Sutton Trust

Can we improve school interviews? Part 2: Intuition vs. statistical prediction

2020-02-27T09:11:40+00:00May 10th, 2017|psychology|

In Part 1 I reviewed some of the research around the best way to recruit and how this might apply to school recruitment. One of the suggestions I made was that schools should "design an interview format around no more than six qualities or attributes and come up with a short list of questions for each attribute. Then score each interview on a scale of 1-5 for each of the metrics you’ve come up with." In this post I will go into more detail about exactly what that might look like. I'm basing these suggestions on the ideas of Daniel Kahneman and [...]

What's the difference between character and personality?

2016-01-25T11:24:32+00:00January 25th, 2016|Featured|

The recent Sutton Trust report on character education, A Winning Personality, concludes that extroversion correlates strongly with career success. It recommends that schools focus their efforts on improving "less advantaged students" knowledge and awareness of professional careers, using "good feedback to improve pupils’ social skills," providing "suitable training in employability skills and interview techniques" and on ensuring that attempts to improve outcomes for less advantaged students are "broad-based – focusing on wider skills as well as academic attainment". Like others, I feel appalled at the idea of extroversion being preached as a gospel of success. To the extent that career success might correlate with [...]

How do we know if a teacher’s any good?

2020-07-23T15:07:13+01:00May 9th, 2015|leadership|

Obviously enough, not all teachers are equal. But how do we know which ones are any cop? Well, we just do, don't we? Everyone in a school community tends to know who's doing a decent job. But how do we know? Rightly, most school leaders feel it important to evaluate the effectiveness of their staff, but how can they go about this in a way that's fair, valid and reliable? Over the past year or so I've spent a fair bit of time explaining why lesson observation cannot be used to evaluate effective teaching. Mostly, the message has been received and understood. [...]

Teacher appraisal and the fundamental attribution error

2014-11-09T22:45:30+00:00November 9th, 2014|leadership|

As favour and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before. Jean de La Bruyère You know that lad in Year 9 who gives you constant grief? He's a manipulative little git and he hates you. And that lovely, hardworking girl in Year 11? She's such a warm, kindhearted soul - what a privilege it is to teach her. As we trudge from day to weary day, we are each the hero of our own story and all others we meet merely bit players. But no matter the size of the part [...]

How not to improve a school

2012-04-21T13:35:26+01:00April 21st, 2012|leadership|

Everyone agrees that 'lasting and sustaining improvement in student outcomes' is a good thing and there's little doubt that we should also seek to narrow the gap in achievement between different groups of students. Nuff said. But how should we go about it? Ben Levin, writer of How To Improve 5,000 Schools is pretty clear on what we shouldn't do. We should avoid the following assumptions: a single change can lead to rapid improvement strong leaders can force schools to improve incentives will motivate schools to improve change must driven from above through policies new standards and curriculum models will lead [...]

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