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direct instruction

What’s the best (and easiest) way to teach?

2020-08-14T15:09:24+01:00September 25th, 2018|Featured|

I thought I'd said all I ever wanted to say about group work until, responding to a tweet from an education professor exhorting all teachers to add group work to their teaching repertoires, I unwisely suggested that maybe that wasn't such great advice. Unless you teach PE, drama, or some other subject where outcomes require cooperation this may not be good advice. Instead think very carefully about what the purpose of asking children to work in groups might be. All too often it adds little and costs much. https://t.co/psx985tnSS — David Didau (@DavidDidau) September 23, 2018 In all honesty, I really [...]

Hirsch vs Engelmann: “No scientific basis for Direct Instruction”?

2018-09-25T12:59:56+01:00December 2nd, 2016|research|

No one seems clear who first said it, but it's become an abiding truth of journalism that, "If a dog bites a man, that is not news. But if a man bites a dog that is news." To publish an article in which an octogenarian educationalist says basically what he's been saying for the last few decades would not be news. But if said educationalist were to bite another well-known bastion of traditional education? Publish and be damned! So, in a recent article about the nonsense of selecting what to teach based on whether material is cognitively 'age appropriate', ED Hirsch Jr [...]

Scripts: whose lesson is it anyway?

2018-10-02T08:35:24+01:00January 31st, 2016|learning, planning|

When I was 16, Whose Line Is It Anyway? first aired on UK television. The show, hosted by Clive Anderson, asked four comedians to ad lib responses to various prompts and scenarios, much of it shouted out by audience members. The whole thing was completely unscripted with the comedians having to make everything up on the spot. The results were anarchic; always daft and often hilarious. I'd never seen anything quite like it and I was in awe of the quickness of their brains and the way the could conjure a laugh out of almost anything. Here's a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7LVv-X2UEc As you can see, it's [...]

Is there a right way to teach?

2012-11-24T12:49:47+00:00November 24th, 2012|learning, planning|

It’s become a trite and hackneyed truism that if they’re not learning you’re just talking. We’re all clear that teaching only happens when the little tinkers manage to make some sort of progress – preferably that of the rapid and sustained variety. But this simple truth, like so many others, seems to have been systematically and catastrophically misunderstood by many school leaders and inspectors. Until recently it was universally accepted that the key to a good lesson observation was showing that pupils are making progress in the 25 minutes available to us, and that the only way we could demonstrate this [...]

Is SOLO a waste of time?

2012-06-04T00:09:07+01:00June 4th, 2012|learning, SOLO|

Stop blaming your lack of experimentation, risk and innovation on your lack of time. Hywel Roberts - Oops! Helping Children Learn Accidentally It was pointed out to me recently that I can afford to expend my energies on such fripperies as the SOLO taxonomy and group work because I teach a subject which is rich in curriculum time. If, the logic goes, you only have 1 or 2 hours per week you need to spend it delivering content. Anything else is a waste of time. Clearly there's some truth in this: English does get more time than, say, French or RE. [...]

Is it better to be told, or to discover a fact?

2012-01-22T15:39:39+00:00January 22nd, 2012|learning|

I've read a lot of blogosphere twaddle about why students don't learn effectively in groups and the only effective method for teaching is direct instruction. My view is there needs to balance in all things and using one teaching strategy to the exclusions of all others is a bad mistake. I think it's worth reproducing this fairly lengthy quote from, John Hattie in full: Various successful methods of teaching were identified in Visible Learning, but the book also identified the importance of not rushing to implement only the top strategies; rather it is important to understand the underlying reasons for the [...]

Should we be teaching knowledge or skills?

2011-11-02T20:31:31+00:00November 2nd, 2011|learning, SOLO|

It is a truth universally acknowledged that our education system isn’t quite up to snuff. And at that point virtually all agreement ceases. There are those on which we might loosely term the ‘right’ of the divide who point to PISA scores, claim that we’re in the middle of a crisis and suggest that a return to traditional values is the way forward. Oh, and Free Schools are good too. Then there are the proponents of the ‘left’ who think that the current emphasis of schools does not fit us for a future in which compliance will no longer be rewarded. [...]

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