Simon Baddeley

The Real Simon Baddeley!
Owner of @LiteracyEngine | English Teacher | Teaching and Learning Geek | Visualiser Master Practitioner | Lego Super Fan

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

As you may know, I was hacked last week and lost access to the @SimBadd64 account. Can I ask you to please block that account and follow me here instead? Reposts appreciated.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

There is a massive conflict of ideology here. Any school using @Steplab_co to improve teaching and learning must be aware that one of their key players believes apps are the future of education and teachers should be guides at the side not teachers. Very mixed messaging here.

[Peps @PepsMccrea]

🚨 Some personal news:

I’ve joined @Alphaschool to help lead their Learning Science team.

A thread on why, the team, open roles, and your questions...

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@helenrey In a previous life about 10 years ago I worked with Microsoft when they bought Minecraft and embedded the Education Edition into O365. There were 8 "Mentors" across the world that built lessons and trained schools. I was one of the 8. Long time ago.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

This is the first thread I've seen from anyone involved with Alpha that seems sincere and not driven by hyperbolic PR. I was probably most surprised to see Mark on the staff list but this reasoning makes perfect sense. I still disagree fundamentally with Alpha but wish Mark well.

[Mark Enser 🌍 @EnserMark]

@adamboxer1 For me, it just started as any other freelance gig - being largely off X for a few years I didn't know much about Alpha - I was checking/improving geography courses, which is what I do for lots or organisations/institutions

1/?

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@Avivsh Education is a societal problem? In what sense?

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

I'm not sure what societal problems the top 1% of earners who can afford to send their kids to an Alpha school are experiencing but we can rest assured that their experts are well paid for solving them.

[Aviv Sheriff @Avivsh]

@DrWHKitchen Heaven forbid we pay experts well to solve societal problems.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@Avivsh What societal problems are you solving?

[Emma Turner FCCT @Emma_Turner75]

🧵 Solely with my parent hat on, I don’t really want my children taught by/through an app, even if it’s only a couple of hours of a school’s day. I want them to have an apprenticeship in being human - learning human things from humans.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@DaisyJonesbhua @helenrey I think it will be a tough sell to UK schools. But this current government worry me. If they get a sniff of it they'll sink millions into it and we'll all be guiding from the side.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@stoneman_claire Imagine being a school subscribed to one of those CPD programmes.

"We are excited to be embedding these strategies across our practice... just don't search the owners and writers on social media as they are now less excited by them."

That's a hard sell to any staff.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@helenrey I did wonder how much geography he would be consulting on in a US school. I remember being completely baffled by US schooling when I first did some EdTech work with US schools.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

One of my favourite things to teach is a proper guided reading lesson exploring a book with a group. Modelling prosody, guiding interaction, and removing barriers live with learners are skills every teacher should master.

[Greg Ashman @greg_ashman]

Whatever else it is, Alpha School is extremely bad for the global traditionalist education cause. Those who dislike explicit teaching and a knowledge-rich curriculum can point to the people joining Alpha and make all the obvious points. We stand diminished.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@primarypercival @MrARobbins I have 3 books, some Ikea shelves and a plastic plant you can borrow for a picture of your library if you like.

[Paul Kirschner @New_Old_Paul]

This is an incredibly eloquent discussion of @Alphaschool and its underlying philosophy and how at odds it is with what the ‘learning scientists’ (air quotes intended) were espousing less than a year ago. Thanks @adamboxer1 🙏❤️

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

The best AI would be an admin assistant:

"OK AI. Add Merit points for students X, Y, Z and text home to tell them.

Also set a detention for A and alert their tutor to remind them.

Can you print 35 copies of the poem I need for Period 5 as well and set it in B's Classroom too?"

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@adamboxer1 I never got on board with that treasury tag/hole punch nonsense either.

[Adam Boxer @adamboxer1]

I think lots of people are confused about this Alpha business. When you see someone who has advocated for a specific set of ideas for a long time go on to join or lead an organisation that seems completely antithetical to those ideas, then it's reasonable to be confused.

Yesterday, I briefly discussed this with @PepsMccrea, and I argued that Alpha represents educational progressivism with a veneer of "learning science" (or what we have normally called "cognitive science" in England). Here, I'd like to expand a bit on that. I'm not going to cite every claim, because this has been part of common discourse here for at least a year (as long as Carl [and I think Peps]) have been working for Alpha.

First, instrumentalism. In England, educational traditionalists (like Carl and Peps) argued that education and the education system is not designed merely to prepare students for the world of work. Instead, it is there to pass on cultural heritage, and knowledge for its own sake. Progressives on the other hand argued that it was more about "21st century skills" and railed against a system that "failed to prepare students for jobs that hadn't been invented yet."

It's clear that Alpha is built in this vein. It runs courses on entrepreneurialism, media training, startup founding etc etc. NONE of their marketing that I have seen is about the joy of learning or being inculcated into a cultural or intellectual tradition.

Second, long term learning. Proponents on this site have boasted about how students finish courses in a matter of days. One of the very first things I learnt from the traditionalist school was that learning is a process that occurs over the long term, and that short term performance means little.

Third, "time back". Alpha uses an app called Timeback, which broadly - in my understanding - means that if students do well on their 2 hours of AI-enabled academics, they get more time to do other stuff. This again emphasises that academic education is something to be "got through" so we can get to the fun stuff: Navy SEAL training, social media, horse riding and...entrepreneurship.

Fourth, in a similar vein, extrinsic motivation. Alpha has heavily pursued gamification and an extrinsic reward system. Again, English traditionalists used Self Determination Theory as a key plank of their arguments about schools and education, and extrinsic motivation as an educational lever has been widely derided based on simple findings from the SDT literature.

Fifth, personalisation. Every so often someone here said we should teach shakespeare through rap or dance or whatever. Traditionalists thought this was awful. The content is the content, and it is our job to take students beyond their horizons, not pander to their narrow set of cultural experiences. And yet this is exactly what Alpha does. Writing lessons are based on students' particular interests, so Harry Potter and minecraft. Alpha students have spoken about how Romeo and Juliet etc is outdated and boring. Again, very much at odds with what proponents have said in the past.

Sixth, trashing the traditional model. We suffered our way through Shift Happens and Schools on Trial (or whatever it was called) which went on and on about factory models and Gradgrind and sage on the stage etc. And yet Alpha promotional materials do the same.

Seventh, children on social media. This was the most surprising thing this year, where students at Alpha schools were tasked with setting up an X account and getting a certain number of followers. This is obviously a safeguarding concern, and if an English school leader did this it is likely they would be out of a job pretty quickly. Again, opposing social media and teens on phones has been an important part of the traditionalist movement.

Eighth, it's an experiment. This is a kind of trial - "we are trying to figure out if we can do this." There's a couple of problems here. First, children aren't guinea pigs (even if their parents are rich). Second, trialling it in the best possible circumstances (i.e. a rich private school) seems like a good idea because the risk is low, but it's also why it won't scale. Anyone who has tried to roll out educational change knows that there is an "adoption curve" and a chasm between your early adopters and everyone else. What works for one categorically doesn't work for the other. This is basically as close to an iron clad law of business and scaling tech as you can get. But also, if you really wanted to make change and improve the lives of children globally, you'd focus on the things we know work because we've seen them work! Everyone on that team knows about Michaela, Mercia, Ark King Solomon, West London Free School, Mossbourne, TTA and more. Schools that do incredible things for underprivileged students with a fraction of the budget. High academic expectations. Expert teachers. Brilliant behaviour. Knowledge-rich curriculums. If we really care about scaling educational solutions, let's start there.

While we're at it, the focus of the traditional movement was always on disadvantaged students. What can we do for them? How can we help them? How do we serve those who need it the most? Alpha is so obviously not that. It's a hyper-expensive school for the children of elites. Of course, those students need educating too, but dedicating so much time and energy and intellectual capital to them seems at odds with everything that has come before.

Ninth, and it's going to be hard to say this without being catty, but respect for academia and qualifications. I want to be super clear that I massively respect the intellectual acumen of people like Carl, Peps, Becky and others. But, they are not "learning scientists." To the best of my knowledge, nobody on the team has produced original research in that particular field. Again, that doesn't mean they are not worth listening to or whatever - but part of the traditional revolution in England was discovering these researchers who had made incredible findings about learning and the brain, within the confines of the peer-review and scientific inquiry method. I know that arguments from authority aren't empirical, but being able to rely on people like Kirschner, Willingham, Dunlosky and others was critical to the success of the traditional movement.

Tenth, transferable skills. One of the founding principles of educational traditionalism is that you cannot teach generic or transferable skills like "Leadership" or "resilience", but the Alpha website and promotional materials are full of this stuff.

Eleventh, track record. Alpha people have been talking about how fantastic their content is for at least a year, but we are now told that it is just "ok." Obviously most of it is proprietary, but someone posted some physics stuff last week and I thought it was pretty poor. Michael Pershan has blogged similarly, and Dan Meyer (!) has pointed to the objective data from a school that adopted Alpha and ended up doing worse.

Twelfth, similar - ratification. Part of why England has succeeded is that we have objective metrics like standardised assessments and progress 8 that allow us to test the claims of schools and educationalists. Alpha has no such metrics, and instead we need to take their word for it that they are causing "2x learning." It's a surprise to see people who have been part of the positivist and outcomes-led policy movement wanting to be involved in this kind of non-verifiable model.

Thirteenth, real books, but as a totem standing for traditionalism. A number of people have asked if Alpha students read real books. On paper. Great books. There hasn't been much of an answer, beyond a picture of a library. Ok, books are important, but they aren't really my point here. My point is that there is a romanticism around traditional education. Something that goes beyond the petty mechanics of pedagogy, and taps into something social and cultural about learning. That we are one link in a long chain of transmission, a chain which cherishes books not because of a fascination with bleached wood pulp, but because of what they represent: our ability to transcend the narrow confines of our lives and swim in the streams of collective human intellectual endeavour. Nothing I've seen at Alpha tells me there's anything like that idealism. Instead, it strikes me as a desiccated and hollowed-out vision of education, where students learn not from another human, but from an AI-generated screen.

It doesn't surprise me that some people are interested in Alpha. It seems exciting and innovative as a business model. But it does surprise me that THESE people are interested in it. I harbour no ill will towards them, and as I've said I respect their work. I hope this comes across as respectful and measured. But it's no surprise that people are surprised.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

They say the public sector should look to the private sector for best practice.

Exhibit A:

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Logitech gives all 7,000 employees a paid day off to play video games ahead of GTA 6's November 19 launch.

[Simon Baddeley @SimBadd18]

@kutluokan The key test is, when they step away from the app, do they remember the maths or the pet?

[Brad Busch @BradleyKBusch]

I went to visit some Alpha schools yesterday.

I spoke to students, principals, the learning scientists and the people developing their apps.

Here are my reflections…🧵