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practice

What can you practise in English lessons?

2018-05-04T22:52:26+01:00May 4th, 2018|English|

Over my last two posts I've argued that, contrary to popular opinion, English is not a 'skills based' subject. In fact, what appear to be skills are actually composed on many thousands of individual components of knowledge organised together as schema. In my last post I tried to demonstrate that practising 'inference skills' won't actually help students get better at making inferences, and that this ability depends on what they know about a text and about the domain of English more generally. In this post I will attempt to reclaim the concept of practice in English lessons from the confusing quagmire [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Thinking like a writer

2013-07-19T10:48:34+01:00June 4th, 2013|English, Featured, writing|

How do we get better at writing? By writing. The advice I always give to students to improve their writing is to write. Often. Everyday if possible. This might be a private diary entry, an Amazon review, an essay or, even better: a public blog post which someone might actually read. For years now I've been in the habit of writing with my students; whenever they have a controlled assessment to write or a question to answer, I do the work too. Apart from the desire to build a sense of solidarity, I started doing this to model the thinking required [...]

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