The Problems with Effect Sizes
I keep coming back to this talk by David Weston on Hattie’s work and why “it might be a little bit more complicated than it seems.” Definitely worth a watch.
MIST – Educational Videos for Maths and Science
Outside the day job, I’ve been working away trying to repurpose an old project called MIST (Mentored Investigations into Science and Technology) and is essentially a set of videos and lesson ideas for maths and science at the primary level. I’ve also put up a number of “cheat sheets” for those teaching science...
Why 21st Century Education is half-baked
Perhaps it’s the bias of the medium, but spend much time online among teachery types and you come across a whole host of slightly hackneyed tropes. There is the “Shift Happens” video, Sir Ken Robinson, the “guide on the side vs sage on the stage” mantra, factory-model schooling is bunk, and long,...
Notes from Martin Robinson’s 21st C Trivium
Some dog-ears from Martin Robinson’s Trivium 21stC Spoon-feeding “No longer were the students expected to enter the kitchen; rather they chose from a menu and expected it to be served up ready-cooked. This is the problem with spoon-feeding: the whole process devalues the making and concentrates on the service.” Art vs...
Pericles, or Why the Ancient Greeks deserve study
Yesterday, I had another one of those conversations about classics. Anyone who studied Latin, Greek or both to any level will have had something similar. “Really, ancient Greek? Wow. What’s the point of that? I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting but why bother? What jobs does it set you up for?” Everyone who...
Wittgenstein, Popper and Education
A little bit of history goes a long way – and certainly puts some of the 21st Century Learning rhetoric in perspective. “The Pedagogic Institute had been established to further the Austrian educational reform program. This attempted to steer education away from a ‘drill school’ approach, in which schoolchildren...
Too much “Tuck that shirt in”
Interesting article in the Independent called The Politics of the School Uniform. While there are no legal requirements to have uniforms, a 2007 report by the Department for Education found that almost 98 per cent of schools chose to have one. Compared with much of the rest of Europe, where uniforms are relatively rare, we […]
Good News, Bad News
Via: OnlineEducation.net So, the good news is that Twitter can help students boost their grades. The bad news is that many students are device-o-holics. Or perhaps it’s all bad news. Perhaps it’s just that students without Twitter lose marks because the Delirium Tremens they are wrestling with after being told they...
The Effects of School Are Overplayed
John Hattie’s book Visible Learning is a (dense) treasure trove of statistically backed educational research. He looks at 800 meta-analyses of school research and then analyses them for effect. The idea is essentially to try to come up with a way of measuring how much good various initiatives as compared to, say, a child’s...