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What I learned from visiting schools in Uganda

2020-02-27T18:09:27+00:00February 26th, 2020|Featured|

Some months ago I was asked to be part of an advisory panel on a project to improve primary education in Uganda. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. What, I wondered, would I have to offer? The project, SESIL (Strengthening Education Systems for Improved Leadership) is funded by the Department for International Development and managed by Cambridge Education. The basic premise is that by introducing systems for collecting, analysing and using data to make decisions, school leaders will be better placed to improve children's outcomes by the end of primary school. Before heading out to Uganda, I was [...]

Does the new inspection framework trade off reliability against validity?

2020-01-15T13:52:40+00:00January 15th, 2020|leadership|

Yesterday I saw a thread on Twitter from headteacher Stuart Lock on the pros and cons of the new inspection framework: https://twitter.com/StuartLock/status/1216475275514523648?s=20 In it he discusses the idea that because the previous inspection framework relied heavily on schools'  results in national exams in making judgements it managed to be fairly reliable. That is to say, an inspection team inspecting two schools with similar results or that two different inspection teams inspecting the same school would arrive at a broadly similar judgement. In 2015 Ofsted conducted some research on the reliability of it's judgments (the report can be found here). Two independent [...]

The road to hell

2019-11-29T23:01:34+00:00November 24th, 2019|Featured|

My default assumption is that everyone working in education has good intentions. We all want children to be happier, healthier, safer, more creative and better problem solvers. But, good intentions are never enough. Over the past eight years I have used this blog to campaign against the nonsense that used to pervade the system. In the bad old days, Ofsted was the ‘child-centred inquisition’ burning teachers who talked for too long at the stake. Group work, ‘active’ and ‘self-directed’ learning were held up as unquestioned good things and all dissent was crushed with inadequate judgements. We can look back with a [...]

Can we improve school interviews? Part 1: A brief review of the research

2020-02-27T09:05:58+00:00May 9th, 2017|leadership|

Recruitment for most employers is straightforward: you advertise, read through applications, invite the people you like in for an interview, think about it for a bit and then enter into negotiations with whoever you most want to employ. In education it's different. Schools are weird. When I was first told how school recruitment works on my PGCE I couldn't believe it, "They do what?" For any non teachers, school recruitment works like this: All candidates for the job are invited in to the school on the same day. Candidates have to plan a lesson for a class they know almost nothing about [...]

Developing intuition: when can you trust your gut?

2017-04-14T22:44:41+01:00June 26th, 2016|training|

At the talk I gave on intuition at Wellington College's Education Festival on Thursday, I ended up not using the slides I'd prepared and wandering a bit off topic. Here follows what I'd planned to say as well as the slides. Teachers' intuition: when can you trust your gut? from David Didau Certainty and over confidence can prevent us from thinking; the more certain we are that we're right, the less we'll consider other possibilities. This tendency not to think too much about the possibility that we might be mistaken stems in part from a whole suite of well documented cognitive biases, but [...]

Top Gun for Teachers

2016-12-31T15:29:19+00:00June 1st, 2016|training|

On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world. They succeeded. Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it: TOP GUN. As I'm sure you know, these are opening credits of the 1986 movie starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer as pilots graduating the elite Navy fighter school. What you may not know is the background to [...]

Annual report 2015

2015-12-30T13:38:48+00:00December 30th, 2015|blogging|

Well, 2015 has been and gone. It's been a great year for me personally and one in which the blog has continued to make waves. It seems that as more and more ordinary teachers are liberated from the tyranny of some of the daft but pervasive ideas in education, the debate has become increasingly polarised. My writing seems to irritate and encourage in roughly equal measure and I fear I've gained many new readers at the expense of alienating some old ones. For anyone who happens to be interested, here's the 2015 annual report on my blog produced by WordPress. As you [...]

Student voice: windmills of the mind

2015-12-12T23:27:30+00:00December 12th, 2015|leadership, learning|

Pray look better, Sir … those things yonder are no giants, but windmills. Cervantes Does it matter if students like their teachers? Is it worth knowing if students don't maths or hate PE? Should students be asked to evaluate the quality of their lessons? It sometimes seems that the clamour of 'what students want' drowns out even the presumed demands of 'what Ofsted want'. Students' opinions might be interesting but should they be used to judge the effectiveness of teachers? Certainly some school leaders appear to think so. An anonymous blog on the Labour Teachers site* reveals the extent of the rise of this [...]

Discord isn’t disharmony: in praise of inconsistency

2019-06-21T08:36:46+01:00December 3rd, 2015|leadership|

Consistency is the playground of dull minds. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens  What’s so great about consistency? How has the consensus that everybody 'singing from the same hymn sheet’ is always the best idea arisen? Superficially it makes sense – a choir singing from different hymn sheets would create a cacophony – but if we stretch the metaphor a little we can see that while a choir may be singing the same hymn, different choristers will be singing different parts and in different keys. Their hymn sheets will be different. As Harari says in, Sapiens, “Just as when two clashing musical notes [...]

The problem with book monitoring

2020-01-02T17:17:02+00:00November 26th, 2015|leadership|

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way. Albert Camus Most schools these days routinely monitor students' exercise books in an attempt to extrapolate the quality of teaching. In some ways this is positive and reflects the growing recognition that we can tell much less than we might believe about teaching quality by observing lessons. On the whole I'm in favour of looking at students' work, but, predictably, book monitoring goes wrong for pretty much the same reasons lesson observation doesn't work. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with observing lessons, work scrutiny or any of the other practices used to [...]

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