January 15, 2017 at 12:09AM Are you a student? Based in the Midlands? In possession of such a crippling compulsion to be correct that you’re willing to devote several years of your life to it? Great news, because Birmingham City University has just announced its new Centre for Brexit Studies. The centre promises to “further […]

January 14, 2017 at 11:59PM The Christmas edition of the Economist contained an article called ‘Animal Factory: the evolution of a scientific meaning’.  It was about the difficulties of conducting experiments on laboratory mice.  I learnt that ‘Not all mice are equal, even if their genomes are.’  Two sets of littermates that have been raised

January 14, 2017 at 08:51PM In a book published in 2000, the Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has died aged 91, deployed a metaphor since taken up by the anti-globalisation movement around the world. Liquid Modernity analysed the disappearance of the solid structures and institutions that once provided the stable foundations for well-ordered modern societies,

January 14, 2017 at 08:09PM Guest post by Krista Taylor. An earlier version of the post originally appeared on Angels and Superheroes.   Teacher professional development has a reputation for being notoriously poor. So often it’s a top-down approach that’s out of touch with the challenges of being in a classroom. But what if teachers

January 14, 2017 at 07:09PMI’ve been reconsidering good ways to begin lessons and share objectives.  Looking beyond writing objectives on the board (and perhaps copying them into books), Rob Phillips (2001) suggests using Initial Stimulus Material.  He argues that stimuli such as stories, images or problems can help us outline objectives in “a clever, meaningful way”, posing hypotheses and establishing

January 14, 2017 at 06:36PM This is part 2 of a series of blogs on my new book, Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning. Click here to read the introduction to the series. For many people, teaching knowledge, teaching to the test and direct, teacher-led instruction are one and the same thing. Here

January 14, 2017 at 04:33PM Two arguments have been prevalent in education discourse for a number of years: one, that the content of the curriculum is just a reflection of power relations and two, that all truth is relative. The arguments are often expressed as questions: ‘whose truth?’ And ‘whose knowledge?’ These ideas are then used to back up the idea that

January 14, 2017 at 01:11PM A school’s plan to fine parents if their children are consistently late for registration will not solve the problem, say union leaders – although the government has told headteachers they can legally issue penalty notices in such circumstances. Catherine Stalham, head of Winter Gardens primary academy in Essex, last week

January 14, 2017 at 08:10AM The human rights charity Liberty will write to every headteacher in England to demand better information for parents over the collection of pupil nationality data. Schools will next week attempt for the second time to collect information on their pupils’ nationality and country of birth, first introduced in September last