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A guide to The Learning Spy

2013-07-23T13:56:36+01:00July 22nd, 2013|blogging|

The summer holidays are here and tomorrow I'm foolishly attempting to drive to Corsica in a 1979 Campervan. That being the case, there will be no time for writing. So, to satisfy your desire for top quality blog posts (ahem) on all things educational, here is a thematic archive of the posts I've written over the past 2 years. See you in a month! Literacy Thinking like a writer - advice on improving writing skills  4th June 2013 Does dyslexia exist? 26th May 2013 - this upset a lot of people Magic glasses and Meares-Irlen syndrome 27th May 2013 The Matthew Effect: why literacy [...]

Why the knowledge/skills debate is worth having

2015-01-26T08:41:20+00:00July 7th, 2013|blogging, myths, SOLO|

'I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike'. Maya Angelou I've come an awful long way since September 2011 when Cristina Milos took the time to point out that my view on the teaching of knowledge and skills were seriously skewed. I'm flabbergasted that, as an experienced teacher, I could have been so ignorant. I said at the end of that post that "I guess my conclusion isn’t that skills are more important than knowledge: rather that both are required for mastery of a subject." But I didn't really believe it. If [...]

The problem with progress Part 3: Designing lessons for learning

2014-05-25T18:20:25+01:00February 16th, 2013|Featured, learning, planning, SOLO|

Over my last couple of posts I've suggested that you can't see learning in lessons, you can only infer it from students' performance. This means that as a teacher, when you get students to respond to exit passes, signal with traffic lights and otherwise engage in formative assessment what you see are merely cued responses to stimuli. What I mean by that is that the tasks we set students to check whether they've learned what we've taught only tell us how they are performing at that particular time and in those particular circumstances; they offer no indication whether the feckless buggers [...]

Building anticipation… How to get kids to look forward to your lessons without dumbing down

2014-06-03T18:56:55+01:00January 11th, 2013|English, Featured|

One of the banes of every teachers' life is that endless, whining chorus of, "Can we do something fun today?" The correct answer to this pitiful plea is of course that learning is always fun and that today's lesson, along with every other lesson, will contain the gift of knowledge. What could be more fun than that? But this isn't what they mean or what they want, is it? Sometimes, especially at the end of term, they're less subtle and straight for the jugular by asking if they can watch a film. (And they're not clamouring for Herzog or Kieślowski, are [...]

A review of 2012 on The Learning Spy

2012-12-17T20:59:34+00:00December 17th, 2012|Featured|

It wasn't THAT bad! Well, it's the end of another year and as the past month has seen me too drained to write anything even vaguely coherent, I've decided in true cheap TV style to round up the year's most popular posts. I've written 59 of the buggers in 2012 (not including this one) and obviously some of them have chimed with an audience much more than others. This isn't a list of my personal favourites or of the posts I think are the most powerful or best written, they're merely the most read.   So, in reverse order [...]

Knowledge is power

2013-09-25T21:14:34+01:00October 21st, 2012|learning, myths, SOLO|

I've been having a bit of think this week. Firstly I read Daisy Christodoulou's post on Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum. She points out that Hirsch, oft-condemned for being the darling of ideologues like Mickey Gove is, in his own words 'a quasi socialist' and big mates with Diane Ravitch (who is nobody's fool.) Then I listened to the hugely entertaining Jonathan Lear give an excellent presentation at Independent Thinking's Big Day Out in Bristol on Friday and like any speaker worth their salt he got me thinking. His point, if I may make so bold as to attempt a precis, is that [...]

The need for 'Why To' guides

2012-06-07T16:20:53+01:00June 7th, 2012|assessment, SOLO|

I'm not a fan of telling people how to do things. OK, that may not strictly speaking be true, but I do believe that just explaining how to solve a problem is unlikely to result in much learning. The best way is to learn is to think about why a problem should be solved. As teachers we often bemoan the fact that we're not treated with respect as a profession. There are probably all sorts of reasons for this but one reason is the extent to which we've allowed ourselves to be told how we should teach. Consider how we're assessed [...]

Slow Writing: how slowing down can improve your writing

2014-06-28T14:50:08+01:00May 12th, 2012|English, learning, literacy|

NB - my latest thinking on Slow Writing can be found here. Exam season is nearly upon us and English departments across the land will be gearing up to the Herculean labour of training students to churn out essays which, they hope, will earn them the much coveted A*-C grade in English Language. The AQA paper gives candidates just a meagre hour to write a short descriptive, explanatory piece and then a longer piece which asks them to persuade and argue. This isn't much time and most students default position is to race into it, cram in as much verbiage as [...]

Hexagonal Learning

2012-01-28T14:52:41+00:00January 28th, 2012|English, learning, SOLO|

The mantra of all successful lesson observations these days is that students should be seen to be making progress. Perhaps the best way to show that you’re having an impact on their knowledge and understanding is to show that the learning is ‘deep’. By that I mean, knowledge that transfers from students’ working memories into their long-term memories. Students understand new ideas by relating them to existing ones. If they don't know enough about a subject they won’t have a solid base from which to make connections to prior knowledge. Students are more likely to remember learning if they "make their [...]

11 from 11

2011-12-10T12:09:25+00:00December 10th, 2011|Featured|

  2011 has been a good year. Starting the blog has been life changing and after reading A Year in the Life of an English Teacher I've decided to take up the challenge and provide you with a smattering of what's been happening for me over the year. Also, it provides a useful shop window to garner votes in the Best New Blog category of the Edublog Awards. If at any point whilst reading this you are overcome with a powerful urge to vote for me, just click the link on the right. Even though I've only been blogging since July (which leaves [...]

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