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Robert Siegler

Learning is liminal

2016-02-10T21:51:34+00:00February 10th, 2016|learning|

I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. Tennyson, Ulysses I offered my definition of learning here, but there is, I feel, something more to be said on the subject. Learning is a messy, complicated business. Imagine yourself standing before a dark, ominous doorway. Through it you can glimpse something previously unimagined, but entering and crossing through entails a risk – anything might happen. Not passing through, while safe, means you will never know what’s on the other [...]

How to get assessment wrong

2015-05-21T10:45:22+01:00May 20th, 2015|assessment|

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Søren Kierkegaard With the freedom to replace National Curriculum Levels with whatever we want, there's a wonderful opportunity to assess what students can actually do rather than simply slap vague, ill-defined criteria over students' work and then pluck out arbitrary numbers as a poor proxy for progress. But there's also an almost irresistible temptation to panic, follow the herd and get things badly wrong. Levels are by no means the worst we could do - in fact there was [...]

The myth of progress

2015-05-10T14:25:04+01:00May 7th, 2015|Featured|

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. C. S. Lewis We tend to believe that things are getting better, that mankind is on a journey to some perfect state in which irrationality will be banished. This belief shapes and distorts our thinking. Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection is often interpreted as meaning that random biological mutations, which are then inherited and selected as being most fit for the context in which [...]

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