Items to Share: 17 August 2014

Education Focus

• Motivating Students: Should Effort Count? | Faculty Focus '[H]ere’s what’s troubling me. Most students want to get grades with the least amount of effort. If they can get an A or B with an hour or two of studying once a week, or by doing nothing until the night before the exam or paper is due, that’s how much effort they’ll make. Unless students fall madly in love with the content, most won’t expend any more energy than they need to.'

• The Beef with Personal and Social Development | Sam Shepherd 'I’m not averse to changing behaviour: it could easily be argued that that is the whole reason for education. I’m not averse to telling students things they need to do in order to become better language learners, nor to requiring behaviour change in the context of an ESOL classroom. However, PSD seemed, both explicitly and implicitly to be about conscious lifestyle changes based on a specific socio-cultural viewpoint.'

• Students learn more if they'll need to teach others | Futurity '“When compared to learners expecting a test, learners expecting to teach recalled more material correctly, they organized their recall more effectively, and they had better memory for especially important information,” says John Nestojko, a researcher in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.'

• First impressions in the higher ed classroom [teachinginhighered.com] 'First impressions in the higher ed classroom are crucial. There is even some indication that students’ perceptions on the first day will be almost identical to how they will eventually assess the professor on the final course evaluation. Here are a few ideas for starting the semester strong:'

• Brain training games won't help children do better at school [theconversation.com] 'Darren Dunning and colleagues at the University of Cambridge gave seven to nine-year-olds up to 25 sessions of either CogMed working memory training or active control tasks. Then they measured whether training improved performance on additional measures of working memory, and broader skills including mathematics, reading, writing and classroom-based skills (such as following instructions). They found improvements on working memory. Crucially, however, these improvements did not extend to improvements on any of the broader skills.'  

• Confuse Students to Help Them Learn - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Confusion is a powerful force in education. It can send students reeling toward boredom and complacency. But being confused can also prompt students to work through impasses and arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the world.' Vindicated at last! 

• Who Needs an A, Anyway? A Lot of Folks on Campus Do - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education What happened when Princeton tried to cap the proportion of A grades awarded.

Other Business

• What’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos | Science | WIRED  'You have finally finished writing your article. You’ve sweat [sic] over your choice of words and agonized about the best way to arrange them to effectively get your point across. You comb for errors, and by the time you publish you are absolutely certain that not a single typo survived. But, the first thing your readers notice isn’t your carefully crafted message, it’s the misspelled word in the fourth sentence.' 

• Talking therapies can harm too – here's what to look out for [theconversation.com] 'People seeking therapy should always talk to a practitioner who provides good quality treatment that’s appropriate to their needs. Because research shows that even the innocuous-sounding “talking therapies” (essentially counselling and psychotherapy) can be harmful for some when they’re unsuitable.'

• Supermoon lights up skies around the world – in pictures | Science | theguardian.com

Writing

• Steven Pinker: 10 'grammar rules' it's OK to break (sometimes) | Books | The Guardian 'How can you distinguish the legitimate concerns of a careful writer from the folklore and superstitions? These are the questions to ask. Does the rule merely extend the logic of an intuitive grammatical phenomenon to more complicated cases, such as avoiding the agreement error in "The impact of the cuts have not been felt"? Do careful writers who inadvertently flout the rule agree, when the breach is pointed out, that something has gone wrong? Has the rule been respected by the best writers in the past? Is it respected by careful writers in the present?'

• 250 years of English grammar usage advice: HUGE database includes history of hopefully and others '[N]ewer usage guides tend to discuss a greater number of usage problems than older ones do. This suggests that more usage problems are "discovered" than disappear, either by being "forgotten" about or resolved. Furthermore, the database mainly contains usage problems relating to grammatical issues rather than word-choice or spelling. It seems then, that grammatical issues don’t easily "go out of fashion," something that happens more easily with problems of word choice, spelling or pronunciation.'

• The Case for Conversational Writing | Vitae  'I’ve heard some of my college-level colleagues [complain] that students don’t know how to write academic prose. [...] Why should they? The fact that they’re students, and that they’re operating in an academic environment, does not make them academics. Nor will more than a fraction of them go on to become academics, thank goodness. The overwhelming majority won’t be writing academic prose in their professional lives, so why should we be teaching it to them in college, much less high school?'

On the Curse of Knowledge

"It goes by many names, and many psychologists have rediscovered versions of it, including defective Theory of Mind, egocentrism, hindsight bias, and false consensus. They're all versions of an infirmity afflicting every member of our species, namely that it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know something that you do know."
(Steven Pinker, 9 June 2014)

In some measure, the curse of knowledge is the dark side of threshold concepts. Not of course that all knowledge comes into that category by any means, but TCs are where people get stuck, and hence where the curse of knowledge is most potent.

One respect in which knowledge can be troublesome, according to Perkins (2006), emerges when it is irreversible; once you know how to read (any given script, of course) it is impossible not to read. And correspondingly difficult to imagine what it is like to be unable to read. (It is a salutory exercise to take a piece of writing in an unfamiliar script such as cyrillic or arabic, together with a crib sheet, and just to try and sound it out—never mind the sense.)

And of course the curse of knowledge is especially problematic for teachers, because they need to see the world to a certain extent through their students' eyes, and to understand their ignorance. It's generally considered to be bad practice—and of course it is—but we have all at some time or another had to teach something we are not very familiar with. In its most extreme form it is a matter of keeping one chapter ahead of the students in the textbook. And just sometimes it works remarkably well, because you can recall yesterday when you too were wrestling with where to put what in double-entry book-keeping...

In my very early days in further education, I remember a conversation in the canteen when an older colleague posed the question whether it was possible to know your subject too well to be able to teach it effectively.  And of course it is. Willingham (see here) points out that the expert does not learn or use their knowledge in the same way as the novice—that is one reason why it does not make sense to teach "thinking skills" in the absence of a knowledge base on which to exercise them.

But it is our job to get alongside the novice and first to understand how he sees the world, in order to alter that understanding. And that is where knowledge is a curse.

Or a handicap*. We expect and encourage students to overcome their handicaps; without getting too airy-fairy about this, we can learn through overcoming our own.

---

See also: Wieman C (2007) "The “Curse of Knowledge,” or Why Intuition About Teaching Often Fails" APS News November 2007 (Volume 16, Number 10)

Perkins D. (2006) "Constructivism and troublesome knowledge" in J. H. F. Meyer & R. Land (eds.) Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, pp.33-47. London; Routledge

* PC alert!  The current rhetoric deprecates "handicap", but here it is the best term I can think of. Think of it in respect of sport, and racing in particular.

Items to share: 10 August 2014

Education Focus

• Knowledge is what you think with | Webs of Substance 'Instead of spending serious consideration on improving the teaching of content knowledge, we have been sold a classic bait-and-switch. Yes, there is a problem with students forgetting things or forming misconceptions or failing to link ideas or finding things a bit boring. This is all true. But the solution is not to stop bothering to teach content in favour of some ill-defined, vague and frankly soulless load of old nonsense.'

• What will the future of education look like? | Anthropology in Practice, Scientific American Blog Network 'Scientific American’s August supplement takes a look at the changing landscape of education in the face of emerging technology, and asks the question, how do we increase interest and engagement in STEM initiatives? Learning in the Digital Age tackles issues of using big data to better understand students, the validity of online courses, and the need for new pedagogical methods.'

• Closing the feedback loop | You're the Teacher [ubc.ca] 'Remembering [a] situation [when I denied some feedback] helped put me into the mindset of students receiving critical feedback [...] and not believ[ing] it, getting angry, indignant, even lashing out. When that happens you are not even allowing yourself to think that the feedback might be true; since it doesn’t fit with who you think you are, your own evaluation of the quality of your work, the truth must be that whoever said that is simply wrong.'

• The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher [chronicle.com] 'Teaching and parenting share this in common: In both relationships, the goal is to produce independent and self-sufficient human beings. The risk that helicopter parents run is that they will raise children so coddled that they have a hard time functioning on their own in the larger world. So too with the way we have infantilized our students. Afraid or unwilling to challenge them, we pass them through with perfectly good grades but without much of a sense of how to work on their own or think for themselves.'

• Let’s stop trying to teach students critical thinking [theconversation.com] '“Critical theories” are “uncritical theories”. When some theory has the prefix “critical” it requires the uncritical acceptance of a certain political perspective. Critical theory, critical race theory, critical race philosophy, critical realism, critical reflective practice all explicitly have political aims.' [Discuss!]

• Humanizing Academic Citation – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'For years now I have been talking with graduate students about what it means to be entering the academic conversation in their field or subfield. “All your work has to do,” I tell them, “is further the conversation one useful step.” This goal, I think, feels more manageable than, say, “solving the problem,” and it has helped more than one student I know get over writer’s block with an essay or dissertation chapter. The goal of most academic scholarship is not, after all, to end the conversation.'

• Teacher competence [teachinginhighered.com] 'Every single time I get on a plane I’m really glad that the plane is not being flown by someone who just always loved planes.' Teacher quoted in review of Elizabeth Green's new book about preparing teachers better (W. W. Norton and Co.)

Other Business

• 3quarksdaily: MCMXIV (Outbreak of the First World War) by Philip Larkin

• Megan Washington: Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking | TED Talk Video For all the talk about inclusivity and special educational needs, speech impediments don't get much of a look-in (despite "The King's Speech"). A short (13 minute) insight into the world of a stammerer/ stutterer.

• Shortest-known abstract for a serious scientific paper: - Boing Boing

• Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot - Issue 16: Nothingness - Nautilus

On Master's level.

The Scottish Higher Education Enhancement Committee (SHEEC) and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) have just published a “Mastersness Toolkit” online  which outlines the seven attributes characteristic of study at taught Master's level; Abstraction, Autonomy, Depth, Complexity, Professionalism, Research and Enquiry, and Unpredictability:

It promises to be very useful as a way of helping both students and colleagues to get their heads around what is expected at this level.

If you are interested in this, you may also like my pieces on Writing at Master's Level and the Structure of a Dissertation.

Items to Share; 3 August 2014

Education Focus

• First Impressions of the New OFSTED Handbook | Scenes From The Battleground [Andrew Old]

• Feeling Unable to Learn | Faculty Focus 'I’ve just had one of those in-your-face learning experiences. In fact, it was so unnerving that I’m not sure I can even write about it. It all started when I bought a new computer and, as a result, had to learn an entirely new email system. Although not an unusual or difficult situation for most college teachers, it turned into an absolutely awful experience for this learner. I haven’t felt such frustration, anger, and despair for a long time.'

• How do we reform teacher training in research? - Tom Bennett - TES Community 'Evidence based education is this year's must-have toy, [...] but unlike other fashionable accessories to our practice, this has real potential to change the game.'

• Learning on the Edge: Activities to Promote Deep Learning | Faculty Focus 'Fortunately, we seem to be in the midst of a flowering of new research and ideas from the learning sciences that can help ensure that whatever type of approach we take to the classroom—from traditional lecture to flipped classes—can help maximize student learning in our courses.'

Other Business

• Introvert or extrovert, normal or abnormal: the problem with personality types '...Muhammad Ali proposed a fruit and nut-based typology, classifying people as pomegranates (hard on the outside and inside), walnuts (hard on the outside, soft on the inside), prunes (soft outside, hard inside) and grapes (soft inside and out)....'

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): Chinese physicians honor a dead patient —an 11-year-old organ donor.

• Ignore John Humphrys when he rants about grammar, he just wants attention '[T]here’s currently a good natured spat going on between Melvyn Bragg and John Humphrys.' about the use of the historic present.

• The Way We Live Our Lives in Stories | Edge.org [Jonathan Gottshall] 'No matter where you go in the world, no matter how different people seem, no matter how hard their lives are, people tell stories, universally, and universally the stories are more or less like ours: the same basic human obsessions, and the same basic structure. The structure comes down to: stories have a character, the character has a predicament or a problem—they're always problem-focused—and the character tries to solve the problem. In its most basic terms, that's what a story is—a problem solution narrative.'

• Language Log » Philological teaser Brilliant! Be sure to click through to the video itself.

• This TV ad for a Canadian bank may make you cry. - Boing Boing 

• A Drone's Eye View of Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok & Mexico City | Open Culture

• Against happiness: Why we need a philosophy of failure | Prospect Magazine '[T]he spread of depression is partly a side-effect of our addiction to happiness. Conversely, understanding why we are so miserable should liberate us from being too miserable about it. We can feel good about feeling bad. In other words, we need a decent philosophy of failure to save everyone from thinking what failures they are.'

• Playing an Instrument Is a Great Workout For Your Brain: New Animation Explains Why | Open Culture 'Neuroscientists using fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) technology to monitor the brain activity of subjects listening to music saw engagement in many areas, but when the subjects traded in headphones for actual instruments, this activity morphed into a grand fireworks display. [...] This massive full brain workout is available to anyone willing to put in the time with an instrument.'

• Experimental Theology: Search Term Friday: Strange Loops and Theology I don't usually include links to religious material, but this meditation from Richard Beck on the relevance of Douglas Hofstadter's exploration of logic and maths to thinking about aspects of religion is fascinating—as anything to do with Hofstadter is pretty well bound to be. 

On "Why Don't Students Like School?" (Willingham)

You may have come across Dan Willingham. He features regularly in the posts of several education bloggers who crop up frequently in my Items to Share on Mondays, and his crystal-clear and devastating demolition of the VAK reading styles nonsense has been viewed almost 235,000 times on YouTube. But his central published work in this area is;

Willingham D T (2009) Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom San Francisco; Jossey-Bass

The plain language of the title sets the tone for a refreshingly jargon-free book aimed at the general interested reader, principally parents and teachers, whom he addresses directly. So each chapter heading is a question, expanded upon in the opening paragraph, and followed by an answer. Selected sources and references are available as end-notes to each chapter (under the useful heading of “less technical” and “more technical”, but don't interrupt the flow. There are copious graphics and photographs (perhaps too many of those, some of debatable relevance) and box-outs which summarise major points. All this is the familiar apparatus of the text-book, but the book as a whole  does not give that impression. On the contrary, it reads like the transcript of an animated (albeit one-sided) conversation.

In other words, within the confines of the book format, Willingham can practise what he preaches. But what is that?

In the introduction, he says that the book;

“began as a list of nine principles that are so fundamental to the mind's operation that they do not change as circumstances change. They are as true in the classroom as they are in the laboratory and therefore can be reliably applied to classroom situations.” (p.2)

And that is what it is; an exploration of the nine principles. (from pp. 210-211)

	Cognitive Principle	Required Knowledge about Students	Most Important Classroom Implication
1	People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers	What is just beyond what my students know and can do?	Think of to-be-learned material as answers, and take the time necessary to explain to students the questions.
2	Factual knowledge precedes skill.	What do my students know?	It is not possible to think well on a topic in the absence of factual knowledge about the topic.
3	Memory is the residue of thought.	What will students think during this session?	The best barometer for every lesson plan is “Of what will it make students think?”
4	We understand new things in the context of things we already know.	What do students already know that will be a toehold on understanding this new material?	Always make deep knowledge your goal, spoken or unspoken but recognize that shallow knowledge will come first.
5	Proficiency requires practice	How can I get students to practice without boredom?	Think carefully about which material students need at their fingertips, and practice it over time.
6	Cognition is fundamentally different early and late in training.	What is the difference between my students and an expert?	Strive for deep understanding in your students, not the creation of new knowledge.
7	Children (and adults*) are more alike than different in terms of learning	Knowledge of students' learning styles is not necessary	Think of lesson content, not student differences, driving decisions about how you teach.
8	Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.	What do my students believe about intelligence?	Always talk about successes and failures in terms of effort, not ability.
9	Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practised in order to be improved.	What aspects of my teaching work well for my students, and what parts need improvement?	Improvement needs more than experience; it also requires constant effort and feedback.

* my addition.

Willingham is not claiming novelty for any of these ideas—in fact directly the opposite. Many readers will find familiar references and names (although Ausubel does not appear to get a mention in ch.4—this does not pretend to provide a comprehensive survey of the work in the field).

The odd thing is that all this does not add up to an answer to the question in the title, but who cares? It's an excellent intorduction. This is not likely to be available at your local indy bookshop, so for once I'll post the Amazon link.

Items to Share: 27 July 2014

Education Focus

• Playing the Game—the enduring influence of the preferred Ofsted teaching style.  The downloadable version of Robert Peal's much referred-to report for Civitas. There is an introduction at It’s time to scrap Ofsted | Education | spiked

• Mind Benders | Webs of Substance  Might Dweck's mindset model get reified and used as a label? '[M]uch of the discussion that I see on teaching blogs and websites does seem to take quite a reductive stance to the issues as if there are simple polar opposites [...]. Infographics are produced showing the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset – one good and one bad – but with no hint at a continuum or that it might just be a little more complicated than this. [ ] What if there are children in classes right now filling in worksheets to decide their mindset? What if we end up hanging this label like an albatross around their necks?' 

• Examining Knowledge Beliefs to Motivate Student Learning | Faculty Focus 'There is no magic solution to the motivation question. Motivation for learning is an extremely complex entity and scholars disagree on how to measure motivation, evaluate learning, etc. (Schunk, 2012). I believe the heart of motivating students lies in the ability to reach the student at the beliefs level.'

• How Tests Make Us Smarter - NYTimes.com 'tests serve students best when they’re integrated into the regular business of learning and the stakes are not make-or-break, as in standardized testing. That means, among other things, testing new learning within the context of regular classes and study routines. [ ] Students in classes with a regimen of regular low- or no-stakes quizzing carry their learning forward through the term, like compounded interest, and they come to embrace the regimen, even if they are skeptical at first. A little studying suffices at exam time — no cramming required.' By Henry  Roediger, one co-author of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.

• Behaviour Blind Spot | Webs of Substance 'the crisis in school behaviour is a crisis of authority. The same anti-authoritarian stance that promotes discovery learning is the stance that favours permissive approaches to classroom behaviour.'

• Teaching science with bad science: resources for teachers – Bad Science  'People often wring their hands over how to make science “relevant” to the public, or to young people. For me, this is an open goal: we are constantly barraged with health claims in popular culture, and evidence based medicine is the science of how we know what does good, and what does harm. Every popular claim is an opportunity to learn about the relative merits and downsides of randomised trials, systematic reviews, cohort studies, laboratory work, and more.' (You could build an entire course around Jo Willey--the Daily Express "health" correspondent!) 

• Student-generated questions and collaborative answers (T-BLE) | You're the Teacher '[On the course the blogger is taking] there was an example of an instructor who asks students to come up with questions about the course material and submit them to the instructor, who then chooses questions based on the learning objectives and adds more if necessary to make sure all the learning objectives of a particular section of the course are covered. She then asks students to work together to answer these questions in groups. I think this is a great idea, to allow students to both seek help on things that they are having difficulty with, and also come up with questions that test others’ knowledge. See also related posts: Authentic assessments in two PHIL classes  “Students as Producers” Assignments in Intro to PHIL

Other Business

• Do You Have to Learn How to Get High? » Sociological Images A reminder of Howard Becker's classic article, from 1953 (most people know it from the 1970 collection, Outsiders).

• Sunday Fun: Confirmation Bias for Everyone! » Sociological Images

• Above LA: A Top-Down Timelapse View of the Great Megacity | Open Culture 'Chris Pritchard tells us: “Above LA showcases the often unseen beauty of Los Angeles from above. It was shot on hilltops, mountains, and high-rise rooftops around the city and features a number of day to night transitions and rare weather. My goal was to capture the depth, beauty, and movement of a vast and bustling megacity from a new angle, and encourage people to get out and experience their environments in new ways. I never thought I’d appreciate this city so much until I spent countless hours staring at it from high above.”'

• C S Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" [brandywinebooks.net] 'Dr. Peter Kreeft [talks] about "one of the greatest novel[s] ever written," C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. Kreeft says one of the reasons it is such a good book is Lewis' wife helped him write it.' It is almost forgotten now... (Video, 1 hour)

• The staid young: Oh! You pretty things | The Economist 'Today’s young people are held to be alienated, unhappy, violent failures. They are proving anything but.'

• BPS Research Digest: What the textbooks don't tell you - one of psychology's most famous experiments was seriously flawed Conducted in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) has acquired a mythical status and provided the inspiration for at least two feature-length films. You'll recall that several university students allocated to the role of jailor turned brutal and the study had to be aborted prematurely. Philip Zimbardo, the experiment's lead investigator, says the lesson from the research is that in certain situations, good people readily turn bad. "If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples," he has written.

• The Conscientiousness of Kidspeak - The New Yorker  'The study they [three sociolinguists at the U. of Texas at Austin] conducted “aimed to investigate how the frequency of filled pauses and discourse markers used in the English language varies with two basic demographic variables (gender and age) and personality traits.” The researchers explain that, to do this, they “focused on three common discourse markers … (I mean, you know, and like) and two filled pauses (uh and um).”'

• BPS Research Digest: It's time for Western psychology to recognise that many individuals, and even entire cultures, fear happiness

• What playfulness can do for you - Ideas - The Boston Globe '... playfulness, as a personality trait, is not only complex but consequential. People who exhibit high levels of playfulness—those who are predisposed to being spontaneous, outgoing, creative, fun-loving, and lighthearted—appear to be better at coping with stress, more likely to report leading active lifestyles, and more likely to succeed academically. According to a group of researchers at Pennsylvania State University, playfulness makes both men and women more attractive to the opposite sex.'

On revisiting a classic

I'm still wrestling with writing—the book on teaching, that is—and it is all the harder now that the academic year has finished, and I don't have the fuel of current practice to direct my attention. So I have turned back to some classics (at least in my assessment) to re-stimulate my thinking, and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts..

Richardson, E (1967) The Environment of Learning; conflict and understanding in the secondary school London; Heinemann Education (1973 edn.)

WorldCat.org lists 17 editions, including e-editions. I bought it used through Amazon for one penny (+ £2.80 postage, several other copies still available).

I nearly worked for Elizabeth Richardson. In the mid-1970s she was at the University of Bristol and looking for a research fellow for one of her projects, and I applied. I was able to claim a shared background; she had been heavily influenced by the (mildly Kleinian—Melanie, not Josephine) work on group relations which gave rise to the Tavistock Institute/Leicester University experiential (a.k.a. "working") conferences from the early '60s on. I had worked for the Grubb Institute—a sort of junior partner in the enterprise—and participated in several similar events. (They are still going—the 2014 event is the 68th, and takes place in August, and spin-offs are international.)

I went to Bristol for a very pleasant and stimulating interview, but learned that her research had moved on to work on local authorities' management of schools (they did a lot more of that in those days) rather than concentrating on the eco-system of the classroom, as I might now describe her focus. It's much easier to find the labels for her perspective now than it was then, which must say something about how much systems perspectives have permeated our thinking.

But that must lead to an initial observation; the language (and more important, the perspectives it embodies) are dated. There are of course references to grammar- and secondary-modern schools, and leaving school at 15 (so-called ROSLA did not come in until 1974, if I remember rightly), but that's just historical. It's the unselfconscious references to "bright" and "backward", and "coloured" pupils (not "students") which leap out, including this gem, "these were 15-year-old girls of pathetically low ability" (p. 147). It's the assumptions about streaming. And, most germane for a current reading, it's the default assumptions about the authority of and respect for the teacher.

And of course that is one of the key elements of this book. Because, regardless of the default assumption, no-one I have read since has so clear-sightedly and non-judgementally sought to uncover and explore what goes on beneath the surface of the classroom (and the school). I mentioned an "eco-system" earlier; Richardson approaches the class as an ecologist might approach a rainforest.

Much of the first half of the book is about what would nowadays be called "behaviour management". Much as I respect people like Sue Cowley and Tom Bennett, their approach is—although in many respects consistent with Richardson's (given that she doesn't do prescription)—simply pragmatic. It's about ground-rules and fire-fighting. And it works. 'Nuff said.

Except that Richardson does not stop there; enough has not been said. From a group relations perspective,  she regards almost everything which happens (and some things which don't happen) at several levels. Class behaviour has to be managed, certainly, but it is also evidence of the underlying emotional life of the group, both that which can be expressed and that which must be denied. And the teacher is part of this process, not an objective outsider, but as exposed as anyone else. Indeed, the issue of  how the teacher's anxiety can motivate problematic practice and inhibit good practice (especially holding back and doing nothing) is a recurrent theme.

It's a fascinating "lens" to use Brookfield's term, or frame of reference. It highlights (or "privileges" in the current jargon) a neglected aspect of the environment of learning, including the implications of the physical layout of classrooms (rather less of an issue now, I think. For my take see here and here) and time tabling.

By current standards, the argument is loose and merely assertive. Only in the boring chapters 7 and 8 is the referencing anywhere near current standards (and it's not "Harvard"!)

The originality dips from chapter 7 onwards and slowly climbs to the conclusion. Skim.

So? This is largely based on secondary education in the '60s, which was a different world in some respects, but still recognisable in those areas with which this book concerns itself. It may appear that the current competitive, high-stakes testing setting has invalidated the arguments and the admittedly anecdotal evidence base. In some respects they have. There are no effect-sizes from meta-analyses to support them. Some of the practice described in chapters 7 and 8 nowadays prompts responses such as, "Yes, but—what were they learning?" But they are not simply examples of the much-derided pupil-centred approaches of the '60s; there is a degree of rigour here, and interesting explorations of how rules and rituals structure the pupil experience to provide the security needed to tolerate the uncertainty of venturing into unknown territory.

It has to be said that translating all this to the world of post-compulsory education is not straightforward; Richardson is good on the how the default structures of primary schools and secondary schools (a single teacher working with a class on practically all subjects in the former case, and subject specialists taking classes only for their subjects in the latter) affect the role of the teacher and the dynamics of the class, but the school is still a stronger, more containing institution than the FE college or the university. The social and emotional ties (and splits) are looser in the college, but they are still influential, particularly on professional courses where a cohort of students work with a fairly small team of lecturers consistently over from one to four years.

Even so. There's a lot to learn. But sadly it can't be communicated in a half-day CPD session and that in itself may disqualify it... And no, it's not the same as "Emotional Intelligence". But the book is as good as it gets as an introduction, and if you are looking for a trajectory for professional development over a decade or a career, this could be it. It will certainly maintain your fascination with teaching.

On Gary Klein on Insight

Klein G (2014) Seeing What Others Don't; the remarkable ways we gain insights London and Boston MA; Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

I first encountered Gary Klein (not in person, though) through his Edge interview in 2011. Anyone who has Daniel Kahneman as his warm-up deserves attention and respect. So when I spotted this book in Heffers the other day, I was immediately interested. Klein specialises in the psychology of intuition, decision-making, and here of insight.

But he does it naturalistically. He doesn't bring his subjects into a laboratory to put them through some experimental protocol; instead he listens to their stories of life in the real world. Indeed, sometimes he relies on historical records or news reports, contaminated though they may be. He sets out his reasons very cogently in ch.13 of the book. His approach is idiographic, rather than nomothetic, to use Allport's (1937) terms. He argues that standardised methods are by definition incapable of capturing the lightning strike which is "insight".

He embraces the messiness of contextual and confusing variables, but tries to find the common features underlying them all. This is typical of much educational research, too. It's one reason why so much of it is so poor. So it is good to read an account of painstaking qualitative research undertaken on an opportunistic sample of 120 instances of insight, with some discussion of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting an instance, ranging from backwoodsman Daniel Boone rescuing his daughter from marauding "Indians", to the identification of the Aids virus—and the stories are terrific. Malcolm Gladwell should look to his laurels (and endorses Klein, but not this book specifically, on the cover).

Educational researchers could benefit from reading this account of methodology (scattered throughout the book), but... there's a lot left out.

And that is interesting, because from page 4, Klein introduces a notional equation:

(I've prettied it up a little: I may have occasion to use it...)  It's reminiscent of Herzberg on motivational hygiene. But if Herzberg's point (originating in the 1950s) was about minimising the downers, Klein is broadly about boosting the uppers.

He argues powerfully in Part II that emphasising "not getting it wrong", or minimising error creates a culture not only of "quality assurance" but also of risk aversion and closes the door on innovation, and he has the anecdotal evidence to demonstrate it. It's an important argument, but Klein is well aware of its limitations. His final section on creating an organisational culture which encourages insight is not convincing, but then it is speculative. Someone would have to give it a try...

That's the problem. It's the discourse, stupid. More precisely, it's the market. Klein has moved (according to his bio.) from academe, to government service, to consultancy. So his pitch has changed. That is not in itself a criticism; but it's not enough to explore the issues. In that world you need answers. Hence Part III of the book: "Opening the Gates; how can we foster insights?" which is definitely the weakest part, and indeed comes close to contradicting the insights of the earlier parts. Despite arguing that insights are disruptive and unpredictable (p.153) he ends up talking about how to manage their creation. It don't work like that.

Klein writes accessibly: sometimes too much so. Every point is referenced back to one or more of his case-studies, which makes the argument easy to follow if you can remember who Gopnik is, and what her distinctive insight is (about infants' "theory of mind"—and well worth remembering) but he does tend to treat his corpus of case-studies as definitive. He does pepper the book with disclaimers about the limitations of the studies, but in practice these are tokenistic. Ch. 13 is salutary on the problems of experimental design in this area, but his own approach does need monitoring for the likelihood of Type I errors, and would not be allowed to stand alone in sound academic circles.

But then they would come up with hedged, boring, qualified claims which no-one would be able to relate to or actually use.

Items to Share: 20 July 2014

Education Focus

• Stop this educational madness [spiked] (Kathryn Ecclestone) 'Beyond the trivial or cynical claims being made with regard to mental health, more people seem to find everyday life and education a constant source of distress. The idea that almost all people are psychologically and emotionally vulnerable is everywhere, and we need a wider debate about what impact this has had on how we teach and how we relate to people. We need to resist calls for more support and more intervention and start rethinking how education and other meaningful activities can lead to a world outside the self.'

• Hard Evidence: at what age are children ready for school? [theconversation.com] 'When are children “ready” for school? There is much debate about when the transition between play-based pre-school and the start of “formal” schooling should begin. The trend in the UK primary school curriculum over recent decades has been towards an earlier start to formal instruction, and an erosion of learning through play. [] But the evidence from international comparisons and psychological research of young children’s development all points to the advantages of a later start to formal instruction, particularly in relation to literacy.'

• Direct Instruction and the teaching of reading [theconversation.com] 'Direct Instruction is a teaching method developed in the United States in the 1960s, focused particularly on the needs of children with learning difficulties. Building on behaviourist learning theory, Direct Instruction breaks each learning task down into its smallest component and requires mastery of simpler skills before proceeding to more difficult skills. Students are grouped according to their achievement, teachers are provided with closely scripted lesson plans, students respond to the teacher orally and as a group, and the group does not move on until everyone understands the material.'

• For lecturers, there is life beyond Death by PowerPoint  [Times Higher Education] 'By harnessing the power of images, academics can fully exploit students’ learning potential, says David Roberts.'  But my reason for selecting this is that it is totally unoriginal. People knew all this in the days of hand-written "overheads" (transparencies) and even using the black- green- white-board... And the Higher Education Academy are interested in his work? What does this say about the dissemination of the scholarship of teaching and learning, however banal?

• Talent vs. Practice: Why Are We Still Debating This?  [Scientific American Blog Network] 'sheer amount of deliberate practice does not, in fact, explain most of the differences in expert performance. Additionally, there were huge differences between fields, with effects for education and professions much smaller than for games, music and sports...' It's the 10k hours stuff again.

• The pros and cons of giving praise to children – Carlin Flora – Aeon  ...and here's another piece on Dweck and mind-sets.

• BBC News - Barrowford school's KS2 'proud' letter to pupils goes viral Yuck! (Apparently it originally came from a US source—it's partly a cultural thing.)

Other Business

• Why so many domesticated mammals have floppy ears [theconversation.com] 'Take a look at several domesticated mammal species and you might spot a number of similarities between them, including those cute floppy ears.'

• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn And Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002 For The Fellowship Of The Ring DVD. Part One. OK, for afficionados only, probably, but a great spoof!

• The Etiology of Turgid Drivel – Lingua Franca — The Chronicle of Higher Education '[Microsoft's] near-monopolistic hold on personal computing, together with its creepy ability to foist bloated yet sluggish software on users whether they want it or not, has made [the CEO] one of the most powerful men on earth. Too powerful, it seems, for anyone to edit. Nobody dares tell him that his writing is vague, dishonest pothering, or that his memo should have been ruthlessly pruned and tightened, and given a content transfusion.' (from Geoff Pullum.) (And then he laid off 18,000 staff.)

• How to talk like an estate agent – seven tips | Books | The Guardian  I just happen to be having lots of dealings with them at the moment: I did think about doing a blog-post on their weird patois in their advertisements, but this saves me the bother.

On Hensher "The Missing Ink"

Hensher P (2012) The Missing Ink; how handwriting made us who we are London; Pan Books.

This is the review I posted to Amazon.co.uk. (one star) with some editing because Amazon readers would have some background information you wouldn't necessarily share:

OK. I didn't finish it. I threw it across the room at about p.135. (And reluctantly recovered it, to be fair for this review.)

This is such a wasted opportunity. There is so much to say about handwriting. There is a debate (principally in the States) about the necessity or otherwise of teaching what they call 'cursive' (joined-up) script. There is interesting (but early) neuroscience research about the difference between taking lecture notes by hand and by digital device.

Instead, we get a self-indulgent, self-admittedly sloppy (see jokey footnote on p.43), gratuitously padded (the useless "witness" testimonies between chapters), text clearly aimed at a limited coterie of the chattering classes (see the opening of ch.18 "When you are elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, as most English writers sooner or later are..." —which is egregious rubbish), which buries some interesting material under irritating ordure.

At the cost, indeed, of clarity. The examples of handwriting are not systematically chosen. There is no way to link the points made in the text to the illustrations (which are badly reproduced—although this book is not alone in this). I was particularly interested in the chapter on German orthography; I remember struggling with a book on „Deutschland und die Deutschen” for German O level in the late '50s. It was in black-letter typeface. (No, that's not the same as Gothic, at all--he does get that right.) But for all the discussion of the politics of orthography in Germany, where were the illustrations of actual handwriting? I have no clear idea of what Sütterlin or Fraktur actually look like.

At least Palmer's advice on writing with the whole arm (p.73-5) does provide some support for my own to teachers about how to write on boards!

Items to Share; 13 July 2014

Education Focus

• Hard Evidence: at what age are children ready for school? 'When are children “ready” for school? There is much debate about when the transition between play-based pre-school and the start of “formal” schooling should begin. The trend in the UK primary school curriculum over recent decades has been towards an earlier start to formal instruction, and an erosion of learning through play. [] But the evidence from international comparisons and psychological research of young children’s development all points to the advantages of a later start to formal instruction, particularly in relation to literacy.'

Other Business

• The Secret History Behind The Science Of Stress : Shots - Health News : NPR 'For the past decade or so, Petticrew and a group of colleagues in London have been searching through millions of documents from the tobacco industry that were archived online in the late '90s as part of a legal settlement with tobacco companies. [] What they've discovered is that both Selye's work and much of the work around Type A personality were profoundly influenced by cigarette manufacturers. They were interested in promoting the concept of stress because it allowed them to argue that it was stress — not cigarettes — that was to blame for heart disease and cancer.'

• Side Effects – Futility Closet 'Much as I admire Gerard Manley Hopkins, I didn't realise he had a sense of humour!

• The Uses of Being Wrong - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'For all the intellectual benefits of being incorrect, however, how one is wrong matters. It is much less risky to predict doom and gloom than to predict that things will work out fine. Warnings about disasters that never happen carry less cost to one’s reputation than asserting that all is well just before a calamity. History has stigmatized optimistic prognosticators who, in retrospect, turned out to be wrong. From Norman Angell (who, in 1909, argued that war among European powers was unlikely) onward, errant optimists have been derided for their naïveté. If the global economy tanks or global economic governance collapses in the next few years, I’ll be wrong again—and in the worst way possible.'

On Trivers "Deceit and Self-Deception"

Trivers R (2013) Deceit and Self-Deception; fooling yourself the better to fool others London; Penguin (p-back edition)

This is a quite extraordinary book. As Robert Trivers comments in the very last paragraph:

"One nice feature of the study of deceit and self-deception is that we will never run out of examples."

And indeed he finds them everywhere, from plants mimicking poisonous varieties, to male fish misrepresenting their sex to gain a reproductive advantage, to the competition within families between the maternal and the paternal genes inherited by offspring, to aviation and space accidents, to international relations and nationalistic myths, and of course religion.

Some of the material is clumsy and clunky and could have done with a brutal editor—principally in the more scientific passages where terms like "donor" and "recipient" are insufficiently precise for a naive reader to follow the argument (not sure he uses those terms, but you get the idea). There's an element here of going through the motions of establishing his unimpeachable biological credential, just so he can move on to the more interesting stuff...

And that stuff—particularly the historical material and the Chomskyan expose of the self-serving myths of US imperialism—is passionate and riveting, but I suspect highly contestable.

Trivers readily admits the limitations of current research in all the areas he covers, but he cites his sources only in end-notes. Generally I prefer this approach in "popular science" texts; author/date citation tends to ruin the flow for the reader, but it is not until you follow up the endnotes that you discover that a whole page of argument may be based on a single source, which may be highly contentious, and the surrounding dispute is not mentioned at all. Much of the discussion of conflict in the Middle East, for example, relies on the work of Robert Fisk—hugely respected, but equally hugely contested in the field, I gather. The intriguing idea that xenophobia and inter-group conflict and religiosity are higher in societies which carry a higher load of parasites and hence probably infections rely on four articles (albeit some in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B—but some of which are not fully referenced). The effect is dogmatic, but Trivers does include occasional exclusions where he acknowledges that he must paint with a broad brush because of the scope of the topic. Hence he starts chapter 12, on religion, with;

"A book could be written on this subject—no, a twelve-volume treatise..."

He is an avowed positivist and reductionist; the social "sciences" in his view forfeit any claim to credibility insofar as they drift away from biology. It's all in the genes, in the Dawkins mould, and he aligns his early thought with E O Wilson (of Sociobiology notoriety in the 70s).

He is also prepared to step into the picture himself, in anecdotes which rarely redound to his credit.

So he has a clear frame of reference, or lens, through which he views a vast swathe of biological to political activity, and as might be expected he finds deceit and self-deception wherever he looks—just as a critical theorist finds oppression and exploitation everywhere. The content and examples are fascinating and thought-provoking, but does the whole really work as anything other than another cynic's charter?

Discuss.

Items to Share: 6 July 2014

Education Focus

• What’s the harm in knowing your times-tables? | Webs of Substance 'Of course, you can get by without being able to quickly recall all of the times-tables. You can work them out if you have to. But this doesn’t represent a gain. It simply reduces the number of tools you have to think with and possibly wastes a bit of time whilst you have to work some of these things out. Given that such facts are stored largely subconsciously in the long term memory, they don’t get in the way of the process of conscious reasoning; they are merely called upon when required. Of course, if the facts are wrong then you do have a problem.' 

• The problem with potential: why the cure for cancer might not be inside the mind of a child who won't go to school - Tom Bennett - TES Community 'Potential merely means that an agent or object, given certain interventions and conditions, can become or achieve some thing else. [...], I don't think that potential can be seen as a limited, fixed thing. I think it’s just a (perhaps mundane) observation that with effort, direction and dedication, most of us could do or be most things. I don't believe in miracles: [... b]ut I do believe in the miracle of diligence, time,industry and determination, often the most undervalued qualities in learning.   

• What the grammar gurus don’t get about how we learn [theconversation.com] '...what some grammar gurus forget is that the vast majority of language is not written, but spoken. Talk to a researcher who studies grammar in its natural habitat, and they will tell you that by just two years of age, children already have a deep understanding of grammar, far exceeding anything that our most powerful supercomputers can currently achieve.' 

• BPS Research Digest: Exploding the 10,000 hours myth - it's no guarantee for greatness '"The bottom line," write Hambrick and his colleagues, "is that deliberate practice is necessary to account for why some people become experts in these domains and others fail to do so, but not even close to sufficient." What else matters? Another relevant factor, they say, is starting age. This correlates with amount of completed practice, but crucially, it remains a predictive factor even after subtracting the influence of practice.

Other Business

• Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic Writing is So Bad | Open Culture

• Future English: Johnson: Simpler and more foreign | The Economist'...whatever the long run might look like, the next few decades are set. No language has anything like a chance of displacing English. [] Interestingly, about two-thirds of English-speakers are not first-language speakers of English. To put it another way: English no longer belongs to England, to superpower America, or even to the English-speaking countries generally. Rather, English is the world’s language. What happens to a language when it becomes everybody’s? Shaped by the mouths of billions of non-native speakers, what will the English of the future look like?

• And English, loanword champion of the world! - Ideas - The Boston Globe  'It’s the number-one lender of words to other languages--but not everyone wants to borrow them'

• The Role of a Critic [farnamstreetblog.com] '“In many ways, the work of a critic is very easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.”'

On Threshold Concepts in Vocational Higher Education

My session on TCs in vocational and professional higher education on 3 July at University Centre Grimsby is here. If you were there and want to comment, it is easier on this blog than on the static web-page itself.

Items to Share: 29 June 2014

Education Focus

• You do not need an LMS in order to teach with technology. (Jonathan Rees' 'More or Less Bunk') 'LMS' is American for VLE.

• Another Education Neuromyth Debunked [discovermagazine.com] Lectures aren't as totally useless as you thought. Quite... 

• The beauty of annotating | Pragmatic Education 'Like dewdrops on a dragonfly, annotations are microscopic, fragile and beautiful. I’ve come to believe that they’re the most important secret for teaching literature; a hidden treasure trove, waiting to be discovered. '

• Big Dog, Little Dog: Bloom's Revised Taxonomy: Cognitive processes and levels of knowledge matrix Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (Remember - Understand - Apply - Analyze - Evaluate - Create) not only improved the usability of it (using action words), but perhaps also made it more accurate. However, probably the best feature — the matrix — is often left unnoticed.

• The dip | Teaching In Higher Ed 'When I shared “the dip” that I had experienced in wrapping up each semester, [my colleague] shared that he, too, had that pattern throughout all of his years of teaching. He has been teaching more than 25 years and said that every class he taught had the frustrating time toward the end of it, when it seemed like the end just couldn’t get here fast enough.'  My own slightly different take is here.

• I Hate Training Days | Sam Shepherd 'You probably have training days in some form or another, if you are a teacher, and you probably spend several days of your academic year student free and attending various workshops and presentations about one thing or another. Now, let’s be perfectly honest, in your life, how many of these have genuinely stuck with you? How many of the workshops have been so strikingly informative that you can measure their impact in your day to day practice?' 

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » Don’t Personalize Learning 'a lot of fun learning in math class – argument, discussion, and debate chief among them – is impossible when you aren’t learning it synchronously with a group.'

Other Business

• A spook’s guide to the psychology of deception « Mind Hacks '...a plausible psychological framework for practical deception and influence online. It draws on a mix of persuasion psychology from marketing, studies on scammers and con-men, the social psychology of trust and disclosure, studies of how stage magic works psychologically, and work on what makes organisations work effectively and what degrades their performance.'

• You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are | Neurobonkers | Big Think (Link to video) Lecture on YouTube about the ubiquity of error—and embracing it. 

• List With Legs – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education Seven grammar rules you really should pay attention to, from Ben Yagoda

• Is America’s Personality Changing? A Decline in the Willingness to Conform » Sociological Images On Asch's group pressure experiments; '[...] then there was Vietnam and anti-war protesters, hippies and free love, the women’s and gay liberation movement, and civil rights victories. By the 1960s, it was all about rejecting the establishment, saying no, and envisioning a more authentic life. Things changed. And so did this experiment.'

On an oxymoronic comment

I moderate the comments on my blogs—not a terribly onerous task—and today I picked up this contribution from someone on a class blog from 2007. Interestingly enough, it's the second in the same vein in a month.

It's one of the best common factor that they must know for them to have a good performance on their work. Thus, if you have some problems regarding on your writings, just feel free to consult best dissertation writing service uk review for you to answer your questions.

(The link has been disabled.)

At first I was amazed by its incoherence and bare standard of literacy. How could a message like that possibly encourage someone to sign up for a "service" purporting to provide essays? How could they be so incompetent?

But then I thought of a point made in Levitt and Dubner's latest book, which I haven't read, but the Guardian review may be on the button. They muse on the continuing illiteracy of 419 scam spam and phishing messages. You would have thought the scammers would have learned by now to do it more professionally. Levitt and Dubner apparently argue that the grammatical errors and clumsy expression are deliberate filters to ensure that only gullible and less sophisticated readers are taken in.

That would certainly work in this case; anyone who responded to such a message would certainly be floundering and desperate.

But given the present concern about international students being admitted to British universities on the basis of dubious evidence of their English language skills, these essay mills appear to be in a lucrative business. 

Items to Share: 22 June 2014

Education Focus

• "Active learning" in college STEM courses--meta-analysis - Daniel Willingham 'Scott Freeman and his associates (Freeman et al, 2014) conducted a meta-analysis of 225 studies of college instruction that compared “traditional lecturing” vs. “active learning” in STEM courses. [...] Student performance on exams increased by about half a standard deviation. Students in the traditional lecture classes were 1.5 times as likely to fail as students in the active learning classes.' 

• How to manage behaviour with praise | Webs of Substance '[...] we introduced ‘Assertive Discipline’; an American programme developed by Lee Cantor. Aspects of the training materials made me cringe and there was little suggestion that it was based upon anything more than experience, but in the absence of anything else, it began to form the basis of an approach that I have used ever since..' 

• An hour with the DfE: How should we improve the use of research in schools? - Tom Bennett: TES  'Most teachers get all their research in one big pill at the start of their careers, and then sod all after that, forever. This makes it pretty important that they get good research to begin with, otherwise they'll carry it around with them like a conjoined twin for the rest of their careers.' 

• The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom : The New Yorker

Other Business

• A Don’s Life: Time Management 'I have picked up a few "time management" tips -- on the job. For example, start booking appointments from the end of the day backwards (they tend to sprawl less that way, for reasons I dont quite understand). Try booking appointments at slightly odd times (12.05, rather than 12.00) -- as it makes it rather clearer that your time is squeezed.'

• RIP, Daniel Keyes, author of "Flowers for Algernon" - Boing Boing Obituary for the author. "Flowers for Algernon" is short, intelligent, thought-provoking, haunting and memorable science fiction. Read it! 

• Human rights: a straitjacket on liberty | spiked A very clear article attacking the shibboleth of "human rights"—well worth arguing with! Does not mention Isaiah Berlin on negative and positive rights, but a commenter does. 

• Jessa Gamble – Life without sleep [aeon.co] 'New technologies are emerging that could radically reduce our need to sleep - if we can bear to use them'

Items to Share: 15 June 2014

Education Focus

• Leave The Laptops At Home, Kids « The Dish (Full New Yorker article here): 'I banned laptops in the classroom after it became common practice to carry them to school. When I created my “electronic etiquette policy” (as I call it in my syllabus), I was acting on a gut feeling based on personal experience. I’d always figured that, for the kinds of computer-science and math classes that I generally teach, which can have a significant theoretical component, any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best...' but see also: Three issues with the case for banning laptops  - The Chronicle of Higher Education .

Other Business

• The Turing Trick – The Chronicle of Higher Education 'On Monday morning, the news was everywhere that the famous Turing Test—in which a computer program tries to convince people that it is a human being carrying on a normal conversation—had been passed for the first time.' 

• Writing In The 21st Century | Edge.org 'Steven Pinker begins by stating his belief that "science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life— because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? [...] There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself [...]'

Items to Share; 8 June 2014

Education Focus

• A physicist weighs in on the rigor of education research - Daniel Willingham 'Can you use the results of your research to predict with some accuracy what will happen in a new situation? A common mistake is to believe that in education one ought to be able to predict outcomes for individual students; not necessarily so, any more than a physicist must be able to predict the behavior of each atom. Prediction in aggregate—a liter of gas or a school of children—is still an advance.' 

• A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop - Scientific American scientificamerican.com
  'New research [...] demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Across three experiments, [...] students [took] notes in a classroom setting and then [were] tested [...] on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half [...] to write the notes out by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.' and:

• What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades - NYTimes.com 'Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.'

• Motivation and mindset anchoring | Pragmatic Education

Other Business

• A heuristic for sorting science stories in the news | Understanding Uncertainty "Ask yourself: if the study had come up with a negative result, would I be hearing about it? If NO, then don't bother to read or listen to the story" (Jo Willey, take note. She is the health editor of the Daily Express, and the most egregious perpetrator of this crap.)

• New Statesman | How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHS 'After the death of his wife following a minor operation, airline pilot Martin Bromiley set out to change the way medicine is practised in the UK – by using his knowledge of plane crashes.' Excellent piece—but no reference to Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto" (2010), strangely. Education rarely experiences such critical incidents—but there are things to learn.

• Photos of the Week: 5/31-6/6 [theatlantic.com]

• BPS Research Digest: Committed nurses cope with stress by dehumanising themselves and their patients - Italian study 'Nursing must be one of the most stressful professions. Not only are the hours long and the work challenging, many nurses are exposed routinely to patient suffering and death. A new study conducted in Italy finds that nurses appear to cope by seeing themselves and their patients as less than fully human.' Not much has changed in 45 years, then? (Since Menzies-Lyth's study in 1967.) 

• The Search for Psychology's Lost Boy - The Chronicle of Higher Education Who was Little Albert in Watson's famous experiments?
  

Items to Share: 1 June 2014

Education Focus

• Motivation and instruction | Pragmatic Education 'In a series of five blogposts, I plan to explore what we as teachers can do about motivation, self-control and willpower in school. There’ll be stories of elephants, chimps and bees; mindsets, biases and self-fulfilling prophecies. The heroes of the story will be Carol Dweck, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, Jonathan Haidt, Kelly McGonigal and the Heath brothers. Going beyond the cognitive psychology I’ve been exploring, this is a journey into our social, intuitive minds.' and...

• Motivation and emotion | Pragmatic Education 'As a student, what makes you look forward to the lesson? It’s not so much what you have next, as who you have next. Emotional interactions between teachers and students are some of ‘the most powerful hidden dynamics of teaching’, according to Robert Marzano, as they are ‘typically unconscious’.'

Other Business

• The Five Second Rule « The Dabbler 'The five-second rule is a widely repeated belief that food dropped on the ground will not be significantly contaminated with bacteria if it is picked up within five seconds of being dropped.' 

• Nigeness: The Missing Forecast '...[H]ow deeply entrenched the Shipping Forecast is in our national culture. For most of us, of course, it serves no useful purpose and is largely incomprehensible, but it operates at some deeper level as a quasi-liturgical celebration of our maritime heritage and our status as a sea-girt island afloat on mysterious waters, storm-prone but somehow ordered.'

• Rory Sutherland — This Thing For Which We Have No Name [farnamstreetblog.com] 'Most of the progress that’s made in business is made through a kind of trial and error where you accidentally stumble on something that’s successful. Of course, the way business works quite well is that things that are unsuccessful get killed off fairly quickly and things which are accidentally successful get invested in; a very crude feedback system but it kind of works, broadly speaking.' 

• Now THIS Is a Synapse – Phenomena: Only Human [nationalgeographic.com] 

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): Clever Stockholm subway advertisement

On Set Books

It's unlikely that you have been able to avoid the arguments now simmering around changes to the syllabus and set books for GCSE English Literature.

Here is part of a post I first wrote in 2012, which touches on some of the issue from another angle:

I passed the local branch of a chain bookshop on Saturday, now featuring the "back to school" window display. Prominent was a "study guide" to To Kill a Mockingbird --presumably a set text again for some exam or another.

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is 86 and reclusive. I wasn't surprised to see a "study guide" in the window, but it did set me thinking about what had been made of her wonderful story, whose very accessibility and gentle power has conspired to its reduction to a commodity--knowledge about it can be traded for exam credits, while the point is lost.

I'm not merely speculating here. Robert Westall was my art teacher at school. We became friends and remained so for thirty years until his death. [...]. As the link shows, he was a wonderful author of stories for children and young adults, acquiring many awards for works from his debut novel The Machine-Gunners in 1975 to posthumous publications. The Machine-Gunners was serialised on BBCtv in 1983 --and of course found its way to being a "set book" for 16+ examinations...

I don't remember when it was first set, or when the first cribs came out (for examples of current stuff go here and scroll until you get to the title--I make no comment at all on the quality of the resources offered. They are simply an accessible example of the kind of material on offer.) But I do remember discussing it with him.

I congratulated him. He'd really made it! And—since he was always something of a contrarian—I didn't really take it seriously when he said he wished it hadn't happened, and that perhaps he had a right to be consulted about it. (As far as I can remember, the first he found out about it was from his publisher or his agent, because they had been warned to increase print runs and approached about annotated editions. But then, most set authors are dead already, so...)

But his argument was persuasive. He did not want young people to see his work as "the kind of stuff they made you read at school." Once they saw it in that light, he would have lost them.

And of course he was right.

Of course it's just possible that Gove is really a big fan of Harper Lee and John Steinbeck, and trying a kind of paradoxical injunction*. By removing them from the required list—forbidding and banning them, he may be making them transgressive and thus all the more attractive to adolescents...

* Introduced in Watzlawick P, Beavin J and Jackson D (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication New York; W W Norton.

On Missing a Trick

Walking the dog this afternoon, we passed the "Factory", as my partner calls it—it's the local university campus, which is currently a building site. Again. (Although that is not necessarily a Bad Thing.)

In true Poppletonian style the shuttering proclaims in almost-perfect corporate-academic gobbledygook:

But there is a buzzword missing. "Learning"?

Of course the acronym for "Academic and Student Learning Experience Enhancement Project" might have been just too apposite?