This is a shortened summary of a talk I gave at researchED Kent in June 2023. In the original talk, I introduced large language models and issues of student motivation. These are now in separate blog posts that you might want to read first (LLMs, motivation). Students who dislike school Few individuals would claim to …
Continue reading How the trickle into elective home education could become a stream
In 2021, Matt Evans, Ben White, and I co-authored "The Next Big Thing in School Improvement", a book that explores perennial policy challenges that arise when we try and fail to overcome the two fundamental problems of schooling: The Invisibility of Learning: Learning is a largely unseen process, elusive to complete measurement and understanding by …
Continue reading The allure of solving the fundamental problems of schooling
In Mr Barton’s Maths Podcast (around 3:14:00), Mark McCourt shared a view that I instinctively disagreed with. He argued that technology could never replace classroom teachers because, evolutionarily, we are predisposed to value pedagogy and learning from other humans—a concept he referred to as ‘human ontogeny’ (I’d never heard this word). While this is an …
Continue reading Artificial Incentives: Will students feel motivated to work for their AI-masters?
“The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” Albert Einstein ChatGPT-4 gave me this quote when I sought insights on …
Fifteen school data leads convene, bringing together their Heads of Science, English, History, and Maths to create shared end-of-year assessments in these four subjects. What's the impetus behind this collaborative effort? The performance of a subject department is often inferred by comparing the knowledge and skills of their students against a benchmark—usually other students. However, …
Continue reading The quest for standardisation in shared assessments
(This is a rough description of the talk I gave at ResearchED London in September 2023) Come with me twenty years into the future and try to imagine the person teaching your classes or subject at school. Would their job be similar to today's teachers? According to a recent survey by Teacher Tapp, 16% of …
Let me share a secret with you. Chat-GPT, an AI model, generated the title of this blog post. I fed it my blog text and asked it for ten possible titles. Four of them would have been a little misleading. Five were precisely correct, and yet felt clichéd or otherwise slightly unattractive to my human …
Continue reading Training the human arbiters of taste and truth
Sometimes (i.e. rarely) economic theory presents ideas that aren't intuitively obvious. One such idea is that teacher shortages are designed into our schooling system. Understanding this perspective is important if one wants to battle the government about pay. Worker strikes seem odd to most of the general public because they work in more conventional labour …
Another term, another crisis (a desperately sad one this time) and another set of solutions mooted by opposition parties and policy commentators to the perennial school inspection problem. As usual, it’s easy to jump to quick solutions by starting at “the end”. “The end” is the question of what policy triggers should be attached to …
Continue reading Ofsted inspections are (still) unreliable by design
The University of Durham’s initial teaching training provision has not been reaccredited by the Department of Education. I know nothing about the quality of this course or about the quality of their application. And yet, I want to persuade you that this is probably *a bad thing* for education. This is why. Joining the profession …
Continue reading Falling out of university and into teaching
Becky Allen 