Dear subscribers to my WordPress post. I've decided to move to Substack, like everyone else! My first post is Can AI Help With Formative Assessment? You can subscribe to my personal posts in Substack here. In addition, my posts on assessment can be found on the 100% Assessment Substack.
Introducing 100% Assessment
“So, are you going to write another book?” Matt asked me as we looked through a close-to-final draft of The Next Big Thing in School Improvement. It was summer 2021, the first time we’d seen each other in person since deciding to write a book together (with Ben White) at researchED Birmingham in March 2020. …
Generative AI and the Future of Artisan Teaching
I delivered this talk at researchED London in early September 2024. After recording the session, I used ChatGPT to transform my ramblings into a written post, which still required significant editing. If only the entire process were automated—it wouldn’t have taken me four months to publish! Artisan teaching—where teachers create their own lesson plans and …
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GCSE Jeopardy and the Difficulty with Second Chances
If we were to design an assessment system focused on maximising learning, we wouldn’t create a Key Stage 3 "No Man’s Land" followed by the high-stakes pressure of GCSE jeopardy. Yet, this is precisely the experience many students face in today’s education system — a period of inconsistent focus in the early years of secondary …
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The AI Ate My Homework – A Fortuitous Opportunity to Fix the Timetable?
None of us know how the future will unfold, but two technological facts are undeniable: Large Language Models give students a new way to ‘cheat’ on homework, which undermines the learning process. Large Language Models make it much quicker to build online independent learning platforms, not least because they boost human productivity in writing code. …
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Teacher Pensions and the Future of National Pay Bargaining
There's been a lot of education policy news this week, so when a multi-academy trust employing less than 1% of the workforce announced a plan to offer an alternative pension likely to be taken up by only a relatively small fraction of their staff, it initially seemed like a minor issue. However, as I thought …
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How the trickle into elective home education could become a stream
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 …
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The allure of solving the fundamental problems of schooling
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 …
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Artificial Incentives: Will students feel motivated to work for their AI-masters?
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 …
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Five provocations on AI and schooling
“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 …
Becky Allen 