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IQ

Can we develop a ‘love of learning’?

2022-04-02T15:29:13+01:00January 13th, 2018|Featured|

The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus Why are some people healthier than others? This might sound like a bit of silly question. The answer is surely obvious: some people eat better and exercise more than others. But is that all there is to it? Couldn't 'healthiness' be attributed, at least in part, to our genes? Might some of us be born with a greater capacity for health than others? We know that various physical traits - eye and hair colour, height, weight, certain specific genetic disorders - absolutely are inherited, so why not a general factor of healthiness? [...]

Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer

2017-06-26T07:55:06+01:00June 25th, 2017|Featured|

Here are the slides I used in the talk I gave at this year's Education Festival: Whatever the question is, intelligence is the answer from David Didau The antipathy of very many otherwise sensible people to the concept of intelligence is really quite remarkable. This aversion seems only to be increased by bringing up the subject of IQ tests. The idea that IQ tests are only useful for showing how good some people are at taking IQ tests is a deeply ignorant view based upon a breathtaking piece of intellectual dishonesty. It's difficult to believe that people like Professor Guy Claxton [...]

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 2: The effects of education

2017-05-22T15:24:05+01:00May 22nd, 2017|psychology|

In Part 1 of this series I laid out why IQ matters and that, far from being a banal measure of merely of how well some people do in a series of irrelevant tests, IQ actually has real power to predict people's life chances. What seems incontrovertibly true is that a higher IQ leads to a better life. This could easily seem like a counsel of despair if it automatically meant that children with lower IQs lived shorter, less fulfilled lives. Thankfully, there is something we can do and in this post I want to show the effects education has on raising IQ. [...]

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 1: Why IQ matters

2017-05-22T15:14:22+01:00May 21st, 2017|psychology|

Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not. Montaigne Although it’s become a truism to say we know relatively little about how our brains work, we know a lot more now than we used to. Naturally, everything we know is contingent and subject to addition, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or pretend we don’t know enough to draw some fairly clear conclusions. Despite the many myths surrounding it, intelligence is a good candidate for being the most well researched and best understood characteristic of the human brain. It’s also probably the most stable construct [...]

Can we improve school interviews? Part 1: A brief review of the research

2020-02-27T09:05:58+00:00May 9th, 2017|leadership|

Recruitment for most employers is straightforward: you advertise, read through applications, invite the people you like in for an interview, think about it for a bit and then enter into negotiations with whoever you most want to employ. In education it's different. Schools are weird. When I was first told how school recruitment works on my PGCE I couldn't believe it, "They do what?" For any non teachers, school recruitment works like this: All candidates for the job are invited in to the school on the same day. Candidates have to plan a lesson for a class they know almost nothing about [...]

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