The Bell-Curve Cage: Something must break.
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...
Be more Goose: a school shouldn’t rely on Mavericks
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...
Is the use of PowerPoint in lessons misguided?
https://othmarstrombone.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/is-the-use-of-powerpoint-in-lessons-misguided/
Stop Fetishising Failure and Success
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...
The problem with ‘reading along’
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...
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