Dr. Anthony Hoyle

Assistant Principal - Assessment, Data & Timetabling | Microbiologist turned Science Teacher 🔬| Lover of old cars 🚗

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

Live model marking in action. I supplied a weak answer which we analysed as a class using the visualiser whilst verbalising my thought process. Pupils then produced their own improved answers & peer marked their work. Excellent work was celebrated under the visualiser #edutwitter

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

What a great read! The mention of 'APP' grids had me hyperventilating, what a logistical nightmare they were, having had firsthand experience of launching these at the time 🤯 Also, the phrase 'doing the same thing again & again and expecting a different result springs to mind 😵‍💫

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

What impact will the government's new education policies have on standards?

https://t.co/ttEgfB1m6A

[Adam Boxer @adamboxer1]

I am going to try and explain my position on terms like oracy, metacognition, adaptive teaching and inclusive teaching.

These things are all desirable. We want students who can speak articulately. We want them to be able to be creative problem solvers. We want them to be and to feel included in our teaching, regardless of their starting points or particular needs. We want teachers to adapt and respond to students as their knowledge grows and develops.

I don't think any of that is controversial, but it's like saying "we want teachers who can teach" - ok, sure, but what does it mean? What are the things we want people to actually do in the classroom?

When you tell me my classroom should be an "oracy" classroom, what does that mean? What do you want me to do differently? Debates? Group work? Hot seats? Turn and Talk? Cold Call? Warm Call? No hands up? All hands up? Students showing proof of listening? Explicit vocabulary instruction? Expecting full sentences? Policing pronunciation? Teaching tonal variation? Encouraging humour?

Everything in this list can -and has!- been called "oracy". And the problem is that some are good ideas, and some are bad ideas. Even the ones which might be good ideas have specific parameters. Subject or disciplinary constraints. Lesson phases. Curricular placements. Behaviour management.

So you take a big fluffy thing that nobody could ever disagree with because it's obviously good, but then people do stuff in class that is often a bad idea or doesn't work, but it's fine, because it's oracy, and Oracy Is Good, Obviously.

The same is true of everything else on the list. Without specific definitions of what they actually mean, and what you then do in the classroom, you are absolutely 100% going to run into big trouble. It's logically obvious, but also empirical. I've seen this stuff in schools, where teachers are doing things that make no sense, and I ask why and they say because of oracy, or adaptive teaching or whatever.

And then none of that is even to mention assessment. How do we tell if a student has good "oracy" or "metacognition"? How do we *really* ascertain if a teacher is "inclusive" or "adaptive"? We can't, and all we can do is look at the specific things they are doing, which brings us right back round to the start.

Sometimes, I think we should ditch the terms altogether. Sometimes I don't, and think instead we should be specific about what we mean. People ask me to deliver training about "adaptive teaching", and I say "sure" and then just talk about checking for understanding, mini-whiteboards, thresholds for reteach etc. I'll rarely mention the term. Occasionally I will, and just say "...and all of these are critical components of what is commonly called adaptive teaching".

Either way, just chucking the terms out there is almost definitely going to cause harm and weird, weird things. How do I know? Because I've seen it. Lots. And I don't like it, because ultimately it just leaves teachers confused and cynical, and students worse off.

[Tom Bennett OBE @tombennett71]

This super myth buster from Steplab about evidence-informed approaches to SEN/ additional needs provision. Summary: lots of things we sometimes think are useful, have no evidence to back them up, or weak evidence. In some cases they may even harm. Fidget spinners, Zones of Regulation, Mindfulness…just because we want something to work doesn’t mean that it does.

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

This week it was my pleasure to return to @TrinityAcademyL & meet the @TALMFL team. The same calm, focused, yet warm atmosphere exists across the school. Catherine & @Hancol190216 were gracious & knowledgeable hosts, which allowed us to walk away with a plethora of ideas. 🙏

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

A huge thank you to Cory and his amazing MFL team @CathedralMfl. Our visit was eye-opening and inspirational in equal measure. The outcomes you generate for the children in your care are nothing short of remarkable! We've walked away with so many ideas 💡 🙌 @TrinityAcademyC

[Adam Boxer @adamboxer1]

Lots of behaviour advice is bad.

FLMOP isn't. It's a concrete and tangible strategy that any teacher can use to improve behaviour in their classrooms.

Read and share 🙏🙏🙏

https://t.co/HmOm4nDCLi

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

A few thoughts on Lucy Powell's article in Times about vocational education.

Is the UK's NEET problem a direct "consequence and legacy" of Gove's education reforms, as she says?

Unlikely. Wales did the total opposite of Gove's reforms and has more NEETs (& a faster increase).

[Pritesh Raichura @Mr_Raichura]

This represents such a fundamental misunderstanding about learning, assessment and thinking. These sentences further betray @LucyMPowell’s underestimation of the importance of teaching & testing knowledge well. This is extremely worrying for the future of schools in England.

[Tom Bennett OBE @tombennett71]

Neurodiversity is a common term in education- and society. But it lacks precision both in definition and usage. And that really matters in the real world.

For a start 'neurodiverse' is not a clinically recognised or used term, eg in the DSM-5. It was coined by the sociologist Judy Singer in 1998, as an advocacy term for people with ASD and very closely related conditions.

'Neurodivergent' describes an individual whose brain functions differently from the majority. Clinically recognized examples include autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome, and others. These are formal neurodevelopmental diagnoses.

Crucially this means people who have been born with a life-long condition. It does *not* include people with anxiety disorders, or dementia, or PTSD, or depression etc. It doesn't mean 'everything'.

There is no diagnosis 'neurodiverse'. It is a purely vernacular term, with multiple meanings depending on who is using it and who you talk to. Clinicians diagnose specific conditions, like ASD.

And of course even clinically diagnosable conditions like ASD, ADHD are subject to intense debates about how the category is defined, is it too broad or narrow etc.

Diagnostic criteria can vary from country to country, LA to LA, school to school. And so can the response strategies. What a lot of people outside of either the education or clinical sectors don't realise is that this is an area that is crying out for high quality research, clarity, transparency, and honesty about what works, and when, and when it doesn't work. We are often talking about very different things when we use the same words carelessly.

The common use of 'neurodiverse' matters; it is often heard in advocacy discourse, the media, etc. but frequently misunderstood.

It doesn't mean 'a little bit different'. We are all different from one another. People who claim to be 'a little bit autistic' may very well simply misunderstand that some of the characteristics they identify in that category are also perfectly normal-spectrum qualities that many people have. Liking your house to be tidy doesn't mean that you are neurodivergent. Being a stickler for details doesn't mean you have OCD. If the term means 'everything' then it means 'nothing.'

It has become fashionable for people to self diagnose and self-refer as neurodivergent, even in the face of little evidence. Because it confers, for some, a sense of being special, different, or interesting. And of course in a sector where we rightly seek to support people/ students who need reasonable accommodations in order to promote inclusivity, the *incorrect* assignation of an unmet need leads to unfair advantages over those who do not receive those accommodations.

A small but growing group of activists now campaign on the platform that almost any mental health difference indicates neurodivergence, but this is a huge definitional drift, without any clinical basis. You see a lot of this activism in education, often perfectly well-meant. Singer herself would have disagreed strongly with this.

The reason this matters is that if we treat all mental health problems, all behavioural disorders, all learning problems, as having lifelong neurological foundations - which they absolutely do not- then we create a narrative that indicates all individuals face insurmountable obstacles in modifying the behaviours associated with the condition. Some children identified as dyslexic, for example, are simply deficient in high quality reading instruction.

But if you treat every child that behaves unsuccessfully in the classroom as being neurodivergent, then you create a circumstance where we treat them as the victims of irresistible compulsions, rather than human beings with the ability to learn to take responsibility, to grow, to change their habits and attitudes. It is also a substantial abandonment of our commitment to only use evidence info strategies with children- especially the most vulnerable.

In other words, not all forms of SEND are indications of neurodivergent conditions. And most certainly aren't.

Sadly, as in so many fields, many of the strategies recommended for children with any form of SEND, including forms of neurodivergence, lack substantial or credible evidence bases. There is a lot of well-meant money being spent on approaches that simply have no basis in research, impact or other outcomes.

This is an area that cries out for high quality evidence bases, and evidence informed approaches to support students with genuine need, not activism that leads to treating all children as incapable. But the energy of that activism, married to evidence, could produce something spectacular for those who need help the most, and I hope we see this happen in the future.

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

@LucyMPowell Been there, done this in the early 2000s. Nearly every child in my old (average) comprehensive used to acheive an A* for their coursework as they were drilled and prepped so much by their teachers. They didn't actually learn anything 🙄

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

@Yorkshire_Steve What school is this out of interest? I'd love to visit. Thanks

[Yorkshire Steve @Yorkshire_Steve]

It's really telling that, having inspected around 250 secondary schools, that @Ofstednews have yet to identify a single school with low or very low levels of prior attainment that have achievement that is worthy of others coming to see how they manage it.

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

@adamboxer1 @MrARobbins It's great! Make sure you watch Believe Me on ITV next. Harrowing but gripping TV. How did the Met get away with it!?

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

@MrFletcher1205 I would love a copy but I'm unable to DM you for some reason. Can you DM me and I will reply? Thank you

[Huddersfield Town @htafc]

Double= done! ✅

A second piece of silverware in less than a week for @HTAFCWomen, with tonight’s result confirming their status as @SHCFA CHAMPIONS! 🤩

UTT💙

#htafc | #htafcw

[Huddersfield Town Women @HTAFCWomen]

Winners win 🥇

#htafc | #htafcw

[Sophie Woolford @MissSWoolford]

An exciting opportunity for anyone interested in RS leadership. An outstanding school, with a large RS team, working collectively with the wider Humanities team - every child sits the AQA RS GCSE. Feel free to drop me a message.
https://t.co/m6BpWPGJc9

[Tom Bennett OBE @tombennett71]

Completely agree. Developing minds need interaction, challenge, and play, not monotonous distraction.

[Dr. Anthony Hoyle @HoyleDoc]

@Mouhssin_Ismail @MrBottomley_ this one?