Items to Share: 25 October 2015

Education Focus

• Learning about Teaching from Tom Waits [James M. Lang] ' I would argue for the pursuit of experimentation and novelty and “not-yetness” in our teaching as an essential tool for a teacher to remain inspired and engaged throughout a long career. Our teaching strategies, like the fingers of a musician, can become like dogs: they go to the same familiar places over and over again. If those strategies are producing learning, that’s wonderful; but if they are leading to the slow strangling of our passion for teaching, that will eventually manifest itself in our classrooms, our relationships with our students, and our commitment to our work. I know that I tend to be good for about three iterations of a course before I get tired of it and need to make substantial changes, or at least need to put it away for a few semesters before I return to it. I prefer to have variety in the courses I am teaching; if I can’t have that, as I sometimes can’t, I need variety in my course design, my classroom practices, and my assessment strategies.'

• Is growth mindset pseudoscience? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'Suffice it to say that if you want to find evidence to prove [...] claims [about mindsets] there’s a lot of it out there. But, and it’s a big but, when schools try a growth mindset intervention without support from Dweck or her colleagues, sometimes it doesn’t work. Maybe you’ve tried telling kids about growth mindsets and how this can turn them into academic superheroes? Has it worked? If it has, I’m glad for you, if it hasn’t, the problem might be that either you or your students have a ‘false growth mindset’.'

• Why Is No One Paying Attention to This Roaring Educational Success? - The American Interest  '[T]he Chicago study shows that there is buried treasure even in America’s most underperforming schools. It’s not necessary, as some interests in the education establishment would have us believe, simply to lower expectations for low-income students and resign ourselves to poor outcomes. Smartly implemented back-to-the-basics reforms—good teaching coupled with a demanding curriculum—may be able to unleash tremendous potential at relatively low cost. It’s time foe Chicago study shows that there is buried treasure even in America’s most underperforming schools. It’s not necessary, as some interests in the education establishment would have us believe, simply to lower expectations for low-income students and resign ourselves to poor outcomes. Smartly implemented back-to-the-basics reforms—good teaching coupled with a demanding curriculum—may be able to unleash tremendous potential at relatively low cost. It’s time for the K-12 establishment to start paying attention to the ideas that work.

• Children in care are falling behind in literacy and numeracy but the problem is far bigger than that 

• So much more than money | Sam Shepherd  'It is very clear now that the focus for area reviews is how much money college leavers will produce. Economic benefit is the easy win for FE, especially vocational courses. [...]. But [...] as my own learners demonstrate, the value of post 16 education is not just in its financial benefit, but also its social benefits: integrative, interpersonal, cultural education. [...] [P]resent day social benefits like educating adults are surely likely to lead to future social and economic benefits: cohesion and integration, support and independence in the present gives birth to a better educated, more successful future.

• Colleges warn cuts 'threaten adult education' - Telegraph  'The Association of Colleges (AoC) estimate nearly 200,000 adult learning places could be lost next year alone if the government cuts to the adult skills budget continue. The Association, which is the national representative body for further education, said health, public services and care courses could see a drop of over 40,000 places in 2015.' See (or hear) also: BBC Radio 4: "File on Four: Colleges in Crisis".

• A new study on the diffusion of that *%*§§§ Learning Pyramid | From experience to meaning...

• Do learner-centred approaches work in every culture? | British Council 'Is it time to challenge Western assumptions about education, especially when it comes to promoting 'good teaching approaches' in the developing world? The British Council's Ian Clifford looks at the case of Burma, ahead of his webinar on 12 October 2015.'

• Donald Clark Plan B: 10 examples of how ‘DEVICE fetish’ is ruining EdTes 'Educational debate around technology is, as my father often says ‘arse before elbow’. It’s obsessed with devices – tablets, mobiles, whiteboards, holes-in-walls, 3D printers and so on - which is to focus on the wrong end of the problem. Device fetishism has been a destructive force in research, procurement, projects and outcomes. So here’s some blowback.'

• Education’s Panacea Fever | @LeeDonaghy | Labour Teachers 'The way forward is actually something approximating another mania that briefly flared in the wake of London 2012 and Team GB’s success in the cycling events: marginal gains. Not the commoditised, hashtagged bandwagon it became on Twitter, but the acceptance that we need to continually seek to refine every aspect of our practice, and that improvement comes from the interplay of many different changes we make to what we do in the classroom.'

Other Business

• The rebellious plaques of Chester, England / Boing Boing 

On being well out of it

Apologies for delayed posting.

As the new academic year starts, I am at last in the position of having no formal academic obligations. No teaching. No funded projects ("research" as such was never a major feature of my role—thank goodness). No external examining.

So I am now a recovering academic.

Academic life has always (at least, in the UK, in the later 20th century onwards.... [Ouch! It's struck again! I just can't bring myself to make the unqualified generalisations which everyone else bandies {sp.? I've never written that word before...} about)] claimed to be the last bastion of free speech and the disinterested (no—that is not the same as "uninterested"—although I generally go along with Oliver Kamm and Jean Aitchison et al.  in maintaining that language is as language does...) pursuit of truth.

Academe has long fallen short of those high ideals. They were probably always a fantasy, or at best an aspiration. And since the advent of "political correctness" and more recently "trigger warnings" and "micro-aggressions" (at present a N. American issue—but a diluted version will probably pop up here soon) speech is more constrained in academe than in any other sector of society. [Note: this paragraph contains no references...]

It isn't just a matter of free speech. The following egregious corporate-speak appeared in a job advertisement on behalf of the Times Higher Education's "University of the Year" a few weeks ago. The job is "Head of Directorate Office" which sounds grand until you see the salary, "up to £36,309". It's not clear what the post entails, but apparently:

'Supporting the senior team with high quality policy intelligence through research and data analysis, you will generate reports and briefings on strategic issues and manage a range of exciting projects.

[...] Emotionally intelligent, positive and solution-focused, you will have excellent interpersonal, communication and influencing skills. You will also be well-organised with a flexible, enthusiastic attitude, and a positive [...] customer-focused approach.

That is the kind of vacuous HR rhetoric you expect of an advert for a sales position in a second-rate competitor to Sunshine Desserts, rather than an academic institution. (OK, it's not an academic post, but even so you would expect the university to aim for a discourse in keeping with its academic aspirations.)

Sometimes even Laurie Taylor is understated...

Items to Share: 18 October 2015

Education Focus

• Evidence Based Educational Leadership: Lesson Study - The New Brain Gym?  Probably not, but is scepticism becoming cynicism?

• ‘We need a cultural revolution’: Alan Tuckett’s inaugural | thelearningprofessor  Alan—long-time leader of NIACE—has taken up a Chair at Wolverhampton. 

• Heutagogy and lifelong learning: A review of heutagogical practice and self-determined learning | Blaschke | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Another "brand" in lifelong learning: what does this one have to offer? 

• A Step Change for Ofsted? Stepping Out, not Stepping Up! | kevenbartle's Blog  Excellent and fairly dispassionate analysis from a headteacher of the ills besetting the whole Ofsted model. 

• Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department [alexandercoward.com] Alexander Coward's account of how he fell foul of the powers that be in the Department, for teaching too well, and was then fired. 

Other Business

• BPS Research Digest: Social psychology textbooks ignore all modern criticisms of Milgram's "obedience experiments" [bps.org.uk ]

• The Myers-Briggs personality test deemed expensive and silly / Boing Boing The MBTI is a storytelling hack. It tells exactly you what you tell it, but in nicer words, assigning you to a Jungian team along archetypal lines wired into us by generations of social role-play and entertainment. Of course it's going to be more popular than the MMPI! The sad part is that it isn't even very good at that purpose: as Emre writes, "Jung would likely be greatly displeased, if not embarrassed" by the transformation of his magic into a rigid, jargon-bound "type indicator." Also: Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs - Digg

• Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset' - Education Week '[A]s we’ve watched the growth mindset become more popular, we’ve become much wiser about how to implement it. This learning—the common pitfalls, the misunderstandings, and what to do about them—is what I’d like to share with you, so that we can maximize the benefits for our students. [ ] A growth mindset isn’t just about effort. Perhaps the most common misconception is simply equating the growth mindset with effort. Certainly, effort is key for students’ achievement, but it’s not the only thing. Students need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they’re stuck. They need this repertoire of approaches—not just sheer effort—to learn and improve.'

• President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa by Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson | The New York Review of Books You may have heard of him, but not of her. She is arguably (of course) the greatest, most humane, most insightful, most graceful (in several senses) novelist of this century, but not exactly the most prolific. He was sufficiently impressed to interrupt a scheduled visit to Iowa, so he could interview her. Read all about it and then read her oeuvre.

Off topic: an accolade for Windows 10

My 5+ year old "netbook" (remember them?) ran bargain-basement Windows 7. So much so that I couldn't change the wallpaper. But then there came the chance of a free up-grade to Windows 10. It worked on my main laptop, already running 8.1...

But the netbook was hosting my favourite—very basic—graphics package. Snapgraphics. I got it free on a cover disc on a magazine, and it produced most of the graphics on my original website. It's a Windows 3.1 package (aka "app").

Having had problems with everything since Windows 95, and occasional random successes, it was clear that Windows 10 would be the final kiss of death for this "legacy" software. But I already had Windows 10 on another machine, and was actually very pleased with it; easy migration, improved startup time, more intuitive operation. So I bit the bullet and installed it.

There were a couple of failures in the installation. I had set the download to run, and left it to do its thing—it is 2160 mb after all. I returned to get the failure notice, but that was probably because I had not clicked acceptance of the T&Cs within the required time limit. Once W10 was installed, I clicked on the Snapgraphics shortcut (my desktop was perfectly preserved). As expected, I got an error message, to the effect that this program required the (something like) NTVDM module. But then that changed to a notification of automatic download of that module, and the initiation proceeded seamlessly.

Credit where credit is due; Windows 10 is a great technical achievement, and more user-friendly than earlier versions to boot (so to speak). And free!

Items to Share: 11 October 2015

Education Focus

• How to engage with sullen students | Times Higher Education 'Academics offer advice on how to turn glumness into enthusiasm'

• OECD Report: Puzzles To Solve (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 'Puzzle 1: Students from countries that score high on PISA in 2012 spend less time in school using computers than European and North American students.'

• Banging Your Head Against Bad CPD | FurtherEdagogy Continuing Professional Development 'is [...] a raw, organic process and is unique to the individuals that undertake it, yet FE managers often make the mistake of trying to keep too much control. Controlling CPD to ensure that data can be captured (i.e. numbers attending, evaluation forms, observation grades, etc) negates the impact. This article aims to highlight where FE managers might be getting CPD wrong and how they may reconsider future CPD opportunities for teachers?

• Reflections on Teach Like a Champion, 2.0 | A few thoughts on education 'I love Lemov’s obsession with the micro-techniques (‘instructional brush strokes’) of teaching. Teaching is a complex process, and with so many variables to consider it’s easy to resort to intuition to explain good teaching. A great teacher looks like a ‘natural’ – she is simply ‘being herself’ in the classroom. Similarly, it’s easy to resort to generic advice – “high expectations!” “Don’t smile til Christmas!” “More pace!” “Engagement!”. Lemov blows these platitudes apart by focusing not on the manifestations of effective teaching but on the systems, routines and procedures that underpin it.'  And Teach Like a Champion is Going Out of Print! (Sort of) - Teach Like a Champion There's a 2nd edition coming out.

• starting the phd? get organised now | patter patthomson.net 

Other Business

• Steven Pinker: 'Many of the alleged rules of writing are actually superstitions' | Books | The Guardian 'The real problem is that writing, unlike speaking, is an unnatural act. In the absence of a conversational partner who shares the writer’s background and who can furrow her brows or break in and ask for clarification when he stops making sense, good writing depends an ability to imagine a generic reader and empathise about what she already knows and how she interprets the flow of words in real time. Writing, above all, is a topic in cognitive psychology. '

• Fundamental Things Apply [futilitycloset.com]

Items to Share: 4 October 2015

Education Focus

• Taking the Tech Out of Technology [facultyfocus.com] 'Somewhere along the line, our excitement over the latest technological tools has started focusing on the wrong thing. The excitement ought to reside in the praxis of teaching, not the use of technology.' 

• The science of learning | Evidence into practice Here’s a really clear, short and applicable summary of the key areas of cognitive science which can be applied to the classroom

• 16-19 education saw the largest fall in education spending over the last Parliament - Full Fact

• Happy 100th Birthday, Jerome Bruner: The Pioneering Psychologist on the Act of Discovery and the Key to True Learning | Brain Pickings

• Curriculum: The Key to Boosting Knowledge Retention Even Among Adults Who Haven't Been in a Classroom for Ages - The Atlantic

• Nine Ways to Improve Class Discussions [Faculty Focus] This post offers some simple suggestions for increasing the impact of the discussions that occur in our courses.

• PHD Comics: Academics don't read