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The case against Power Point as means of implementing curriculum

2022-03-21T11:19:15+00:00March 13th, 2022|curriculum|

First things first: I have nothing against PowerPoint. As means for displaying visual information it definitely has its merits. I have no issues with teachers using slides to share pictures, diagrams or moving images with student (although I do have a few reservations about using it to share text.) My argument here is focussed on the widespread practice of using PowerPoint (or any other similar product) as a means of implementing the curriculum. When I began teaching the idea of displaying slides in classrooms was a distant dream. My first classroom didn’t even have a modern whiteboard and I made do [...]

Do young adult novels have a place in the English curriculum?

2024-02-22T08:52:46+00:00July 10th, 2021|curriculum, English|

When I got my first teaching job I visited the school at the end of July to find out what I'd be teaching the following September. The Head of Department talked me through which GCSE texts I might want to go for. When we came to consider my Key Stage 3 classes, the brand new sets of Holes and Skellig had, unfortunately, already been nabbed by other teachers but he gave me the keys to the stockroom and told me to pick from whatever was left. On one side of the room were piles of unloved, dog-eared class sets of [...]

Why we need to read aloud

2020-05-27T11:52:25+01:00May 27th, 2020|reading|

Here is the recording of webinar I gave for #LDeduchat this week on 'Why we need to read aloud'. The prerecorded presentation lasts for about 25 mins with the rest of the time given over to Q&A. If you can't be doing with watching it, this is my basic argument: Too many children will not read independently because they are not fluent decoders. This is through no fault of their own: there is no correlation between decoding and intelligence. Reading confers all sorts of intellectual advantages: the more you read the more intelligent you will become We can overcome some of [...]

What I learned from visiting schools in Uganda

2020-02-27T18:09:27+00:00February 26th, 2020|Featured|

Some months ago I was asked to be part of an advisory panel on a project to improve primary education in Uganda. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. What, I wondered, would I have to offer? The project, SESIL (Strengthening Education Systems for Improved Leadership) is funded by the Department for International Development and managed by Cambridge Education. The basic premise is that by introducing systems for collecting, analysing and using data to make decisions, school leaders will be better placed to improve children's outcomes by the end of primary school. Before heading out to Uganda, I was [...]

Where we’re getting curriculum wrong Part 2: Powerful knowledge

2020-04-04T17:00:00+01:00December 12th, 2019|curriculum|

In part 1 of this blog series I discussed the importance of cultural capital, where we might be getting it wrong, what it consists of, and how to resolve the problem of 'dead white men'. Where we're getting 'powerful knowledge' wrong While we can make a case that all knowledge is precious, not all knowledge is equally precious. In Bringing Knowledge Back In, education professor Michael Young advanced the idea of ‘powerful knowledge’. In Young's view, knowledge is powerful if it fulfils a number of characteristics. It should: provide reliable explanations and a sound basis for making judgements and generalisations about [...]

What should schools teach?

2019-10-29T13:20:54+00:00October 29th, 2019|Featured|

All knowledge may be precious, but it's hard to argue that it's equally precious. The time children spend in school is strictly finite and so, when deciding what to teach we must must make choices. Often these choices will necessarily be brutal. I was recently contacted by a marketing company who wanted me to write about some 'research' conducted by SellHouseFast which analysed search terms used on UK search engines to find out which queries related to "the real world" are most search for. Here's the result: The argument appears to be that if people are searching for these things then [...]

Should we scrap SATs? Cautiously, yes

2020-12-03T12:10:56+00:00April 20th, 2019|assessment|

Earlier this week, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn turned up at the NEU annual conference with some crowd pleasing ideas. The most eye-catching of these was that he would, if elected, scrap SATs, saying, "We need to prepare children for life, not just exams". Cue rapturous applause from the assembled trade unionists. None of this is particularly surprising, but what does intrigue me is why Corbyn and the NEU want to get rid of SATs. For Corbyn's part, he says, "SATs and the regime of extreme pressure testing are giving young children nightmares and leaving them in floods of tears." Of course, [...]

Survivorship bias and the enduring appeal of bad ideas

2021-09-13T18:43:09+01:00October 9th, 2018|Featured|

Survivorship bias occurs when we draw conclusions only from examples which have passed some sort of selection criteria and systematically discount those which have not. During World War II, British bombers were suffering a fairly awful attrition rate. Understandably, the RAF were keen to try to improve the survivability of their aircraft. Most of the bombers that limped back to base showed signs of heavy damage around the cockpit and wing tips and so the prevailing opinion was that if these sections of the aircraft were reinforced more planes would survive. Then, along came statistician, Abraham Wald who pointed out that [...]

Why I recommend self-report to audit teachers’ grammatical knowledge

2017-11-21T11:29:32+00:00November 21st, 2017|Featured|

The response to my recent post on supporting teachers' standards of literacy was overwhelmingly positive, although, as expected, there was also some criticism. Some of the criticism was directed at my suggested process and several people were unhappy about the use of self-report to audit teacher's current level of confidence. I acknowledge that self-report is a notoriously unreliable tool for determining what people think and believe - often respondents simply answer in the way that they think the questioners wants them to and they are at pains to present themselves in the best possible light. Additionally, some readers felt that many [...]

How can we support teachers' standards of literacy?

2017-11-18T10:55:54+00:00November 18th, 2017|Featured|

Recently, I've spent some time talking to school leaders about how to implement and evaluate effective literacy policies in schools. From these conversations it's clear that one of the main stumbling blocks is concern over some teachers' standards of literacy. If "every teacher in English is a teacher of English," unless teachers are familiar with some fairly basic knowledge of the English language they may, inadvertently, be passing on misinformation and bad habits to their students. This is likely to disproportionately affect the least advantaged children, disadvantaging them further. It therefore makes sense to hold teachers to account for the personal [...]

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