One of the main reasons why people say we need to keep national curriculum levels is because they provide a common language. I am all in favour of a common language, but levels did not provide this, as I have argued before here. Since I wrote that last post, I have come across this fascinating… Read more »
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Life beyond levels? Life after levels? Life without levels? Lots of teachers, senior leaders and academics have come up with some interesting ideas for what should replace national curriculum levels. Here’s a summary of some of those ideas. Michael Fordham is a former history teacher and now works at Cambridge’s education department. He has written… Read more »
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My book, Seven Myths about Education, was published this week by Routledge. It was actually first published as an ebook by The Curriculum Centre in June 2013. There are a couple of new additions to this version. There are some slight alterations to chapter two, and, more significantly, forewords by E.D. Hirsch and Dylan Wiliam.… Read more »
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Myth 7 of my book is ‘Teaching knowledge is indoctrination’. I found lots of influential educationalists who believed this, but I did also feel that it was not the most pervasive of the myths I identified. Generally, I find the problem is not that people think that teaching Romeo and Juliet is indoctrinating pupils with… Read more »
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In my previous two posts (here and here), I looked at the structure of my book and restated some of the evidence I’d used to make the claim that a certain set of ideas were dominant in English education. In this post, I want to restate the evidence I used to back up my second… Read more »
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I have noticed that a common response to my book has been a) to deny the existence of the myths I’ve outlined and b) to claim that they are not myths after all. This is not only rather illogical, it’s also something I anticipated prior to publication in this blog post. Very often, I’d give… Read more »
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In Seven Myths about Education, I make two claims: first, that in English education, a certain set of ideas about education are predominant; second, that these ideas are misguided. Finding the evidence to prove the second point was relatively straightforward. It is scientifically well-established that working memory is limited and that long-term memory plays a significant… Read more »
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Over Christmas I read Nate Silver’s excellent book The Signal and the Noise. Silver runs the FiveThirtyEight politics blog and became famous for his uncannily accurate predictions of US elections. Before predicting elections, he predicted the success of baseball players and teams. Before that, he made money playing online poker. His book is a distillation… Read more »
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Andrew Old frequently tells me that the way to get lots of people visiting your blog is to mention Ofsted in the title, so here goes. If you are an Ofsted-watcher, you might be interested in my book, particularly in the appendix. Although my book won’t be published until March 5th, you can still access… Read more »
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This is part three of my summary of Daniel Koretz’s book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Part one, How useful are tests?, is here and part two, Validity and reliability, is here. In my last post I spoke about how tests are only ever a proxy for what we want to measure.… Read more »
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