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

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

"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. [...]

Big data is bad data

2016-01-12T09:49:42+00:00January 11th, 2016|leadership|

The cost of bad data is the illusion of knowledge. – Stephen Hawking Schools, as with almost every other organ of state, are increasingly obsessed with big data. There seem to be two main aims: prediction and control. If only we collect and analyse enough data then the secrets of the universe will be unlocked. No child will be left behind and all will have prizes. Can we learn from the past? No. Or at least, not in any way that helps. We can see trends, but these are far more likely to be noise than signal. When exam results are rising [...]

The Illusion of Knowing

2017-04-18T23:41:37+01:00November 20th, 2015|leadership|

Knowledge, n.: The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. Ambrose Bierce Advanced Learning has commissioned me to write a piece about the uses and abuses of data in schools. My thesis, if that's not too grand a term, is that while data can be extraordinarily useful in helping us make good decisions, too much data leads, inexorably, to overload. When we have too much data we start doing silly things with it, just because we have it. The cost of bad data is the conviction that we have figured out all the possible permutations and know exactly what we're doing [...]

Pseudo intervention and the power of placebo

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

…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 [...]

5 questions to guard against availability bias and made-up data

2014-08-18T20:41:15+01:00June 8th, 2014|myths|

The cost of bad data is the illusion of knowledge - Stephen Hawking What's more likely to kill you? A shark or a hot water tap? We've all heard stories of killer sharks, but as yet Spielberg hasn't made a thriller about killer plumbing. We reason based on the information most readily available to us. We assume that the risk of dying in a plane crash is greater than the risk of dying on our sofa because plane crashes are so much more dramatic. But we're wrong. This is the availability bias. We make decisions based on the most readily available information [...]

Making data meaningful: Pen Portraits

2013-10-13T19:39:53+01:00October 13th, 2013|leadership|

Most of what makes classrooms work is invisible. The activities that teachers and students enact are, by and large, irrelevant. I'm aware that this runs the risk of sounding like preposterous nonsense, but I think it's true. The here and now of lessons and classrooms is dependent on the routines and relationships that have been forged over time. If you're clear about what is and is not acceptable behaviour, firm and fair in applying consequences and provide meaningful feedback on how pupils' can improve it almost doesn't matter what you do in a lesson. And vice versa: if you neglect these things, no [...]

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