert Bjork, Daniel Willingham and Robert Coe, some 'real' readers have had a chance to plough their way through the 400+ pages. I realise this is a big ask but I hope the Amazon reviews below give you a sense of why it might be worth reading. Many thanks for all the kind comments and also for some of the rather blunt feedback. (I hear @HeyMiss Smith has given it a savaging in Schools Week!) Anyway, here's a taste of some [...]

May on The Learning Spy

2015-06-02T18:31:28+01:00June 1st, 2015|Featured|

Blimey, but May was a busy month! I wrote more posts than ever before - a ridiculous 29, and had more views than any other months with 90,590 views. Anyhoo, I did this last month and 4 people got in touch to say they'd like me to do it again, so this is for them. Here follows a brief run down of what I wrote about. Two stars and a bloody wish! 3rd May (4,244 views) I started the month by continuing where I left off at the end of April by writing about marking and took aim at the execrable process widely [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #5 “Learning is dependent on practice”

2016-02-04T10:08:30+00:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

This is the fifth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 5: “Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice.” Whenever the going got tough, my mum always used to remind me that 'practice makes perfect'. Well, I'm delighted to say it turns out she's wrong. Sorry mum. Practice makes permanent. What we repeatedly practice we get good at, and if we practice doing the wrong things, we'll get good at them. So, while practice is certainly necessary for us to acquire long-term knowledge and [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #4 Context

2015-06-29T14:55:29+01:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

This is the fourth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 4: "Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated." The fact that learning occurs in context is well established. Our ability to retrieve information is heavily context dependent - we link it to related subject matter, times, places, people and feelings. I've written before about the variation effect and troubling finding that students often struggle to transfer what they have been taught from one [...]

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 [...]

Endorsements – what are they worth?

2015-05-10T14:28:35+01:00May 5th, 2015|Featured|

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise — although the philosophers generally call it “recognition”! William James You might not have noticed (I've been the very soul of subtlety!) but I've got a new book out in June. This is my third book, and I have to say I love the process of assembling ideas, crafting them into some semblance of meaning, rethinking, redrafting, editing, proofreading. Writing is so much more than I ever thought it was before establishing a foothold in the publishing industry and I pretty much enjoy it all. The bit that terrifies [...]

What might be a good proxy for learning?

2015-03-22T21:21:13+00:00March 22nd, 2015|Featured|

Professor Rob Coe's speech, From Evidence to Great Teaching, at the ASCL conference last Friday seemed to generate quite a bit of energy on Twitter, as did Carl Hendrick's post on engagement. Coe has been referring to the idea that we confuse learning with various 'poor proxies' since the publication of Improving Education. These are the proxies of which he speaks: It's small wonder, perhaps, that so many get so upset by being told that the certainties on which they've based their careers may not actually be true. The cognitive dissonance produced leads us to either agree with Prof Coe and abandon [...]

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