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Reading difficulty is a teaching problem not an intelligence problem

2020-02-04T14:09:03+00:00February 4th, 2016|literacy, reading|

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate I've visited a lot of schools over [...]

Differentiation: Are high expectations enough?

2015-01-02T14:57:48+00:00June 12th, 2014|learning|

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation. Charles F. Kettering Last night someone retweeted a tagline from a post I wrote earlier this year: "Teach to the top, support at the bottom". Inevitably perhaps, someone else took great exception to the word 'support' and asked why those at the bottom shouldn't be taught. Why should they have to suffer support while everyone else got taught? This isn't an unreasonable position and begs the question, what do we mean by 'teaching' and 'support'? If it means the most able are given explicit instruction whilst the least able are consigned [...]

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