Even with a question mark my title, Do Boys Have a Comparative Advantage in Math and Science, is likely to appear sexist. Am I suggesting the boys are better at math and science than girls? No, I am suggesting they might be worse.
Source: Do Boys Have a Comparative Advantage in Math and Science? – Marginal REVOLUTION
A little while ago I had a conversation with a colleague from another school who was describing the progress of a child. They spent twenty minutes or so talking about a flight path and the relative points progress, both up and down, the child had made. They were earnest, committed and passionate and after twenty minutes I hadn’t the faintest clue what they were talking about.
Clearly a lot of time had spent calculating this and I imagine a good number of staff meeting hours and PPA given over to feeding the spreadsheet or database that drove the system. But if it doesn’t actually make any sense or difference to the teacher or children concerned – why bother?
Could just be me, but wouldn’t some tea leaves be equally as useful and a lot less time consuming?
I tenuously – and hopefully – suggest that the days of measuring progress in one single lesson are gone. I remember, with pounding anxiety, observers looking for a knowledge check at the beginning – I know nothing, Miss – and then ticking that golden box at the bottom of the form when – yes! – they can all answer the same question by the end of the lesson. If you threw SOLO taxonomy into the mix, you’d have all the PGCE pupils observing you within a week.
There’s no depth to that kind of progress, though. By depth, I mean, it doesn’t stick. It’s lost, the moment they step outside your lesson. They won’t be able to answer it as fully the next day and they won’t be able to use this knowledge to contextualise the next concept or any previous learning.
It’s better to have planned-for lessons, in which
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I had the great pleasure of hearing Mark Lehain (@lehain) speak at the ResearchED National Conference (#rED18) last week. He is entertaining, charismatic and, perhaps most surprisingly given some of the things tweeted about him, not actually evil. He was speaking on the topic of a knowledge rich curriculum – a topic which has provoked as much surreal discourse on #EduTwitter as anything else. He was keen to point out the emphasis on the indefinite article, though. He wasn’t talking about the knowledge rich curriculum; there was no attempt here to dictate or prescribe what all children should learn across the country. Rather, this was a rallying call for teachers to engage with the question of curriculum, and to develop their own answers for their own students.
Lehain’s examples were drawn from popular culture: did you know that The Lion King is Hamlet? (I did, as it…
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Back in August, Sam Hall, a second year Teach First participant, wrote this.
In it, he describes the process he went through to build a geography lesson that was in line with some of the principles from Enlgemann’s Direct Instruction, all the way down to writing his own version of Engelmann’s scripts!
I’ve never done this.
When I talk about ‘scripting sequences of my lessons,’ I’m talking about a few lines, so brief, that I can quickly memorise and deliver them.
Sam scripted an entire lesson! And this also meant he had to stand and read from that script, something that most of us would probably baulk at.
But… I think of Doug Lemov’s points about teaching as a performance profession, and I’m open minded. Doug’s work has led to teachers starting to rehearse what they’ll say while giving directions to pupils, or reacting to poor…
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Every so often progressive edutwitter goes insane about something. Usually it is something that is obviously true.
The last time it happened was over this post. In it, I argued that children should be held responsible for their behaviour and pointed out they were “not insane”. Progressives deduced that if I thought we should hold children responsible for their behaviour because they were not insane, then I must be saying that children who are not responsible for their behaviour are insane. For some progressives, this is almost all children, particularly if they have SEN or are badly behaved and edutwitter filled with two arguments:
As ever, the argument could only get as far as it did by being…
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Last night I tweeted about ‘slow feedback’ (I made up the name as I typed. I now claim it as mine ©) I thought I’d write a quick blog to explain what I meant and the rationale behind it.
Our year 11s did some exams in the final days of year 10. There was no way I was going to mark them before the end of the academic year and to be honest I wasn’t going to spend my holiday doing it either.
The new specifications are huge. Ours has two separate papers. Each paper has 16 questions, ranging from multiple choice to extended writing. They take a long time to mark. I will be honest. I didn’t set full papers for them as I knew it would take a long time to mark. My class has 27 students in it. That would be 864…
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