Today Justine Greening wrote this letter in which she explains that she wanted to give everyone more certainty about the value of the new GCSE Grade 4. Whereas previously – outrageously – Nicky Morgan had decreed that only Grades 5-9 would be regarded as ‘Good GCSEs’, Grade 4 will now be considered a Pass. Hooray. I’ve […]
GCSE Grading Goes Ga-Ga. Read More »
One does not have to look too hard to find examples of where curriculum selection was designed to indoctrinate. The most obvious cases are the totalitarian states of the twentieth century where children in, say, 1930s Germany or the USSR were taught curricula that were designed to advance a specific view of the human past.
Can a curriculum ever be balanced? Read More »
https://othmarstrombone.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/is-the-use-of-powerpoint-in-lessons-misguided/
Is the use of PowerPoint in lessons misguided? Read More »
Reading, in Berkshire, is a typical British town. In fact, it was once considered by some to be the most typical town in the country. In the years following the Second World War, its typicality was of great use to a nation rebuilding itself: it was used as a sample to gauge the morale of
Be more Goose: a school shouldn’t rely on Mavericks Read More »
Want your college class to be exceptional? These strategies will make your teaching more engaging, effective, and satisfying for you and your students. Continue Reading →https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/teaching-college/
5 Ways College Teachers Can Improve Their Instruction Read More »
I keep going on about this but at some point, something’s going to break. Ever since Michael Gove and Ofqual – more or less independently – decided, reasonably and sensibly, to bring an end to grade inflation around 2010, taking effect from 2013, we’ve been on a collision course with our embedded, natural and
The Bell-Curve Cage: Something must break. Read More »
Do we undermine formative assessment by confusing learning and performance? Student performance during a lesson is “a highly imperfect index of long-term learning” (Soderstrom and Bjork, 2015), but it’s…https://improvingteaching.co.uk/2017/03/26/formative-assessment-flawed-confusing-learning-performance/
Is formative assessment fatally flawed? Confusing learning & performance Read More »
Last week I spoke at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai. I took part in a debate on the following topic: This house believes 21st century learners need their heads filled with pure facts. I spoke for the motion, together with Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for School Standards in the UK. Speaking
The Global Education and Skills Forum 2017 Read More »
Famous ‘failures’ is a slightly ridiculous concept when tied to the idea of ‘success’. In most cases the people above are famous people who have succeeded who have experienced some sort of failure in their lives. I’m not sure it is helpful to fetishise failure in this way. And yet many schools use posters
Stop Fetishising Failure and Success Read More »
It has become an unwritten law of teaching that when reading aloud to students, the teacher must ensure students are reading along in their own copy of the text. This is, I contend, a bad idea. To understand why we need to consider working memory in some detail. It’s well know that the capacity of
The problem with ‘reading along’ Read More »