Maths teacher. MEd. Studying Ed Doctorate in Mathematical cognition. 👨🏫 Resource developer @AddvanceMaths ➕ Interested in CogSci, SoL.
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Joined March 2018
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As we get ready for a new school year, I hope @AddvanceMaths can support your students.
We 100s of free resources to help students revise.
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‘Oh to have a wisdom with no basis in reality’
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100%. Have received more than my share of shrill invective on this point. (Paging @ian_cushing) Mostly it’s university academics who are paragons of correct grammar themselves who rant about the paternalism of correction. I have never had a parent tell me they didn’t want their child to be able to use standard English. I suggested to Ian that he speak to parents of actual children but he couldn’t be troubled. Oh to have a wisdom that needs no basis in reality.
Will Mac retweeted
Somehow we've reached a point in education where:
- teaching kids explicitly is controversial
- academic rigour is treated as a threat to student wellbeing
- memorizing math facts is discouraged or considered unnecessary
- practice is dismissed as "drill and kill"
Low expectations are not kindness, and nothing hurts someone's confidence more than falling further behind every year.
Will Mac retweeted
Skills statements are making a comeback in England.
This approach to assessment is one of the major differences between a knowledge-based and a skills-based curriculum.
It’s a clear sign that the current government are unpicking the successful education reforms of the last 15 years.
substack.nomoremarking.com/p…
‘Understanding is remembering in disguise’
@DTWillingham
This paper is closely related to Willingham’s original insight, but clarifies the theory. Worth reading.
Will Mac retweeted
That's why I think opportunity cost is the single most important idea in school improvement. Every hour our teachers—and our students—spend on one thing is an hour they don't have to spend on something else. And this matters most of all for students who find learning hardest...
Will Mac retweeted
One of the things that always bothers me is the fact that many ppl think "green = nature" without any consideration for anything else
An ecologically dead field instead of an affordable supermarket for residents, yeah well done you're really saving the planet
Excited to be presenting my first Webinar live on 10th November, 5pm UAE time.
Hope you can join!
forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/…
Will Mac retweeted
Amidst all the talk about oracy (and indeed inclusion) one thing that seems to get missed is that too many girls in too many classrooms aren’t talking.
Did you know they get asked fewer questions, have shorter wait times & get interrupted more?
Probably best to start with that.
Will Mac retweeted
This needs to go. Implied accusations of prejudice should never be injected into conversations about pedagogy.
Whatever the intent, the impact has been a weaponization of SJ language to promote techniques that are enormously *inequitable*.
This may be my naivety, but aren’t modern languages objectively more important than classical languages?
What is the real argument for spending curriculum time on Latin over French?
More than happy to be educated on the matter if I’m missing something 😊👍
Recommended read. Insightful.
Major takeaway: neuroscience is hard to apply to instructional design.
Don’t measure brain electro-stuff in Ed research, directly measure behavioural change as this is the most direct indicator of having learned something.
Most high-leverage improvements in Ed are unsexy.
They’re really boring dinner time conversations (I should know, I tried to rant about it before).
It takes impressive leadership (Gibb) to remain focussed on the things that matter without shiny distractions.
Will Mac retweeted
What would my priorities be?
1. develop teacher subject knowledge
2. support schools with discipline + culture
3. improve training in explicit instruction
4. get kids off tech
5. develop robust pastoral support that allows pupils with needs to eventually thrive without it. 5/
Will Mac retweeted
I'm getting really worried now. We need to focus on improving the basics of numeracy, reading and writing. Schools that were set up with oracy at their heart failed embarrassingly. Where is the oracy success story?
Education secretary @LucyMPowell says oracy will be given ‘equal status’ with reading and writing in the revised national curriculum
tes.com/magazine/news/genera…
Provocation*:
The single biggest instructional step we can do to develop deep understanding is to gain large amounts of domain knowledge.
Other steps are necessary, but this is the highest leverage step.
*(ive thought about this for 7.9 seconds, not sure where I stand)
This makes sense on the surface, but my issue with it is that it hand waves the schema formation process.
Forming conceptual understanding is not merely an automatic function of gaining enough facts.
Saying "understanding relies on memory" is not the same as saying "learning is memory." The first is well backed up by the research, the second is a logical leap. The word "well connected" in the second sentence of this tweet is doing a lot of work.
(Unless, as I have said elsewhere, we mean something different by memory. If memory means any change in the brain, then yes, of course, saying learning is memory is a tautology. But if we mean the colloquial definition, that memory consists of facts you remember, then this statement goes far beyond the research.)
The processes by which we form complex schema and develop our own ideas are often different from the processes by which we learn isolated facts.
We need both.