Ever experienced with silent classrooms when asking open-ended questions? This excerpt from Chapter 3 of Teaching Meaning breaks down why “guess what’s in my head” questions fail and how to fix them. There’s a common…
Despite the perennial debate on whether teachers should “just tell” or not, both sides of the discussion tend to accept constructivism. Constructivism is a stance on learning which broadly says that students construct meaning in…
The knowledge-understanding problem is perennially debated. Many sense a difference and argue that we should ensure students learn knowledge and understand it. But others claim that understanding doesn’t exist beyond what you know. The issue…
Education is caught in a debate over autonomy and cohesion. On one side, teachers are demanding professional autonomy: the right to discretion over their lessons. Others are demanding “consistency” through rigid structures and scripts. Neither…
When Engelmann developed his popular Direct Instruction1, his principle was that students were capable of learning anything. This seems like a good rule to follow; it removes blame from the student. If they didn’t manage…
Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking information theory focused on getting a message from A to B. It’s now one the major underlying theories of the computers we use every day. Its principles also tell us something fascinating…
I’ve attended a couple of training sessions as a teacher in which the trainer would ask “check for listening” questions. They’d tell us things and then ask a question to someone chosen at random. “Seriously!?”…
Blood glucose homeostasis is a classic concept for teaching about feedback loops that drive stability. But, like all of biology, there are so many new structures and technical terms students may not see the wood…
Surface area to volume ratio is a fundamental concept that keeps appearing throughout biology. It’s best to get it right the first time. Many times, however, students end up memorising ↑SA is good and ↓SA…
Recently, a claim has emerged: if leaders are frustrated with teaching outcomes, the fault isn’t the teacher, but the specific techniques (like turn and talk) they’ve been trained to use. And the proposed solution? Swap…
PowerPoint was a central tool in the community of teachers I was inducted into. Almost everyone I knew used it to develop their lessons (or at least obtain a pre-made one). It was at once…
Around 2012ish, a new movement rode into the UK (school) educational scene. It came with the banner of “evidence-based”, to counter the previous movement. I’m not writing to contend whether the movement was right or…
Stafford Beer, a systems theorist, regularly claimed that a system’s purpose is what it does. There was no point claiming, he thought, that its purpose was what it consistently failed to do. In this post,…
Experimental design is an uncontroversial component of science curricula. It helps students learn methodology, how to spot flaws in arguments, and, partly, how scientists create knowledge. Yet, much of what we teachers see in experimental…
All systems exist in a constant co-adaptation with their environment. The upper secondary sections (KS4) of England’s schools are continually adapting to their communities, the government’s inspection body (e.g. Ofsted), and standardised exams (e.g. GCSEs)….