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Grit and growth: who's to blame for low achievement?

I’ve recently read a couple of interesting articles which question the efficacy of the research of Carol Dweck (Mindset) and Angela Duckworth (Grit). The complaint is that if we attribute an individual’s failure to a fault or lack in their character then we are apportioning blame; the reason we are unsuccessful is down to our own weak will and poor attitude. The counter argument is that society should be held to account for the failure of those at its margins; if we fail it is down to our lack of opportunity and the prejudices we encounter. No one would argue that [...]

2014-07-10T16:56:48+01:00July 10th, 2014|Featured|

The problem with SatNavs, or how feedback can impede learning

I'm not an especially good driver, but I'm a truly terrible navigator. This used to mean that I would get lost. A lot. When I first moved to Bristol in 2001 I bought an A-Z of the city and when driving somewhere new I would have to stop the car periodically and try to align the map to the streets around me. Needless to say, I found this pretty stressful. Luckily, I'm a lot better at recognising landmarks than I am at reading maps. Slowly, through a process of trial and error, I started to learn how to find my way around. I've got [...]

2020-05-07T18:16:23+01:00July 6th, 2014|learning|

Now we are three

In a pleasingly synchronous turn of events this post marking the end of the third year of writing The Learning Spy is also the 300th post I've published on the site. That's about a blog every 4 days. I knew I'd written a lot, but this smacks of some sort of worrying compulsion. This last year has been by far the busiest yet with over 600,000 views but I'm sure that has more to do with the explosion of high quality education blogging that's taken place in the past year or so than it has to do with anything special about me. And [...]

2014-07-04T09:07:19+01:00July 3rd, 2014|Featured|

Teaching for independence: thinking, memory & mastery

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. John Stuart Mill It's been a while now since I last wrote about the Teaching Sequence for Independence, so I'll start with a brief recap on what has come to be meant by 'independent learning'. Up until relatively recently there has been a strongly held belief amongst many teachers that pupils will only become independent if we encourage our pupils to learn independently. In essence, this [...]

2014-07-02T17:08:59+01:00July 2nd, 2014|learning|

Is listening really passive?

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it. David Hockney Like many others, I got very excited to see this published on the Ofsted website back in February: Inspectors must not give the impression that Ofsted favours a particular teaching style. Inspectors should not criticise teacher talk for being overlong or bemoan a lack of opportunity for different activities in lessons unless there is unequivocal evidence that this is slowing learning over time. Do not expect to see ‘independent learning’ in all lessons and do not make the assumption that this is always necessary or [...]

2019-11-10T13:13:35+00:00June 30th, 2014|learning|

Listen up: Improving the quality of classroom discussion

We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.Diogenes Pupils are asked to discuss stuff in class all the time. As, from time to time, are teachers. Think back to the last discussion you took part in. No matter how civilised they are, it tends to be an exercise in patience; we spend a lot of time waiting for everyone else to shut up so we can have our say. Inevitably, this de facto approach allows discussion to be dominated by the loudest, most confident participants. As John Wayne put it, we [...]

2014-06-29T16:17:38+01:00June 29th, 2014|learning|

Why we disagree: the purposes of education

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle (possibly a fake quote) We are fantastically bad at recognising that our beliefs are based not on evidence, logic and reason, but on self-interest, preference and emotion. When confronted with ‘others’ who disagree with our most fervently held beliefs, we tend to make assumptions that they are ignorant. When our opponents prove they are sufficiently well-versed in the particular issue about which we disagree, we jump to conclusion that they must be stupid. If they then prove that their arguments are coherent enough to [...]

2014-08-07T13:33:48+01:00June 25th, 2014|Featured|

What I got up to at the Wellington Festival of Education Part 2

Day Two of the Education Festival dawned rather too early; I was camped out in my van and could have done with another hour or so before the hordes descended. By the time I was decent, and had scoffed a quick breakfast in the almost oppressively convivial surroundings of the Master's Lodge, I was ready to rejoin the fray. My first stop was a debate rather pointedly entitled, What's Wrong With English Schools? or something equally foolish. The panel was ably chaired by veteran debater Clair Fox and consisted of everyone's favourite campaigning headteacher, Geoff Barton; grammar grandfather Nevile Gwynne; the [...]

2014-06-24T07:13:00+01:00June 24th, 2014|Featured|

What I got up to at the Wellington Festival of Education Part 1

Sadly, I missed most of the Friday. I spent the morning speaking at a maths conference (I know, right?) on correcting the mistakes made in the name of ‘numeracy across the curriculum’. If you’re interested, I argued that whilst numeracy has a pretty superficial connection with much that goes on in other subjects, mathematical thinking would be a far more powerful way to explicitly teach pupils to filter how they viewed the curriculum. I may blog on this at some point in the future. Then, channeling the spirit of the John Cleese film Clockwise I had to race across to Wellington [...]

2014-09-21T22:12:27+01:00June 22nd, 2014|learning|

Revisiting Slow Writing – how slowing writing might speed up thinking

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast. Shakespeare It's been a while since I first wrote about Slow Writing and in that time it's rather taken on a life of its own. Today I had the interesting experience of someone excitedly telling me about this 'great idea' they'd been using to transforming students' writing, and guess what? Now, I don't want to suggest that I'm precious about it or that it's in any way 'mine', but it is one of the relatively few good original ideas I've had and I feel a certain sense of paternal pride in its increasingly viral [...]

2020-03-10T19:54:01+00:00June 19th, 2014|literacy|

Pseudo intervention and the power of placebo

…it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives… Francis Bacon Today's post has been contributed by a reader who has asked to remain anonymous, but got in touch after reading my blog explaining why I'd abandoned the SOLO taxonomy. Whilst this post isn't directly related to SOLO, it does address the need to provide compelling evidence when we start getting excited about a particular style or approach to teaching. Increasingly I've become convinced that one way to increase students' attainment might be to harness some sort of permanent Hawthorne Effect by [...]

2016-11-21T16:31:00+00:00June 17th, 2014|Featured|

Why I changed my mind about the SOLO taxonomy

I've been meaning to write this for quite a while. Increasingly, I've become rather embarrassed about my erstwhile advocacy for Biggs & Collis's generic taxonomy, the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes. I used to have a separate page of SOLO resources on my blog which I have now removed, but even so my SOLO posts still get a surprising number of hits, and this presentation has been downloaded over 50,000 times. If you've got 8 minutes of your life you want to waste, there's also this video of me extolling the efficacy of SOLO at a teachmeet in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4h1nOdnXDI I was [...]

2017-01-25T23:25:31+00:00June 15th, 2014|learning|
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