Yesterday, Adam Robbins posted on Twitter an excellent thread about assessment that included this comment on Question Level Analysis (QLA). It's easy to say that QLA generally isn't a good idea (and I used to say this), but I keep encountering teachers who insist that they find analysing individual questions on a test helpful! My …
Continue reading The limited uses of question level analysis
Given the free choice between spending a day at school or at home gaming, many (most?) students would pick gaming. The gaming industry has become the master of engagement. Perhaps this isn’t relevant to educators since we have legal instruments to make schooling an act of coercion rather than persuasion. However, coercion has its limits …
Five years ago, I decided to read a book about gaming by Jane McGonigal called ‘Reality is Broken - Why games make us better and how they can change the world.’ I read this book as a non-gamer and as a sceptic that we can use the principles of gaming to create compelling learning environments …
Have you ever wondered why we let so many diverse educational approaches flourish in the English education system? Knowledge-rich approaches led by highly autonomous teachers… knowledge-rich direct instruction… collaborative and enquiry-led learning… integrated curriculum approaches… the list is infinitely long. Surely we should just develop a mega-research experiment and measure the effectiveness of approaches against …
In my last post, I made an argument that diversity of teacher instruction should be allowed to flourish in a wide variety of circumstances in schools. This is a short post to balance that perspective and give three circumstances where consistency and alignment are a good idea. The first two circumstances are obvious. If we …
Continue reading When should we force alignment in teacher practice?
In our book, The Next Big Thing in School Improvement, we have a chapter where we talk about how diverse teachers are in their beliefs, motivations and instructional practice. We decided not to write a great deal about how much diversity in teaching we felt was optimal, but it is a conversation I have repeatedly …
Continue reading How much classroom diversity should there be?
We are in the middle of a rather odd educational experiment. I said odd, because normally we run experiments in the hope of learning something new. But so far in this educational experiment, where children have received a wide variety of different distance learning ‘treatments’, we’ve done little to systematically find out how they are …
Continue reading The great education and public health experiment
Blogging is the preserve of the time-rich, and so excludes those of us currently running (in parallel) a household, a home-school for small people, and a job. However, on a conference call whilst simultaneously recording daily weather station measurements with my six year old, I realised we need a new educational theory to describe whether …
When I wrote about reforming accountability measures a few months ago, I promised I’d follow up by explaining why I don’t support any methods for ranking schools from the very worst to the very best, regardless of whether it is an attainment measure, a value-added or ‘progress’ measure or some sort of voodoo ‘contextual value-added’ …
This is an approximate transcript of the talk that Ben White and Becky Allen gave at researchED Kent on Saturday 30th November, 2019. It is a little light on references and grammatically requires improvement - sorry… we’ll try to tidy it up soon! I (Ben) am not sure if it's possible to win teaching. For …
Becky Allen 