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Carl Sagan

Walking the tightrope between cynicism and sincerity

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

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 [...]

Some assumptions about scripted lessons

2016-01-31T22:24:10+00:00January 31st, 2016|Featured|

"So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language." Michael Polanyi In this post I wrote about the fact that one of the tenets of Direct Instruction (note the capitals!) is scripted lessons which aim for 'flawless communication'. Let me be clear at the outset: I am not advocating the use of scripted lessons, nor am I claiming DI is the best way to teach. What I am suggesting is that [...]

#ResearchED – Everything you know about education is wrong

2014-09-07T17:36:49+01:00September 6th, 2014|Featured|

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong. Charles F. Kettering I realise I must have come as something as a disappointment for all those expecting the curly-headed medical mischief-maker, Ben Goldacre, but it was wonderful to have the opportunity to try to explain where my thinking currently is on the thorny matter of education research. Really I have no right to a place on the big stage at a conference like ResearchED; I've never done any proper research; I have no qualifications beyond my PGCE. I'm just a very geeky chancer with a big gob and [...]

Why I changed my mind about the SOLO taxonomy

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

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 [...]

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