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 ...