@Emma_Turner75 I’d love to get your opinion on this from a secondary perspective. If students move between lessons every hour, are moving around in their practical subjects, surely it’s reasonable to expect them to sit in academic subjects for an hour at a time? Thoughts?
This in today's Guardian is an example of what I mean about politicians ignoring Wales & Scotland.
Alan Milburn wants to reduce youth unemployment by getting schools to focus less on exams & more on soft skills.
He doesn't mention that Wales & Scotland already do this, and have more NEETs than England.
https://t.co/C0gBbz6gac
https://t.co/Qv5s2uXUwS
@Miss_Snuffy In practical terms, what does that mean for staff you employ at your school with young children? Without before and after school care they could not do their jobs.
"I’ve been quite swept up by the autism spectrum idea, and it’s only in the past 10 years or so that I have felt things have gone too far, and very slowly I have come to say, 'No, this is not right'"
Autism expert professor Uta Frith talks to @Helen_Amass
https://t.co/jqdubV5zJT
This is such a flawed study for so many reasons - one of which is that it uses the "Guilford Alternate Uses Task" to measure creativity.
This is the test that asks you to "find new uses for a brick." You give the test to 4 year olds and they do better than 50yos and everyone goes "oh wow school destroys creativity".
🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
Creativity is NOT about new ideas.
It is about new ***AND VALUABLE*** ideas!
The "AND VALUABLE" part really matters! And the Guilford test doesn't measure that at all! It emphasises quantity, not quality.
The Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon did a lot of research on creativity and he hated this test.
He preferred to assess creativity - including the creativity of AI - by using great moments in the history of science: planetary motion; Ohm’s law of electrical conduction; Dalton’s theories of chemical reactions; the discovery of atomic and molecular weights; the conflict between the phlogisten and oxygen theories of combustion; Krebs’s explication of the synthesis of urea in living organisms.
Redo this study using those as your creativity metric and see if fidgeting helps. We'll wait.
🚨 NEW POST 🚨
‘The psychology of SEND labels’
“Receiving a diagnosis with a name and a status that medical experts validate can give children and adults a story, and an explanation, that renders their experience comprehensible.”
https://t.co/QQLmVTRMfB
NEW: Maternity pay for teachers is set to rise to 8 weeks full pay.
We covered how this impacts teachers in our long-read last yr & revealed that civil service staff get an extra 20 weeks off.
The increase is welcome, but still doesn’t come close to most other public sectors.
Sam is correct.
Also, from an assessment point of view, this whole debate reveals why rank order sometimes can be really useful.
EG a lot of the time you will hear people say "Well it's the absolute score that matters, not the rank order".
But when there is a big external shock to a system - like a pandemic! - comparing pre and post absolute scores is misleading.
Rank order is actually more useful in this situation.
In this case, yes, England's absolute scores did not change much pre & post pandemic - but in the context of almost every other country's score falling!
It's disappointing to see Phillipson cherry picking the data in the way that she does. England's schools have done really well despite years of austerity, and it's ok to say that a big chunk of that is due to the Gove reforms.
All children deserve good teaching. Some need it more than most. If support replaces thinking, it isn’t support.
Our aim must be independence.
Link below 👇
@BenRiceTeach Thanks Ben! Can I ask - what do you do for 20 minutes? I’ve been doing an hour but now thinking a shorter session might get more bums on seats
The scarcity of good evidence bases to support many support strategies for SEND students is another crisis we need to address if children are to get the targeted help they need, rather than folk medicine and good intentions.
Anyone who works in a secondary school will know that this isn't true. I don't know of a school that could do this even if it wanted to: https://t.co/u42aRcwfev
As a Labour voter working in education, I’ve wanted to write about the Schools Bill for a while. I’m worried about what it includes. But I’m even more worried about where it’s come from, and what it says about those making decisions in education.
https://t.co/YewS1L73GK