Learning is the thing

I attended a highly successful Grammar School in Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland from age 11 to age 18. Looking back, I think I was generally very well taught, but I remember having a trainee teacher of Latin in 4^th Year (Year 10) whose sole method of teaching my class consisted in sitting at his desk and reading to us from a book; our job was to copy down verbatim what he was reading. I’m not exaggerating here – that was what we did for the whole lesson…

‘I’ve come to the conclusion Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory is the single most important thing for teachers to know’ – Dylan Wiliam, 2017

The idea that being tested, testing ourselves and doing other forms of retrieval practice will boost learning has been around for a long time. In his essay on memory, Aristotle talked about it…

‘... there are only two good reasons to ask questions in class: to cause thinking and to provide information for the teacher about what to do next’. Dylan Wiliam, ‘Embedded…

This is the second blog in my ‘The problem with…’ series. The problem with learning styles is that they are an industry crafted from almost thin-air, a hyped, commercialised near-fiction.…

When I read Matthew Syed’s book, ‘Bounce’, some years ago, I remember being uplifted by its core message that it is practice that gets you there. The book’s subtitle is…

The old short-hand definition of differentiation is teaching different pupils differently - TDPD - and that sounds instinctively right.  Of course, we naturally think, all young people are unique and deserve to…

To remember, retrieve... ‘Memory is the residue of thought’, says Daniel Willingham. We remember what we think about. Logically, the harder we think about a thing, the more likely we…

The other day, I was remembering Bloom’s taxonomy. You usually find it presented as a diagram of a pyramid with six levels. ‘Remembering’ is at Level 1 of the pyramid,…