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Stephen Twigg and Teach First
Posted on January 13, 2012
Stephen Twigg is quoted here in the Guardian as saying that: ‘While in government, Labour made huge efforts to raise the status and quality of teaching; introducing programmes like Teach First to attr…
Educational Politics Part II
Posted on January 10, 2012
In my last post, I referred to a great post by Andrew Old where he uses a quadrant to clarify a common misconception in educational debates. I have drawn up a quadrant to represent something similar….
Educational Politics – Part I
Posted on January 10, 2012
I just read an excellent post here by Andrew Old which clarifies a frequent misconception in debates about education. Put simply, there are two key debates in education – one is about the content of t…
One thing I don’t like about blogging…
Posted on January 8, 2012
I just posted a blog about 21st century skills over here. I got some very interesting and thought-provoking responses from people in the comments and on Twitter. All good. One person, Sam Freedman, re…
Why 21st century skills are not that 21st century
Posted on January 8, 2012
Whenever I hear anyone talk about preparing students for the 21st century, I am always sceptical. Partly this is because it is never made clear exactly what is so different about the 21st century that…
Why you can’t just Google it
Posted on January 7, 2012
In my post here, I talked about the pervasive modern idea that Google renders memory irrelevant, and explained why this idea is false. I want to return to this point here with some further explanation…
Skills and Knowledge
Posted on December 22, 2011
A very similar post to this was originally published on the Policy First website here. In modern education, traditional knowledge often gets a bit of a hard time. Critics of knowledge-based curriculum…