Items to Share: 28 June 2015

Education Focus

• Can inclusive education do more harm than good? [theconversation.com] 'Recently, a teacher expressed his misgivings about the “inclusion at all costs” ideology of modern education. Despite being well supported by his school and hugely in favour of inclusive practice, he outlined his difficulties in managing a young fellow with Down Syndrome whose behaviour in the classroom was extremely difficult, and increasingly dangerous. This resulted in children and staff leaving the school, citing concerns about their safety and psychological health. [ ] The article attracted derision from many, but also a sigh of relief from other teachers and a surprising number of parents of children with a disability.

• More Physics Clangers | e=mc2andallthat By the examiners. '[T]hose who call for rigour should display rigour.'

• The crisis in non-fiction publishing | Books | The Guardian  'When it comes to high-calibre non-fiction, risk-averse trade publishing houses are producing too many copycat ‘smart thinking’ books that promise more than they deliver. But praise should be given to the university presses.'

• Which Reasoning Style Best Describes The Way You Think? [io9.com] Duck! Bullsh*t incoming!

• BPS Research Digest: Is dyslexia associated with exceptional visual-spatial abilities?

• It's not PowerPoint's fault, you're just using it wrong [theconversation.com] Up to a point...

• Sir Ken Robinson versus Nick Gibb: The Battle of the Subjects | @katie_s_ashfor

• Why universities should get rid of PowerPoint and why they won't [theconversation.com] 'An article [...] recently argued universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring. I agree entirely. However, most universities will ignore this good advice because rather than measuring success by how much their students learn, universities measure success with student satisfaction surveys, among other things. [...] Overreliance on slides has contributed to the absurd belief that expecting and requiring students to read books, attend classes, take notes and do homework is unreasonable. [ ] Courses designed around slides therefore propagate the myth that students can become skilled and knowledgeable without working through dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of problems.' 

Other Business

• The impossible world of MC Escher | Art and design | The Guardian 

• The Internet Accused Alice Goffman of Faking Details In Her Study of a Black Neighborhood. I Went to Philadelphia to Check. [3quarksdaily.com]  

• Negotiation Tactics: 31 Techniques and Strategies [nickkolenda.com] Substantial (7k words) and practical article. 

Items to Share: 9 — 21 June 2015

Education Focus

• Why the ‘false growth mindset’ explains so much | David Didau: The Learning Spy '...Dweck then dropped a bombshell. She’s identified a phenomenon she calls the ‘false growth mindset’. Because we’ve unanimously agreed that having a fixed mindset is egregious and a growth mindset makes you a better all-round human being, no one wants to fess up to being ‘fixed’. When asked, we tend to say, “Yes of course I have a growth mindset,” because the alternative is to say, “No, I’m afraid I’m a terrible person.” It seems reasonable to suggest teachers are at least as prone to this as anyone; we tend to know more about the perceived benefits of growth mindset than most other people and so there’s a huge social pressure to fall into line. But just saying you have a growth mindset does not (quelle surprise!) mean you actually have one. What you actually have is a false growth mindset. This goes some way to explaining why schools are so bad at allowing teachers to behave in a way consistent with the growth mindset....' 

• And see also: 20 psychological principles for teachers #12 Goal setting | David Didau: The Learning Spy ' [...] Trouble is, the evidence appears to be vastly overstated. King and Burton argue that goals only works in the narrowest of circumstances: “The optimally striving individual ought to endeavor to achieve and approach goals that only slightly implicate the self; that are only moderately important, fairly easy, and moderately abstract; that do not conflict with each other, and that concern the accomplishment of something other than financial gain” otherwise, research indicates that “goal investment, goal structure, and goal content may all lead to negative outcomes.”...'

• And: It’s the shape of the bell curve, stupid!  David Didau: The Learning Spy Useful thoughts on effect sizes. 

• By freeing prisoners from cycle of crime, education cuts re-offending 'Teaching inside a prison takes patience. Not because the students are difficult or dull, they are not. On the contrary, you are unlikely to meet a more highly motivated and interesting group of adult learners. It does take time, however, to have your fingerprint scanned, to pass barefoot and beltless through the metal detectors, to have your personal identification, criminal history and biometric data checked. [ ] A prison teacher also needs to be flexible. When visiting incarcerated students, be ready to roll with the unexpected. If you arrive on a family visits day, or during an emergency lockdown, or when students can’t make it to the education block, your own sense of time warps and stretches.'

• Cheating with essay mills: an extension of students asking each other for help?  [theconversation.com]

• Giving Bad Whiteboard | Sam Shepherd '[H]ere, in proper controversial style, is a list of the things that I try to remember when I am freestyling on a whiteboard. You can call them “dos and don’ts” if you like, or God forbid, good practice. But I’ll stick with “stuff I try to remember”.

• Give students diagrams before the lecture - Futurity 'Giving students illustrative diagrams that show relationships among key concepts before a lecture can boost their learning and recall, say researchers.' Big deal!

• More than sums: Hannah’s Sweets – a great time to be a maths teacher! Excellent commentary on the "notorious" GCSE question.

• Average Master's thesis lengths charted by discipline - Boing Boing (US data of course)

• What does the word ‘engagement’ mean to you? An interview with Roger Kneebone, National Teaching Fellow | The Higher Education Academy [From the HEA] 'In this post Roger Kneebone (HEA National Teaching Fellow) talks to Jenni Carr about his use of simulations in learning and teaching and the relationship between public engagement activities and learning and teaching. [ ] Roger is Professor of Surgical Education & Engagement Science at Imperial College London (r.kneebone@imperial.ac.uk).'

• The Semmelweis Reflex: Why does Education Ignore Important Research? | chronotope

Other Business

• How to design a metaphor – Michael Erard – Aeon 'Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.'

• Crowdsourcing the Serengeti: how citizen scientists classified millions of photos from home  'Snapshot Serengeti’s success demonstrates the enormous potential for citizen science to help researchers tackle bigger questions than ever before. Camera traps provide a way to collect the ecological data necessary to answer bigger questions about the world around us, but citizen science is what provides a way to turn this data into new scientific knowledge, enabling research at a scope and scale otherwise impossible.'
  
  Seven Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer [farnamstreetblog.com] 'Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while longer than last year’s, it’s a great place to kick off your summer reading. [ ] “Each of these books,” Gates writes, “made me think or laugh or, in some cases, do both. I hope you find something to your liking here.”'  

Items to Share: 7 June 2015

Yes, I know it's late! So?

Education Focus

• Gallery Critique | Class Teaching '[Peer assessment is] not always that useful. In fact, it can often be damaging and compound misconceptions. Gallery critique, where students spend an extended period of time reading and assessing the work of their peers, as well as giving high quality feedback, seems to be a far more purposeful alternative.'

• Desperately Seeking Sir: Empathy, Behaviour, Excuses and Reasons 'I have taught two children that were killed by other children. One was stabbed and one was shot. I have taught children who have killed other children. I have taught a number of children that have been stabbed. I have taught a number of children who have stabbed other children. I have taught one child who said he 'couldn't remember' how many people he'd stabbed. I have taught children who have been convicted of rape. I have taught children who have been abused. I have taught a child who believed a small person lived inside their head and gave them instructions. I have taught a number of children who have battled suicidal thoughts. I have taught one child who attempted suicide but did not quite succeed. I have taught children who have had to be educated in high security units. I have taught children who have had to be forcibly committed to mental health institutions. I have, by necessity, wiped the arse of a child with severe special needs when taking him on a day trip to a theme park as he had made a bit of a mess of it...'

• Fail again. Nicky Morgan on Academies | SurrealAnarchy 'So on, somehow on marches ‘Academisation’, all business values and managerialism, being brought into an education sector that is itself falling for business values and managerialism without the need to be turned into academies but we’re sick of the either so we’ll try the other… Whether it works or not… But what works is our mantra, that Blairite creed: “What counts is what works…” has now turned into “What counts is what we say works…” which it always was but…'…

• Learning Styles are NOT an Effective Guide for Learning Design - The Debunker Club 'Special Note: This Month (June 2015) the Debunker Club is targeting the Learning Styles Myth in a special debunking effort'

• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me - Vox [US] 'Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. [ ] Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.'

• Closing the feedback loop | The Higher Education Academy  'Getting students to engage with feedback can be a challenging task and in this post Leah Marks [...] shares her experience of a method for encouraging students to use the feedback. To encourage students to engage, they were asked to write feedback reflections and assignment grades were witheld until this was done. Increased engagement with feedback resulted in improved writing and students found the reflective approach helpful.'

• Cognitive Load Theory and its implications for instruction | Filling the pail

• All academic metrics are flawed, but some are useful [theconversation.com] 'Why are bean counters so fixated on counting? Why are universities overrun by metrics? Are we heading for a world where we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing? [ ] Is an obsession with metrics really corrupting science?

• The Hydra | Esse Quam Videri On the surprising acceptance of spurious junk "research" in apparently respectable policy debates...

• Making a difference in education: What the evidence says | British Politics and Policy at LSE 'Research suggests that who teaches you matters much more than what school you go to. Yet a major proportion of educational spending has gone on fostering Academies and Free Schools. The Academies formed up to 2008-9 have been evaluated, and found to have positive results; but improved outcomes were mostly confined to better-achieving students, with little or no benefit to the lowest achieving. At the time of writing, there was no comparable research on Academies founded after that, though an Ofsted survey of 2012-13 found half those inspected ‘requiring improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. There has been little research on Free Schools or primary Academies, though DfE data do not show them to be providing more progress than local authority primaries.'

Other Business

• ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education '[W]hat I’m really getting is that slang can go wonderfully deep — with intricate, subtle, and sometimes hilarious notes of class, gender, and group identity. And also that “cheeky Nando’s” won’t be coming to America any time soon.

• Offline: What is medicine's 5 sigma? [Editorial in the Lancet] 'The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. '

• Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking: Julian Jaynes’ Famous 1970s Theory Long introduction to Jayne's maverick and intriguing "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"  

• The Spy Who Billed Me | Atlas Obscura 'It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they're spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them. "They're the same as the reports any businessman would submit after meeting a client," says Chris Lynch, former FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer and author of The C.I Desk. "Meals, miles, parking, small gifts, other expenses, receipts if they had them, some kind of 'certification' if they didn’t."

Items to Share; 31 May 2015

Education Focus

• A Don’s Life: Exams, and dumbing down 'Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.' But Mary Beard teaches at Cambridge...

• The Education Myth by Ricardo Hausmann - Project Syndicate 'In an era characterized by political polarization and policy paralysis, we should celebrate broad agreement on economic strategy wherever we find it. One such area of agreement is the idea that the key to inclusive growth is, as then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair put in his 2001 reelection campaign, “education, education, education.” If we broaden access to schools and improve their quality, economic growth will be both substantial and equitable. As the Italians would say: magari fosse vero. If only it were true.'

• A Small Victory in a Bigger Battle – The End of Graded Observations in FE Inspections | Perspectives on professional development 'If, [...] attaching a grade to a one-off, episodic event like a lesson observation is no longer deemed fit for purpose, this inevitably raises the question of why stop at observations? Why not extend the removal of grades to the inspection process as a whole? There is a strong case for moving towards an assessment framework that simply operates on a ‘good enough/not good enough’ basis.'

• The Trick of Teaching - HuntingEnglish   We know a great deal about the human memory, but there is still so much more to know. Much of what we learn is counterintuitive and unveils the idosyncratic of our mind and memory. One such quirk is that when students expect to teach new material that they remember it so much better.

• SEDA - Blog Post: Motivating Students is not Magic One of a series of pieces commissioned by Graham Gibbs. (See side-bar for links to others)

• Stress levels of teaching professionals in FE are increasing due to constant change | Teacher Support Network 'A degree of stress is to be expected in any professional role but this survey clearly suggests there is now a very serious cause for concern in further education. It has pinpointed some of the prime causes of stress and it’s now for colleges to respond to those challenges and work with us to start to reverse this worrying decline in wellbeing' (by Sally Hunt of UCU)

• The case against inquiry-based learning | Education in Chemistry Blog 'Writing recently in The Irish Times, William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork, stated that newer teaching methods employed in the UK and Ireland are ‘sharply inferior to the older teaching methods they supplanted’. His article highlighted a 30% difference between educational scores in China, where whole-class teaching is employed, and those locally, where child-centred methods are used.'

• Laurie Taylor on academics v administrators | Times Higher Education 'Managers and administrators who once had a mute background presence are now a noisy part of the daily life of every scholar. Their ranks continue to swell even though the UK is already one of the very few countries in the world where non-academic staff already outnumber academics [...] No wonder that my weekly [...] column is no longer stuffed with professors and readers but with directors of corporate affairs and human relations and the heads of research excellence framework strategy, overseas recruitment, research impact, fundraising, external relations and brand management. No wonder that what used to be a mildly patronising relationship between dons and their administrative servants has now become more and more like a battle for control.'

• And in similar vein: Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains? | Features | Times Higher Education 'We spend more and more time assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours doing it - just to give administrators something to do for their gold-plated salaries

• Evidence Based Educational Leadership: Do all good ideas need to be researched? - A response to David Didau An interesting rejoinder from Gary Jones to a recent post, leading to a stimulating exchange in the comments... 

Other Business

• ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ – Lingua Franca -  The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Humility is always a good thing. I got a dose of it recently, courtesy of a BuzzFeed article posted to Facebook by a friend of mine, an Anglo-American journalist. The article was called “Americans On Tumblr Are Trying To Find Out What A ‘Cheeky Nando’s’ Is And Are Struggling” and concerned a meme that had become popular in England.'

• Players with more Time | More Intelligent Life 'Slowing time is linked to a state of flow, or being in the zone. Playing cricket for Kent one July morning in 2003, I made 149 runs in about three hours. I scored faster than ever before, but felt in no hurry to get anywhere, even to a hundred. I felt the rhythm of the ball in sync with the downswing of the bat. My mind revved at the same pace as the game. There was no sense of rush (the ball arriving too soon) or impatience (wanting it sooner). There was a suspension of ambition that was rare for me. The innings didn’t feel like a stepping-stone, even though it turned out to be, but an end in itself. I felt very clearly, that high summer’s day, that my job was not to get in the way—to be the conduit rather than the agent. [ ] The match was not rushing forwards, opportunities were not slipping by, and I understood, just that one time, a line from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “Though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” '