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Long has been the promise that technology will ease workload, but, as Damien Hinds acknowledges with all too often disappointing results. However, a recent OECD survey of 2496 of England’s teachers found that teachers who regularly allow pupils to use ICT for project and/or classwork, also report working 4.6 hours per week less than colleagues (Sellen, 2016). Perhaps…

So the story goes…  Once a philosophy exam is reported to have asked students ‘What is courage?’ One student is said to have written only two words saying ‘This is.’ Whether true or not,  how much to write in an exam, or indeed for any report, is a question causing much anxiety.  In today’s high pressured…

Change is opportunity, right? But what enables people to take advantage, as opposed to being swept aside – as sadly some will, in the coming technological storm? We focus on 21st Century Skills – and rightly so.  But let us not forget to focus on even more fundamental, vital prerequisites; those things that enable and…

When children come up with the right answer, is it because they actually understand / comprehend the reasons why their answer is right? Do the highest scoring students actually understand the concepts behind their success? Frequently not, it turns out. When asked “could you light a bulb with a battery and one wire?”, even at…

With over 14 million views,  Shawn Achor is on to something – he’s really caught people’s attention. Put simply, he turns the happiness paradigm on it’s head.  Instead of success making us happy,  he shows how happiness makes us successful. The good news is that there are easy ways to build and strengthen happiness.

Why is it that complex things – like learning to drive a car – can be much easier and quicker to manage than, say learning a vocabulary in a foreign language? It’s because the brain has different memory systems. Our brains weren’t designed to remember vast quantities of factual knowledge.  Hard wiring this knowledge is…

Project based learning is learning by: Designing Collaborating Making Improving and refining Experimentation and Inquiry Despite this type of learning going back centuries, it doesn’t seem particularly in vogue. Instead we have a system which is accused of being too much ‘work today’, ‘jam tomorrow’ … Has learning fallen in to a ‘linear trap’? Take…

Peer Instruction has been getting rave reviews. Eric Mazur, a Harvard Professor of Physics, holds that learning proceeds at (up to) triple it’s normal rate!  And, with very little input from him… he’s even known students to feel it unfair that they’re doing all the work. How does it work? Students must do prep work…

Singapore, Australia, Shanghai, Korea, Finland and Ontario – What do top performing education systems all have in common?  One thing really stands out. One thing which would be easily transplanted, at almost no cost. It is the power of ‘Not Yet’ as Carole Dweck calls it… a pervasive belief that failure is not permanent and…

A neat bit of secondary data research appears to show that stress kills.  No surprise there, except to say, there’s a catch. Keller et al. (2012) looked back at a 1998 study, and matched 28,753 participants’ mortality against both their stress levels and their attitudes to stress. It would seem that being stressed, and believing…