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PISA

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 [...]

What do teachers think differentiation is?

2017-07-15T22:11:41+01:00April 24th, 2017|research|

In Why Knowledge Matters, ED Hirsch Jr sets out the case against differentiated instruction, saying, "the attempt to individualize the content of the language arts curriculum has been a quixotic idea that has put teachers under enormous pressure to achieve the impossible." He explains further: When a teacher is attending to the individual needs of one student  in a class of twenty, nineteen are not receiving the teacher's attention. all sorts of techniques conspire to obscure that fact - group work, isolated seatwork on boring work sheets, and "independent study' with choice of books from the leveled-reader bin.(p. 72) In What If [...]

Why feedback fails

2017-05-28T13:40:02+01:00January 10th, 2017|assessment|

Feedback is one of the few things in education that pretty much every agrees is important and worthwhile. The need for feedback is obvious: if you were expected to learn how to reverse park a car whilst wearing a blindfold you would be very unlikely to learn how to go about this without causing damage either to your car, or to the environment. In order to learn you would need to see where you were going and what happened when you turned the wheel. We get this sort of trial and error feedback all time; we act and then observe the effects of [...]

PISA 2015: some tentative thoughts about successful teaching

2017-03-06T08:14:28+00:00December 6th, 2016|Featured|

Despite all the eminently sensible caveats offered by Sam Freedman, PISA provides a fascinating lens through which to view the world of education. The most interesting of the PISA documents I've had a chance to look at today is Policies and Practices for Successful Schools. It's a long document and a great many policies and practices are addressed, but the most interesting to me is the section on how science is taught (pp 65-77). As the report says, "How science is taught at school can make a big difference for students." In order to work out what sorts of activities regularly occur [...]

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