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Workload Challenge: Marking

The three areas identified by teachers' responses to the Workload Challenge as particularly burdensome were marking, planning and data and a separate report has been prepared on each. On of the problems encountered in preparing these reports is the lack of a robust evidence base. Too often those involved in compiling the reports were forced to rely on professional judgement and 'common sense' interpretations of what little evidence there was. One of the themes which ran through all our work was the belief that marking, planning and data are proxies for teacher performance. On its own, this might be fine - proxies are often the [...]

2016-11-02T18:04:15+00:00March 26th, 2016|assessment|

A plug for Teaching & Learning Conference on 2nd July

The following is a guest post from Anne Williams wherein she promotes the Teaching & Learning conference she has organised on 2nd July in Leeds. I'll be speaking there and so will loads of other rather excellent people. Tickets are selling fast so don't miss out. At the end of June last year, I was hosting a visit from two other schools when a particularly portentous email dropped into my unsuspecting inbox: ‘Confirmation: school is happy for you to host a conference on 2nd July 2016’. @Sabato0612, who I was drinking coffee with at the time, will bear witness that I [...]

2016-03-21T19:29:56+00:00March 21st, 2016|Featured|

Walking the tightrope between cynicism and sincerity

Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope. Edith Wharton I wrote recently about unscrupulous optimism. Mostly this seems to have been understood as a warning against the unbridled enthusiasm for the new and the recklessly blinkered belief that the best possible case will always come to pass. Naturally enough I suppose, some readers read into it a celebration of negativity and cynicism. This could not be further from the truth. My favourite definition of cynicism comes from the novelist John Fowles who wrote in The Magus, "All cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short, and [...]

2016-03-16T13:45:20+00:00March 16th, 2016|Featured|

The revolutionary wisdom of the tribe

In A History of the World, Andrew Marr suggests there needs to be a balance between new ideas and what he calls 'the wisdom of the tribe': What is the right balance between state authority and individual liberty? No successful state is a steady state. All successful states experience a relentless tug-of-war between conservatism, the wisdom of the tribe, and radicalism, or new thinking. The wisdom of the tribe really matters: it is the accumulated lessons of history, the mistakes as well as the answers, that a polity has gathered up so far. But if this wisdom is not challenged, it ossifies. The [...]

2017-04-11T23:16:27+01:00March 12th, 2016|blogging|

Proof of progress Part 2

Back in January I described the comparative judgement trial that we were undertaking at Swindon Academy in collaboration with Chris Wheadon and his shiny, new Proof of Progress system. Today, Chris met with our KS2 team and several brave volunteers from the secondary English faculty to judge the completed scripts our Year 5 students had written. Chris began proceedings by briefly describing the process and explaining that we should aim to make a judgements every 20 seconds or so. The process really couldn't be simpler: the system displays two scripts at a time and you just have to judge which one you think is [...]

2016-07-06T22:04:47+01:00March 11th, 2016|assessment|

7 habits of genuinely expert teachers

Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition. Stephen J. Gould Being a teacher is a tough job. The quantity and the complexity of the decisions and responses we make in the course of a day is daunting. Useful as it would be to think deeply about and reflect thoroughly on each of these interactions, there isn't time to stop and stare. In order to function we have to rely on our intuition. Most of what we do in [...]

2016-03-09T22:44:13+00:00March 9th, 2016|leadership|

The value of testing – on the back of a postage stamp

In an effort to spread the word about some of the most robustly researched psychological effects which can be used to support learning, I've been having a go at creating gimmicky memes. This one is on the 'testing effect', or as it's sometimes called, retrieval practice. I've written about the testing effect before here and have discussed some of the recent research evidence in more depth here. But for those who are understandably unwilling to trawl through my back catalogue, I'll briefly explain the 4 points made above 1. We often think we know things which we have in fact forgotten. This is [...]

2016-03-07T20:58:22+00:00March 7th, 2016|psychology|

The rise of the unscrupulous optimist

"Optimism, n.: The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Education is a project filled with hope. We stand, framed heroically against the setting sun and scan the horizon for new stuff to transform the tired, outmoded, factory clamour of the past and hope - oh, how we hope - that everything will be better. But our forward-looking, progressive stance means we can all too easily miss seeing a landscape littered with failed ideas and the scorched ruins of unscrupulous optimism. Here are a couple of recent examples for your consideration: The College of Teaching Tom [...]

2016-03-05T16:33:51+00:00March 5th, 2016|leadership|

February on The Learning Spy

February was cold, dark, wet and miserable. Which probably explains why I go so much writing done. Here are all of my posts from lat month in one convenient digest. Learning about learning: What every teacher needs to know A report from the US National Council on Teacher Quality reveals the 'big six' strategies we should all know. More guff on creativity There really people who believe that being creative means you don't have to remember stuff! Reading difficulty is a teaching problem not an intelligence problem If a child leaves school unable to read it is the school's fault. Romanticism & the Enlightenment: Meta-beliefs in [...]

2016-03-02T08:55:57+00:00March 2nd, 2016|blogging|

The role of teachers is not to make managers’ lives easier

"To supervise people, you must either surpass them in their accomplishments or despise them." Benjamin Disraeli Questions about the purpose of education divide and bedevil: there's no real agreement about what education is for. But what about teachers? Surely, even if we disagree about what exactly teachers ought to teach we all at least agree they should be teaching children something? And - at least in theory - I think we do, broadly, agree that teachers should teach. Whatever your ideological stripe, you probably agree that the education of children - whatever that means - is the main thing. Everything else is peripheral. [...]

2016-02-29T19:17:28+00:00February 29th, 2016|behaviour, leadership, workload|

Why do edtech folk react badly to scepticism? Part 3: Sunk cost fallacy

After writing a fairly frivolous article expressing scepticism about using iPads in schools, and then experiencing a torrent of invective from various iPadistas, I began a series of posts exploring why asking questions about education technology provokes such an egregious responses. In Part 1 I wrote about vested interest and in Part 2 I addressed confirmation bias. The focus of this third installment is the sunk cost fallacy. We have an irrational response to having wasted time, effort or money: I’ve committed this much, so I must continue or it will have been a waste. I spent all this time training my pupils [...]

2016-02-27T10:36:06+00:00February 27th, 2016|technology|

What are they learning?

Learning is never neutral. Although I have no empirical evidence, I'm pretty sure that it's rare indeed for children - or indeed anyone - to learn nothing in a given situation. My contention is that children are always learning something even if that thing is not what a teacher wants or expects them to learn. In a lesson, students might learn what we have planned for them to learn, or they might learn a misconception. Equally, they might learn that their teacher has low expectations, that they 'can't do' maths, that school is rubbish, or that messing around results in greater social recognition than [...]

2016-12-31T13:51:38+00:00February 26th, 2016|learning|
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