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 …
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?
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 