In July, I will be leaving my role at Ark Schools to work for No More Marking as Director of Education. Over the last 6 months, No More Marking have been working with primary schools in England on a pilot of comparative judgement for year 6 writing called Sharing Standards. Comparative judgement is a quick… Read more »
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This is part 7 of a series of blogs on my new book, Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning. Click here to read the introduction to the series. Bad ideas can cause workload problems. If you have a flawed understanding of how a system works, the temptation is to work harder to try and… Read more »
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This is part 6 of a series of blogs on my new book, Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning. Click here to read the introduction to the series. With national curriculum levels, it was possible to use the same system of measurement in exams as in individual lessons. For example, national curriculum tests at… Read more »
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This is part 4 of a series of blogs on my new book, Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning. Click here to read the introduction to the series. One frequent criticism of memorisation is that it doesn’t lead to understanding. For example, a pupil can memorise a rule of grammar, or a definition of… Read more »
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This is part 3 of a series of blogs on my new book, Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning. Click here to read the introduction to the series. I can remember having a conversation with a friend a few years ago about the value of memorisation and practice. I said how important it was… Read more »
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Who is Herbert Simon? Herbert Simon was one of the great scholars of the twentieth century, whose discoveries and inventions ranged from political science (where he began his career) to economics (in which he won a Nobel Prize) to computer science (in which he was a pioneer) and to psychology. Simon was one of the… Read more »
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I have blogged a bit before about comparative judgment and how it could help make marking more efficient and more reliable, and help to free the teaching of writing from tick box approaches. I think CJ has the potential to be used for national assessments – that’s why I’m working with Dr Chris Wheadon… Read more »
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I’m a bit late to this, but I just wanted to write about how much I enjoyed Ouroboros by Greg Ashman. It’s a very elegantly and sparely written account of Greg’s experiences of teaching in England and Australia, and of the education research which is relevant to his experiences. The central organising metaphor is the… Read more »
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Yesterday I went to a brilliant day of professional development at Ark Globe Academy called Teach Like a Top Athlete: Coaching and Mastery Methods. I went to a workshop run by the amazing Jo Facer on Mastery Planning, and one by the equally amazing Dan Lavipour and Michael Slavinsky called What Can Teachers Learn From… Read more »
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I think technology has great potential to transform education, but I am frustrated by how ineffective so much educational technology really is. For more on this, see my Guardian article here. Recently, I read a fascinating book about how big data could transform education, which described a lot of what I think are the more… Read more »
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