When I was studying for GCSE history, there was a sudden class panic about revision guides. I think a job lot of guides had arrived at the library and were available to buy for about £2, but a rumour went round that they were selling out. Suddenly, students who weren’t even studying history were worrying… Read more »
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The best part of researching my new book, Teachers vs Tech, was getting to read a lot more about memory. Not just the academic research on memory – although this was fascinating – but the practical attempts by real people to come up with systems to improve their long-term memory and remember things forever. Often,… Read more »
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The challenge of remote teaching is the challenge of all teaching: learning is invisible. How do you get students to understand complex material, and how do you know when they have understood it? You need to check for understanding, and this is why – rightly – so much educational ink has been spilt on the… Read more »
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It’s clear that education needs to become more research-based. Too many fads and myths hold sway, and too little is known about large bodies of solid research evidence that have powerful practical implications. Still, just expecting teachers to become more research informed is a big ask. Education research is a huge field, and teachers are… Read more »
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Back in 2008, the business professor Clayton Christensen made a prediction that by 2019, half of all US high school classes would be taken online. It’s now 2020 and this prediction is not even close to being true, in the US or any other country. Similarly, big predictions that online courses would completely disrupt university… Read more »
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Suppose a friend came to you and told you they wanted to visit Siberia for the whole of next February. They want to prepare for their visit, and to do so they need a precise weather forecast. They want to know exactly what temperature it will be at each hour of their visit, to within… Read more »
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Recently, I started flicking through a book I’d read about ten years ago, Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties: An Intimate History. I stumbled across the section on education, and was quickly engrossed. But the weird thing was that I had no recollection of ever having read these pages before. And yet, the book was clearly well-read,… Read more »
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My new book, Teachers vs Tech, will be published on March 5th by Oxford University Press. Technology has been promising to transform education for over a century – but it’s never quite succeeded. In Teachers vs Tech, I look at why that is, and what needs to happen for technology to really improve education. Read… Read more »
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As long ago as 1913, people were predicting that technology was going to transform education. “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten… Read more »
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When is student choice a good idea? Here’s an extract from a document from the Scottish Curriculum, on best practice in maths teaching. Children were asked about ways the school could improve learning in mathematics. Most children felt that they wanted more time to talk about what they were learning and spend less time completing… Read more »
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