Blog
Teaching knowledge is not indoctrination
Posted on March 2, 2014
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 identi…
Seven Myths – the evidence base, part III
Posted on February 23, 2014
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 educati…
Seven Myths: The evidence base, part II
Posted on February 16, 2014
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…
Seven Myths: The evidence base, part I
Posted on February 7, 2014
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 evidenc…
Nate Silver and E.D. Hirsch
Posted on February 2, 2014
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. Bef…
Ofsted and my book
Posted on January 26, 2014
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,…
Why teaching to the test is so bad
Posted on January 19, 2014
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 her…
Validity and reliability
Posted on December 17, 2013
This is part two of my summary of Daniel Koretz’s book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Part one, How useful are tests?, is here. Part three, Why teaching to the test is so bad,…
A-level maths and earning potential
Posted on December 11, 2013
This week, the Institute of Physics have published a report on gender imbalances in certain subjects. They look at 6 A-level subjects: the typically ‘male’ ones of maths, physics and economics, and th…