A famous and brilliant passage of writing about effective teaching is called, ‘Imagine Three Teachers’. Written in 1991 by cognitive scientists Scardamalia and Bereiter, the passage is a thought experiment that compares three classroom teachers: Teacher A, Teacher B and Teacher C. The strength of the passage is that the Teachers appear at first glance […]
When Teacher A, Teacher B and Teacher C work from home Read More »
And so Coronavirus brings Online Learning and the Virtual School into the spotlight. Up to this point, our schools have clung on dearly to their bricks and mortar tradition. A physical centre, a place of learning, a workplace for teachers, a social centre, a community hub. Assembly rooms, science laboratories, music practice rooms, tech facilities,
The talk is everywhere of Online Learning Read More »
You have to enjoy this. The BBC reports that there have now been 30 years of UK exam results where girls have consistently out-performed boys. I can’t claim the credit (or blame?) but I do remember when I joined the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) in the early 1980s, that the future was in the air.
Doctoring the results Read More »
In my series of blogs about the pedagogy of the Middle East, I have been pleased to come across McKinsey’s study of the 2015 PISA data sets. PISA has a large database of student results from around the world, based on its regular international testing rounds. I don’t quite agree with all of McKinsey’s method and
Mindframe and Teacher Direction Read More »
In my blog about Changing the Pedagogy of the Middle East, I tried to express my great frustration at the efforts being made to improve our teaching and learning in the region. I dislike the way that some educators bring to the region a ‘fashionable pedagogy’ that is not even supported by evidence in the west.
Baby steps to changing the pedagogy of the Middle East Read More »
As I travel I like to ask school chains, what are your educational assets? If the answer is, “it’s our teachers”, I worry about all that high turnover in the international field. If the answer is “mainly, it’s our schools”, I worry about the missed opportunities. You see, I have commented before about the Copernican shift that
What are your educational assets? Read More »
Interesting times for GEMS, the international schools chain with a customised school model at almost every price. The news of their successful move on Ma’arif in Saudi Arabia, another school chain, is out and now they can enjoy having a large Acquisition under their belt. I almost added, “at last” because, in their sixty years
GEMS cutting a new path Read More »
Last week, I visited Singapore where my friends at the Global Schools Foundation (GSF) have built a new ‘smart’ school. I have known GSF for 7 or 8 years now and they are a special group of people. They oversee a fast-moving and energetic school chain that has schools throughout Asia, including Japan which is
Our Smart, Digital Future Read More »
I want to continue on a theme I started recently. You see, there is a not a simple route to improving pedagogy and we can do a lot of damage by suggesting that there is. An allegory will help and I am sorry for the inevitable generalisation. With global pedagogy, it is best to recognise
The Three Villages Read More »
Throughout my career as a teacher and education leader, I have been trying to understand teachers’ training better, because you would think that the profession would be good at it; but it isn’t. It was refreshing to read Lorna Eagle’s foreword to this very good New Zealand study by Helen Timperley and others. Lorna points
Teachers have to learn too Read More »
