(Image sourced via Pixabay) I hate speaking on the phone. I loathe it with a singular passion and look to avoid it when I can. Why do I experience such a visceral response to something so, well, ordinary? The answer: a phone call deprives me of the crucial stuff of
We all get our students to do tests. We do long answers, short answers, multiple choice, long essays, or performances in Music, Drama, PE and Art. In short, there is lots of testing and, as we know, lots of feedback. We all know that this tried and tested (sorry!) method
(Image via Stowe Boyd from Flickr) “The human mind is an overconfidence machine.” David Brooks, The Social Animal Overconfidence is dangerous. How many ill-judged wars, invasions, crashes, economic downturns and worse, have been initiated by confident fools? Now, such overconfidence provokes such massive global catastrophes, but it also triggers trivial
I have the following image to start a couple of assemblies at school. My question for students: what emotions is the woman at the centre of this image experiencing? Negative answers abound: she is invariably lonely and sad. Such assumptions about standing aside from the crowd pervades our culture. We
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881) Going to university to study English Language and Literature is
Sometimes a social media story goes viral for all the right reasons. It is just enough aslant from conventional opinion that the headline grabs your attention and you click the link and delve in to read. This CNBC story, of the Princeton professor who ‘posted his CV of failures for
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify … into every corner of our minds.” John Maynard Keynes Knowledge is power, without doubt. What is an education if not the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. And yet, we should be mindful of
This blog series was inspired by the simple and complex truth, offered by Professor Rob Coe, that we need to get students thinking hard to learn best. The first post in my series, entitled ‘Thinking Hard…And Why We Avoid It‘, explores why our students’ lazy brains let them down
Do boys loaf more or less when working in groups with girls? Do girls work better in a single sex group? What is the ideal classroom grouping scenario? Such questions can beguile even the most experienced of teachers. Answering those questions could provide us with important marginal improvements for our
Is it better to group students based on their prior ability, in mixed ability groupings, or something in between? This questions besets schools, departments and teachers on an annual basis. There are unique conditions, supports and pressures that mean it is a difficult issue with no silver-bullet answer. The best
Are you struggling to motivate your horizontal students too? So we have found the secret to learning…thinking hard. Part one of this series – you can find it here – explored what we mean by thinking hard and it explored just some of the many reasons why we avoid it. It
In his excellent 2013 paper, called ‘Improving Education: A Triumph of Hope Over Experience’, Professor Rob Coe defines the secret of learning: “Learning happens when people have to think hard.” With refreshing honesty, Professor Coe goes on to describe his wise aphorism as “over-simplistic, vague and not original”. Now, despite