PoetrY

Hello! You read the channel of Elena Esipova. I am very pleased that you read what I write. Your comments and likes are important to me. Enjoy reading. The article expresses my opinion exclusively. Thanks for reading...

Hello! You read the channel of Elena Esipova. I am very pleased that you read what I write. Your comments and likes are important to me. Enjoy reading. The article expresses my opinion exclusively. Thanks for reading...

Hello! You read the channel of Elena Esipova. I am very pleased that you read what I write. Your comments and likes are important to me. Enjoy reading. The article expresses my opinion exclusively...

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about whether we should be teaching children knowledge of the world or the skills to flourish within it. The debate has moved on a lot in recent years and today it’s rare to find anyone arguing against teaching knowledge, but there are many who would still advocate for a balance of knowledge and skill. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to see just how meaningless this distinction is. Knowledge and skill are two sides of the same coin. Or, to attempt...

The way ideas come to fruition is often mysterious; while we may remember consciously thinking a few things, we are unaware of all the ingredients simmering away in the pot of thought. I like the image of placing a pot on the back boiler on a very low heat and allowing flavours to develop over time. It seems, at least to me, that some of my favourite ideas have emerged in this way. Paul Carney appeared in Schools Week a few days ago, criticising my ideas about how creativity works. It says: [Didau] argues that creativity is a by-product of knowing more; the more stuff we put in, the more we have to be creative with...

As everyone already knows, Ofsted have published a draft of the new Inspection Framework which is currently undergoing a process of consultation. Amazingly, one of the most contentious aspects of the document is the definition given to learning: Learning can be defined as an alteration in long-term memory. If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned. However, transfer to long-term memory depends on the rich processes described above.[1] In order to develop understanding, pupils connect new knowledge with existing knowledge. Pupils also need to develop fluency and unconsciously apply their knowledge as skills...

Of course it’s desirable that students are able to identify problems, generate potential solutions, evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies, and then communicate with others about the value of the solutions. If you want to call this ‘creativity,’ so be it. But it may be that creativity isn’t always desirable. Kaufman and Beghetto argue in their wonderfully titled paper, In Praise of Clark Kent: Creative Metacognition and the Importance of Teaching Kids When (Not) to Be Creative, that teachers need to encourage restraint in students and that often it is much more efficient to follow well-established processes rather than trying to think of new ways to solve old problems...

In chapter 2 of my book, I discuss, David Geary’s theory of biologically primary and secondary knowledge. Human beings seem to have various universal behaviours and characteristics in common regardless of the specific culture into which they’re born. Geary’s theory suggests that such species-wide traits must have some root in evolution and he argues that the capacity to learn ‘folk knowledge’ is a biologically primary evolutionary adaption. This means that we tend to pick up the knowledge of how to interact with our environments quickly and easily through mimicry without the need for instruction...

Argument All writing – not just stories – is, by its very nature, artificial. The concept of argument examines the intentions of this ‘artificial’ (as opposed to ‘natural’ conversation) communication and is concerned with the formal structures of thought and expression. Logic, reason, persuasion are all required to communicate with clarity and force about anything we feel to be important. Part of this is developing an understanding of the three aspects of rhetoric: ethos (appeal to character) pathos (appeal to emotion) and logos (appeal to reason). Everyone uses rhetoric. Even those who profess...

For some time now I’ve been thinking about how epistemology* – how knowledge is accumulated and divvied up – in English as an academic discipline. While I’m not at all sure that I’ve accomplished anything particularly profound or useful, I’ve identified four distinct areas which I’m calling metaphor, story, argument and pattern. These concepts underlie an understanding of what knowledge is in English. They are, broadly speaking, the lenses through which literature and language can be viewed and by which meaning is made...

Over the past year or so, I’ve been doing some very informal research into students’ attitudes and opinions with some of the schools I work with on an ongoing basis. Two years ago I wrote 2 posts summarising the problems with marking and suggesting an alternative way forward: Since then I’ve been recommending that one of the ways schools can seek to reduce teachers’ work load is to move away from the expectation that teachers must write extended comments in response to children’s written work and instead move to a system of giving whole class feedback. The best counter-argument to this suggestion...

Recently, I was contacted by a school who wanted some help working on ‘deeper learning’. I asked them what they meant to which they replied, “Oh, we were hoping you’d tell us!” According to the school’s last Ofsted report, the school is not outstanding because, “Teaching is not consistently of the highest quality because deeper learning is not promoted across the curriculum”. In order to improve, the report offers the following advice: “Improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment...