Items to Share; 22 February 2015

Education Focus

• If we cannot see learning in a lesson, what are Exit Tickets for? [ …to the real.] 'if learning cannot be observed [within the space of one] lesson, what on Earth is the point of AfL assessment mechanisms such as exit tickets, and for that matter, hinge questions, mini-whiteboards, checking kids’ work as they’re doing it, any kind of marking, and anything else you might dream up!?'

• Time to name and shame? | dancing princesses 'Here’s an idea – instead of paying a small number of senior FE managers astonishingly high salaries, why not employ a greater number of specialists on lower salaries to share the load? Perhaps we could remedy the erosion of lecturers’ salaries while we’re at it? There is, in fact, excellent leadership in FE if you know where to look for it – many are lecturers and trade unionists. These professionals retain an ethos of public service, and would, if the opportunity arose, take on greater leadership responsibility in flattened, distributed organisations for the love of FE and their communities, not for the prospect of straw turned to gold.'

• Get publishing! Crown Copyright and my Ofsted monitoring visit notes | Improving Teaching The author obtained the Ofsted inspector's observation notes of his class, and wants to share them. Which proves to be OK; '"On behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office I can confirm that there are no objections from a Crown copyright point of view to you publishing it and if you, as the sole subject, are content for your personal data to be published then you may do so. All we would ask is that you acknowledge the observation itself as being Crown copyright." I queried further, asking for a statement of principles, to avoid everyone having to go through the same process. Any teacher is free to publish their observation notes.'

• Why Students Should Be Taking Notes | Faculty Focus 'There is also accumulating evidence [...] that giving students teacher-prepared notes or PowerPoint slides does not improve their performance. Students need to take notes in ways that are meaningful to them. It also helps when notes are restructured. [...] “It makes sense to return to one’s notes and organize them in a way that reflects the connections between ideas rather than simply the chronology of presentation.” [...] But how do we sell students on the value of taking notes for themselves? They might be persuaded if we had evidence that doing so may improve exam scores. And that’s exactly what this study showed. The research design is clever—a good example of the kind of classroom research that teachers can conduct.'

• Growth mindset: What interventions might work and what probably won’t? | Evidence into practice

• Interpretation of the results is more important according to John Hattie - Educator Stockholm Also available on ResearchED here. An interview with John Hattie (Visible Learning) with news of a revised "top ten" list of interventions, based on the ever-growing database of meta-analyses. 'I am now close to 1200 meta-analyses (up from the 800 in VL). What is remarkable since I published the first study (in 1989 based on 134) is that the "story" underlying the data has hardly changed. Some of the more interesting (new) effects include Bullying (-.24), parental employment (.03), sleep (.07), single sex compared to coed schools (.08). Philosophy in schools (.43), Service learning (.58), conceptual change programs (1.15), and collective self-efficacy (1.57).' (With thanks to Sara Hjelm for putting me on to it; I'll blog on it shortly)

• The rigor of chronology: how knowing dates leads to higher order thinking | Newman's blog '...Additionally, and more importantly, specific and precise dates started to make an appearance in the extended written work of the class and the overall grasp of the chain of chronology was clearly improving. However, the thing that surprised me the most is the conversations they were having when they were completing the task – which, in some ways, took me by surprise. It wasn’t just recall, such as ‘this goes with’, it was language laden with connections and links revealing a developing and deepening chronological awareness.' An excellent show of task-centred reflection related to literature and research.'

• The Problem with Plenaries | mrbunkeredu 'If group work was the holy grail of my teacher training, effective plenaries were definitely the pedagogical white rabbit – the element of the lesson you always felt was achievable, but nevertheless remained elusive. Running out of time for a plenary during an official observation was almost to be expected, but cramming it in for two minutes was better than nothing. [...] Although there’s bound to be some variation, I think most teachers have a pretty similar idea of what a plenary is, or what it is suppose to be, even if they are sceptical about its efficacy.

• Of all the blogs in all the world, I had to write this one… | ThinkSayWriteCheck Excellent post on the challenge of getting teachers' practices to change (as well as a discussion of phonics—but that's not my field).

• What goes on in teachers' brains as they help students to learn 'Neuroscientists are beginning to understand how the human brain processes information in learners. Yet very little is known about how the brains works when people are engaged in teaching. Our new research [is] aimed at finding out whether it’s possible to understand the brain processes involved when we monitor how wrong other people are.' 

• Introducing MINDFLAY (TM)! | Mike Stuchbery Mind you, after the learning styles fiasco (if that is over) this could well be the next big thing...

Other Business

• Are We Becoming Morally Smarter? - Reason.com 'Given that the moral Flynn effect is cultural, not evolutionary, there are no biological constraints on what we are capable of becoming in centuries and millennia hence, if we apply what we know works to expand the moral sphere: [...] As we're witnessing today the unfolding of a new rights revolution for gays and lesbians, and yet another for animals, there is no reason to limit our thinking of how much better life can be for more people in more places: Freedom and abundance for all is within our reach this century. We can bend that moral arc even more.'

• Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker A nice glass of processed sewage to accompany that plate of insects, anyone? 

• What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke and Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC

• Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions | FiveThirtyEight 'Explaining the science and helping people understand it are only the first steps. If you want someone to accept information that contradicts what they already know, you have to find a story they can buy into. That requires bridging the narrative they’ve already constructed to a new one that is both true and allows them to remain the kind of person they believe themselves to be.'

• How a Dog Actually “Sees” the World Through Smell | Brain Pickings Even though smell is the most direct of our senses and the 23,040 breaths we take daily drag in a universe of information — from the danger alert of a burning odor to the sweet nostalgia of an emotionally memorable scent — our olfactory powers are not even mediocre compared to a dog’s.

• How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played | History | Smithsonian

• John Ioannidis has dedicated his life to quantifying how science is broken - Vox 'Medical research is in bad shape. Fraud, bias, sloppiness, and inefficiency are everywhere, and we now have studies that quantify the size of the problem. We know that about $200 billion — or the equivalent of 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on poorly designed and redundant studies. We know that as much as 30 percent of the most influential original medical research papers later turn out to be wrong or exaggerated. We also know that a lot of medical evidence is contradictory and unreliable, such as those studies that purport to show that just about every food we eat either causes or prevents cancer. (Courtesy of John Ioannidis) What all this means, says Stanford University professor Dr. John Ioannidis, is that most published research findings are false.' 

• 3-D Printing Prosthetic Hands That Are Anything but Ordinary - NYTimes.com

Items to Share; 15 February 2015

Education Focus

• A common mistake that educators make | Webs of Substance About skill development in context: main text is a useful formulation of the issue, but I've cited it for the comment by Wilbrink, with useful links on “situationism”.

• Faith and Stuff | Sam Shepherd 'This is a post about teacher faith. You see, not so long ago I was a keen enthusiastic little trainee on a part time training course and there were all these people telling me stuff. Stuff that would make me a good teacher, stuff that I needed to do to pass the course. That sort of stuff. Then I did DELTA, and learned shitloads of stuff. And I believed every single word, referenced or not. Because they were trainers and they knew their stuff, right? And then later on I started working in the public sector and managers told me stuff, and people said that certain stuff was best practice and that I should do that stuff because OFSTED said it was good stuff. I was a true believer. I listened, I absorbed, I followed the True Path of the Righteous. [...] I can pinpoint, to within a few months, the arrival of my professional scepticism...

• Is knowledge worth testing anymore? Is testing knowledge ‘Authentic’? | TheOtherDrX's Higher Education blog 'My view of assessment, and in particular ‘authentic assessment’ in science, is that it should rely upon some known facts, and students should be able to apply those facts to conclude or deduce something, like an authentic scientist. As a research scientist, I have had some ideas over the years, and none of them have come about by not knowing anything about the topic. In fact I’d go as far to say that all of what I’d call half-decent project ideas have come from deep understanding two or more disparate topics in great detail, and making some sort of interacting link between the two. So the question is: Am I assessing in a manner that is authentic to science?'

• Donald Clark Plan B: Only 60% attend lectures & plummets across semester & week – and that’s at Harvard! 'University ranking tables are perhaps the most mendacious form of marketing known to man. They are, quite simply, a lie. Why? They say nothing about ‘teaching’ the reason for most of this marketing effort is to attract students and funding (monetising). The reason they say nothing is that they don’t measure anything. It’s all proxies. The Times rankings are a case in point. They claim that their ranking scores include teaching. In fact, only 30% is based on teaching but they use NO direct metrics. The proxies include student/staff ratios (which is skewed by how much research is done) and, even more absurdly, the ratio of PhDs to BAs. It is therefore a self-fulfilling table, where the elite Universities are bound to rise to the top. '

• Text Savvy: Intuition and Domain Knowledge 'The clearest takeaway for me is that while knowledge and process are both important, knowledge is more important. Even though each of the tasks was more "intuitive" (non-decomposable) than analytical in nature, and even when the approach taken to the task was "intuitive," knowledge trumped process. Process had no significant effect by itself. Knowing stuff is good.'

• Beyond Dependency Learning: scaffolding, crutches and stabilisers. | headguruteacher 'One of the challenges we face as teachers is knowing how much help to give. There are so many examples of structured support across a range of learning experiences: arm-bands in swimming, stabilisers on a bicycle… the vocab crib-sheet in language learning. They are all designed to provide support in the early phases of learning, with the explicit goal of removing them later on. The question is when. My feeling is that, too often, we leave the support structure in place for too long and students develop a dependency; an over-reliance on the support and a mutually reinforcing fear of failure.'

• Leaving care is hard enough without the system favouring those who are fostered 'The Office for National Statistics reported that the age at which young people leave home has shifted in recent years. The average age of young people leaving home is now 25 and the number of 20 to 34-year-olds living at home has gone up by 24%. So even with “staying put” until the age of 21, fostered young people are still leaving home earlier than their non-fostered peers. But this age extension does buy more time for foster carers and social workers to best support care leavers as they move into adulthood. It also allows individuals to do things we all begin to do at this age – get a job, consider university, all with a continuation of support and shelter. [...] Reports that highlight the outcomes of care leavers show just how vulnerable this group is during the transition to independence and how much support they need.'

• The worst of all forms of teaching, except for all the others | Bodil's blog

• Creating Color-Blind Accessible Figures – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'It is highly likely that whether you are teaching a class, presenting at a conference, or submitting figures with an article for publication, at least some of your audience will have some form of colorblindness or another color vision deficiency. Why not make sure everyone can see your slides clearly?'

• Who will stand up for adult education? | The Learning Age '[T]he ongoing cull of qualifications is indicative of a really remarkable narrowing of the educational offer to adults – one which began in earnest under the previous government as it became increasingly fixated on a funding model based on boosting employability and vocational skills. It’s not that employment and vocational training aren’t important it’s just that they aren’t everything. Among the qualifications considered of no or low value will be many that adults have found hugely valuable, in giving them a foothold in learning again, building their confidence, broadening their horizons or simply offering them a second chance. [...] [I]t can make them more flexible, more resilient, more rounded and civilised, helping them become better people as well as better employees. The wider public value of adult education is far too infrequently asserted.'

• Professionalism: FE’s Rolling Stone | dancing princesses 'What follows is a proposed alternative take on professionalism. To paraphrase The Rolling Stones: you can’t always get what you want from professionalism; but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need: a collective democratic voice…'

• 3quarksdaily: The Changing Idea of ‘Knowledge' 'In line with the criticisms of IQ tests, one must ask who determines general knowledge? What is relevant to whom? Today, when ‘do research' means ‘Google it', when we're bombarded with more information than we ever have been before, when our short-term memories are suffering from the lack of micro-moments, where does the Lowest Common Denominator of information lie?'

• BPS Research Digest: Want to learn a new skill more effectively? Stop thinking about yourself! 

Other Business

• Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments - The Atlantic (On Milgram's obedience experiments) 'But as with human memory, the study [...] is malleable. And in the past few years, a new wave of researchers have dedicated themselves to reshaping it, arguing that Milgram’s lessons on human obedience are, in fact, misremembered—that his work doesn’t prove what he claimed it does. [...] The problem is, no one can really agree on what it proves instead.' 

• BPS Research Digest: Accepting help can be difficult. You'll find it easier if you help others '[The researchers] went on to show how recipients of help can bounce back. In a second stage of the study, participants tackled another set of puzzles and were invited to write help cards for three they had answered correctly, for the benefit of future participants. With this shift from help-receiver to helper, all participants reported an increase in confidence, as well as more affinity for their previous helper.'

• See Penguins Wearing Tiny "Penguin Books" Sweaters, Knitted by the Oldest Man in Australia | Open Culture

•  “The Mostly German Philosophers Love Song” – Futility Closet (video)

• Joni Mitchell's Application for a Tenure Track Philosophy Position | Open Culture ''My dissertation, "Both Sides Now" applies a bilateral, hylomorphic analysis to the phenomenon that is described by the signifier “clouds.” '

On the moral basis of bangers and mash

This is not a rant about processed food! Bear with me...

For years, I have bemused dining companions in restaurants by ordering sausage and mash, when it was on the menu. I have explained that S. does not like sausages, and so we never have it at home. I have invariably been disappointed in the restaurant, because unlike that other great classic—fish and chips, which relatively upmarket places pride themselves in presenting in an "authentic" form—they can't resist messing with it, such as presenting venison sausages with "onion jam"...

It was when I was grumbling about a restaurant version recently, as one does, that S. revealed (after many years of the subject being off the agenda) that she quite liked sausage and mash—just not the "posh sausages" I insisted on buying and cooking (and I don't cook the potatoes long enough...)

We tested (well, I tested on her) several kinds of sausage.

My reference point was the "home-made" ones from Harry Ramsbottom's of Davenham, Cheshire of the late '50s-early '60s. Nowadays they would be called "Cumberland" (style)—then they were just his "best". There's no way of telling what the meat content was—it wasn't recorded in those days—but it was high, if fatty. I've never found any to quite match them, since the fat content would not be acceptable nowadays (despite this latest bit of revisionism), but premium brands do approximate to them.

So I started there. No. Then—I'm making this sound more systematic than it was—I tried smoked sausages; OK for her, and for me (minimax solution in game theory terms?) but that's all. Toulouse sausages? Chorizo? ... Broadly, if I liked them, she didn't, and vice versa. Eventually, I went to the sausage section of the supermarket and just picked up a brand name I recognised. Bingo!

For me, 90% meat content is what it's all about. A touch of seasoning and necessary binder, and that's it. I like the filler coarse ground.

S's preferred brand is 42% meat. The filler is homogenised gloop. Sorry!

...water, pork fat (10%), wheat, starch (potato,wheat), vegetable protein (pea,soya). Less than 2%....

It tastes perfectly acceptable. Of course. It is the sausage of her childhood and it is still going strong half-a-century on. You don't survive without something special.

(As far as I know, Ramsbottom's recipe died with him. His son became an accountant. [We were in the same class at secondary school])

So?

I've just finished:

Haidt J (2013) The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion London; Penguin Books 

It's an excellent and thought-provoking read. One of its major arguments is that what we can in broad-brush terms call liberal and conservative moral positions are characterised by different sets of what Haidt calls “moral foundations”*.

The liberal position he traces back to John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859) having its foundations in two principles;

1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

But interestingly he argues (based on empirical research introduced here) that more conservative positions embrace also at least three and probably four other foundations:

3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

and probably:

6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.

He represents the traditions and their foundations thus:

(Images sourced from here)

This is only part of the argument, of course. But in getting to this formulation, Haidt discusses interestingly the default intellectual liberal assumption that conservatism is characterised by less commitment to moral foundations, whereas the research suggests that instead the conservative position embraces more dimensions. Haidt is open about how this realisation has challenged his own thinking.

What has that got to do with sausages? Well, perhaps it doesn't do always to be quite as patronising as even moderates foodies often are. Jamie?
 

---

* Some caveats are necessary here;

• Haidt acknowledges that liberal and conservative mean different things in the USA from their meanings in Europe, so one has to be careful about generalising. 
• And despite the apparent fit with political beliefs, he is insistent that it is moral positions he is addressing. He is not entirely consistent in keeping up the distinction.
• And while I am mentioning the political angle, he does not discuss the authoritarianism dimension, although he makes quite a lot of libertarianism, which he tends to identify largely with liberalism, as understood over the pond. Although it is about politics (rather than the broader area of morals) see the two-factor model used by the Political Compass site for more on this.

Items to Share; 8 February 2015

Education Focus: The traditional/progressive debate

• The Problem With Knowledge Part 1 | Scenes From The Battleground 'My position [...] is that just as it is better to be healthier, or physically fitter, it is better to be cleverer. My position is that there is an intellectual domain, familiar to all of humanity, and it is a good thing to have a more developed intellect. My belief is that this development, this process of making kids cleverer, is as clearly the purpose of education, as it is the purpose of a hospital to make people well, or a gym to help people get fit.'  See also The Problem With Knowledge Part 2.

• Traditional teaching: it’s all academic | teaching personally 'it appears that the traditionalist camp (within which I broadly count myself) isn’t as united in its understanding of this as it might seem. The observations that followed betrayed a wide range of understanding, not to mention conflicts, regarding the respective positions of progressive and traditional education.' (Complements Old Andrew above)

• The Ineffable Cargo Cultism of Sir Ken Robinson | e=mc2andallthat 'In this post, I want to revisit the progressive versus traditionalist educational debate from what I hope will be an original perspective.' (note that Ben Goldacre and Tom Bennett  have also discussed cargo cultism in teaching.) 

Education Focus: Nicky Morgan's silly targets

• What’s the point? | Wicked Witch's Blog 

• War on illiteracy and innumeracy | A sensible teacher 

• Dear Nicky Morgan, here’s the problem with 100%.

Other Education  

• Can we teach students effective ‘revision skills’? | Evidence into practice 'There are two issues with the sorts of activities which typically make up a ‘study skills’ sessions for students. The first and biggest problem is lack of transfer. The efficacy of teaching ‘learning skills’ independent of domain knowledge relies upon students transferring (often fairly abstract) strategies to their own studies. We know that transferability is problematic and the intended transfer of ‘skills’ to other contexts typically doesn’t occur. [...] Secondly, many mnemonic strategies only really help where the material they have to learn is mnemonic ‘friendly’; for instance ordered lists of words (preferably nouns). The lack of wide applicability of these strategies is one of the reasons it rates so poorly in the Dunloski et al (2013) review of study techniques.' (Overlaps/complements this work, too.)

• The Lack of Evidence-Based Practice: The Case of Classroom Technology (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 'When it comes to policymakers calling for data-based decisions and evidence-based practice, the purchase and use of tablets, laptops, interactive whiteboards and academic software miss that call miserably. The fact is that no substantial basis in research findings or existing data on the academic effectiveness of classroom technology warrant the boom-town spread of classroom devices. If so, how come so much money is being spent?' (Part 2 is here. and Part 3 here)

• What Are Your Favorite Faculty Development Blogs? – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Let's get moving [teachinginhighered.com] 'There’s just something that happens when we all get moving, students and faculty alike. To that end, here are some ideas for getting physical movement happening inside and outside the classroom...]

• An Invitation: help write a new curriculum for teacher training | Clio et cetera 'I’ve decided to see just how far I can mobilise teachers online to work together on a project. [...] There is currently a wide variety of routes into teaching, and, increasingly, training is being provided at a relatively small scale by organisations that might have limited access to curriculum materials for teacher education. I would like to see how far a community of teachers (the term broadly defined) might go in creating a curriculum for teacher education that might be of help to such organisations. I am hoping, too, that we might be able to begin a bit more of a debate about what exactly it is that we expect teachers to know.'

• New ranking exposes curbs on university freedom of speech [theconversation.com] 'Freedom of speech is at the heart of academic life and a university should be a place where every issue is discussed and debated. Not so, according to the findings presented in the first ever Freedom of Speech University Rankings (FSUR). They reveal that 80% of UK higher education institutions routinely regulate and actively restrict students’ free speech and expression in some way. 

• What to do about research assessment (the REF)? A proposal for two-stage university education [dcscience.net] (David Colquhoun on the Research Excellence Framework) 'it cost at least £60 million. At UCL alone, it took 50 – 75 person-years of work. and the papers that were submitted were assessed by people who often would have no deep knowledge about the field, It was a shocking waste of time and money, and its judgements in the end were much the same as last time..' 

Other Business

• 3quarksdaily: Blaise Pascal’s Wondertorium 'Everyone learns about Pascal's Triangle when they are young. But I, at least, didn't learn all the wonders contained in the Triangle. Indeed, we're still discovering new things!'

• Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence [nautil.us]

• Quotation marks: Long and fascinating history includes arrows, diples, and inverted commas.

• I Don’t Want to Be Right - The New Yorker 'The [research] goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. [about immunisation risks.] The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked.'

• Why We Remember So Many Things Wrong - The New Yorker On the quirks of “flashbulb memory”.

• Milgram was wrong: we don't obey authority, but we do love drama [theconversation.com] Why have the landmark psychology experiments of the post-war era proved so enduring? Designed as dramas about human behaviour, experimenters drew on theatrical techniques and tailored their results for cinema – results that, though skewed, have become embedded in the collective subconscious.

• Google Earth Pro was $399. Now it's free. - Boing Boing

• The Dish (Andrew Sullivan takes his farewell. If you missed probably the best blog ever for the past 15 years, the archives will be kept on line; do browse.) 'I hope we can all simply look back at the journey, and the laughs we had, and the pain we lived through together and the love that sustained us as a team and as a community, as we struggled together to figure out the truth about the world. [ ] And yes, this was a labor above all of love. Love for ideas and debate, love for America, love for my colleagues, and love, in the end, for you. [ ] I sit here not knowing what to write next. And yet, in the end, it is quite simple. [ ] Know hope. (Yes, it's a bit OTT, especially given that he is British, but the Dish has been a serious achievement in new media. How? You have to read it. Watch out for whatever he does next.) This New Yorker article explains why The Dish was so special. (Paywalled—limited free access.)

On being a fish out of water

S and I went out for lunch today with good, relatively new, friends who[m?] we have met with no connection to my former work. It was a very enjoyable meal; as usual on these occasions (at least when I'm present because I'm not very "chatty") my role was chiefly listening, but several points came up when I could have contributed. But I didn't.

So—at coffee: some general chat about how complicated it is nowadays to order coffee... It used to be "black" or "white", but you can't say that any more. .... What was offensive about the "Black and White Minstrel Show" after all? Where did all this "political correctness" come from?

I didn't have a voice with which to respond. I don't mean that I was reduced to craven pusillanimity, and feared to challenge this "bigotry"—because it wasn't bigotry. It wasn't off-limits. Here. But it might well have been, in the university.

I could have delivered an entire module on this. Or shut up (with few pathetic remarks about Al Jolson...) What I couldn't do was join in the conversation in the way it was proceeding among my companions, which was a succession of examples of  “political correctness gone mad” interspersed with rhetorical questions such as “What's all that about, then?” Nothing at all wrong with that, of course; it was a social event at which having a conversation was more important than what the conversation was about. There was no expectation that any of us would have learned anything from it—which is of course what I should have expected in class.

But that was in a sense the issue. An entire career focused on conducting, or just contributing to, discussions which promote learning has created a rut for me. And I don't seem to be able to get out of it.

It's a pattern I can now detect in my social interaction with family and established friends, but we have accommodated to it and we are able to joke about it. It's possible that I have rather unfairly imposed my limitations on them—because I don't think it is by any means characteristic of most academics.

I'll need to learn some new tricks...

Items to Share; 1 February 2015

Education Focus

• Prosperity or democracy – why does education matter? | The Wing to Heaven (Daisy Christodolou) 'The idea that public spending on education is justified by its impact on GDP is shared by many across the political spectrum.' See also Shall I leave now? | teaching personally

• The problem with lessons | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'My resistance to the lesson as the apogee of teaching as been a liminal process. It grew with the dawning realisation that learning cannot be seen, only inferred from students’ performance. Whatever students might appear to do in lessons, learning takes time. If we rely on learning taking place within neat hour-long blocks then the complexity of what can be learned is necessarily limited. That might be fine if all we wanted to impart were superficial, atomised blocks of knowledge or mechanistic procedures for writing essays or performing calculations. If however we want students to grasp the complex and troubling nature of the underpinning concepts of the subjects we teach then an hour is not going to be enough.' And see also: A lesson is the wrong unit of time (Bodil's blog) 

• Tongue in Groove | drowningintheshallow 'How do you change a professional development culture that has been turned toxic, by the very system that was put in place to promote it?'

• Should we ‘flip’ our classrooms? | Webs of Substance 'I’m not exactly sure which of the two mighty educational philosophies begat flipped learning but it is a queer cat. If you don’t really believe in explicit instruction then why ask students to watch non-interactive lectures at home? If you do believe in explicit instruction then you presumably value it more that this process implies.'

• And Seriously, differentiation really doesn’t work | Webs of Substance When it comes to strong research evidence in favour of differentiation, there is a gaping hole.

• Teaching: it’s about what you know | spiked review of books 'Unfortunately, as a few voices in the educational world are beginning to make clear, left to their own devices children generally learn little and creativity is stifled rather than unleashed. Michael Young has been making the case for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ for many years now. More recently, people like Daisy Christodoulou, Toby Young and Tom Bennett have joined those chipping away at the child-centred, anti-knowledge orthodoxy. This is definitely a trend to welcome.' (Review of Kitchen W H [2014] Authority and the Teacher, London; Bloomsbury)

• How to Help Students Improve Their Note-Taking Skills | Faculty Focus 'Taking notes forces students to listen and engage with the material, especially if they are trying to put what the teacher says in their own words. There’s plenty of research on note-taking and virtually all of it stands against any practice that lets students be in class without writing (or keying in) content for themselves.'

• Whiteboards again | Sam Shepherd On interactive whiteboards, and conventional boards.

• Thoughts on the Carter Review (of teacher training): the Unenforceable Sec’s Machine - Tom Bennett - TES Community Reactions to Carter—generally welcoming.

• Teaching—a research-based profession? | Montrose42's Blog 'We need to identify the best evidence on what works, we need also to look at areas where more good research is needed, we need to make sure that evidence is read and understood by teachers , and we need to ensure that it can be applied not only in the classroom, at the chalk face, but is also integral to teachers’ professional development.'

• Associate Dean of What? –  The Chronicle of Higher Education 'It’s not that the corporate world has nothing to teach academe; surely, we can learn a lot from looking at “best practices” (another corporate buzzword) in business. My concern is that we seem to be learning the wrong lessons. We take empty corporatized language and apply it to our work, reinforcing hierarchies between management and labor, with the consequence of leading us away from our core scholarly and pedagogical missions.' See also the third item here, if you think it's only across the pond...

Other Business

• Chicks Put Low Numbers on the Left, Just Like Humans – Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science “This finding completely overturns the idea—widely held in the past—that our mental number line is a human invention that depends on culture and on instruction,” says Maria Dolores de Hevia from Paris Descartes University, who studies the same topic in human babies. 

• An Unreasonable Man writes his Damn Book | Doug Belshaw's blog Some useful resources on self-publishing

• Can This Treatment Help Me? There’s a Statistic for That - NYTimes.com 'When 2,000 People Take a Daily Aspirin for Two Years: 1 Heart Attack is Prevented. [ ] People at risk for a first heart attack are often recommended to take aspirin daily to prevent it. Only a very few will actually see this benefit and there's no way to know in advance who.' On Numbers Needed to Treat (NNTs); a great corrective to panacea health stories in the Daily Express ...