Even with the best-laid curriculum plans, classroom learning can easily go awry. A painstakingly crafted lesson plan is always at the mercy of pupils’ misunderstanding. In his brilliant book, entitled ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners’, Graham Nuthall observed and recorded around 10,000 lessons and concluded that: “One of the
My weekend typically involves helping coach my boy’s football team in muddy fields in the far corners of North Yorkshire. It is one of those parental experiences that mingles pleasure with pain. From narrow wins to thumping losses. Coaching is a lot like teaching. From wrangling a bunch of
If you want to guarantee clicks on an article or to sell a new product, a focus on failure is the last thing you’d do. People want success. Ideally, they want success quick, cheap, and easy. And yet, when it comes to securing success in classrooms, I think it
My new book - 'Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It)' - has been published this week. It explores eight common problems that beset the classroom and beyond. To make sure this book is practical for every teacher, I have also developed a range of free
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Henry Ford We can all be quick to celebrate our successes, but we can possess a natural reluctance to share or talk about failure. And yet, given how complex teaching and learning in the classroom proves, it becomes
It is a truth universally acknowledged – and bemoaned – that pupils do not learn all that they are taught. They may learn something. They may even learn a lot. But it may not be a lot of what we think we have taught them. If you multiply these learning failures thirty
Every teacher can share ample examples of their students struggling to learn independently. From giving up during an extended piece of writing, to getting stuck and stopping with tricky algebra problems, or forgetting homework and avoiding revision. A lack of independence is a commonplace issue in education, but less common
Adaptive teaching may be tricky to define, but we must define it well, and exemplify it, otherwise it will prove an empty buzzword. I’ve tried to characterise it into broadly two types of adaptations: * Microadaptations (Corno, 2008). Sensitive, moment-to-moment adaptations responding to pupils’ learning e.g. deploying flexible grouping
