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K Anders Ericsson

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue’s model of learning? Part 1: The problem with depth

2020-07-01T20:49:37+01:00June 17th, 2017|learning|

I saw John Hattie speak recently at a conference on his latest re-imagining of his Visible Learning work. He was an excellent speaker and charming company. I was particularly flattered that he asked me to sign his copy of my What if... book. After he'd finished his presentation he asked me what I thought and I said I'd have to go away and have a think. This is an attempt to tease out a response. Broadly, I found myself in agreement. Hattie makes the astute point that the 400 learning strategies identified in his most recent meta analysis cannot be directly compared; [...]

Should students be overlearning?

2017-01-12T21:28:45+00:00January 12th, 2017|Featured|

In my last post I outlined my concerns with the idea of 'thinking hard' being a good proxy for learning. Briefly, thinking hard about a problem appears to be an inefficient way to alter long-term memory structures. This means that it's perfectly possible to struggle with a difficult exercise, successfully complete it, and still not have learned how to repeat the process independently. The problem is that 'thinking hard' exhausts limited working memory reserves. In fact - as Daisy Christodoulou states in Making Good Progress? - the evidence on 'overlearning' seems to suggest that repeating a task to the point where almost no thought [...]

Developing intuition: when can you trust your gut?

2017-04-14T22:44:41+01:00June 26th, 2016|training|

At the talk I gave on intuition at Wellington College's Education Festival on Thursday, I ended up not using the slides I'd prepared and wandering a bit off topic. Here follows what I'd planned to say as well as the slides. Teachers' intuition: when can you trust your gut? from David Didau Certainty and over confidence can prevent us from thinking; the more certain we are that we're right, the less we'll consider other possibilities. This tendency not to think too much about the possibility that we might be mistaken stems in part from a whole suite of well documented cognitive biases, but [...]

Top Gun for Teachers

2016-12-31T15:29:19+00:00June 1st, 2016|training|

On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world. They succeeded. Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it: TOP GUN. As I'm sure you know, these are opening credits of the 1986 movie starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer as pilots graduating the elite Navy fighter school. What you may not know is the background to [...]

The limits of growth mindset

2016-05-30T10:54:25+01:00May 30th, 2016|psychology|

What's the difference between success and failure? Effort, of course! As everyone now knows, all you need to ensure you're a success is a shed-load of hard work and the belief that you can do anything you set your mind to! Yay! I want to be an astronaut! This is mindsets-lite: the undifferentiated and naive belief that the right kind of thinking leads to wonderful things. Like most well-intentioned educational fads, there's a kernel of truth in these sorts of claims. Hard work does make a difference; beliefs do matter. As always, though, reality is a little more complicated than that. To shed [...]

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