Insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting different results so what's going to change?

When I started work as an adult in further education, I realised a very simple idea which gets to the core of what Daisy is saying here - when I was writing university essays, the more I understood the subject, the more knowledge I had - the 'easier' it was to write a decent essay. In other words, the benefit was the work I had done to commit ideas and concepts into my long term memory.

Very true.

Formative assessment is a simple concept. It involves three steps: eliciting evidence of student learning; interpreting that evidence; and using that evidence to move the learning forward. Better to call this the ‘ regulation of learning’ which is something that Black and William would have done in their 1998 papers had they paid more attention to the French speaking research on regulation which had been in full swing since the 1970s. The reason formative assessment ‘hasn’t worked’ is simply because the whole process is so simple that it is simply good teaching. I recommend that anyone watching this video read the work of Philippe Perrenoud who responded beautifully (and slightly patronisingly) to Black and William’s papers from 1998. His best stuff only seems available in French, however. Bonne chance!

physiognomy check

Fantastic presentation of the problem. I would definitely subscribe to the speaker's thinking. I always say theta there are elements that need to be remembered. I am always worried ( I have seen this happen) that PBL can result in very poor, superficial, biased results But, as an experienced teacher, I am also worried that this could finally result in discrete item teaching and testing without a clear relationship - as has been happening in my field for many years. I think the challenge will be to connect both: deliberate practice without losing sight of the final objectives.

Very interesting and engaging content! Thank you.

I find the dichotomising of models such a tired problem. "Struggle doesn't lead to learning; instead, we must memorise processes." Same claim is made about baseball and basketball players, etc. "Don't play games with broad practice; instead focus on improving minute weaknesses." But how do we find a weakness? By playing the game and seeing where we struggle. Drills are very valuable, but we have to know what to drill. A standardised curriculum just places items in order and drills them one by one. A more effective approach is to put learners in a contextual environment, observe their performance, identify weaknesses then implement drills and other practices to improve their performance. I hope this sounds like I'm stating the obvious!

The analogy to Football is a perfect demonstration of why the education system is flawed. Claim: If we want our players to be good at football, we should delay their access to playing football matches. This takes the concept of a sport, engaged in with passion and for enjoyment, and turns it into a mechanical system to be optimised. It's quite likely that exclusively running drills and delaying matches could lead to heightened skill, but this ignores what people enjoy about playing the sport... Back to education: we've ignore the possibility of learners engaging with learning out of interest and focus instead on optimising their performance for testing scenarios.

There's a lot here. Some great, some not so great. But I question the claim made early on that Skills based learning (a curriculum organised by skills instead of academic subjects) is the dominant model in education... Can somebody show me a school in the UK (since that's where the speaker is based) where this is the case? I have yet to see a formal, mainstream school that doesn't send kids to Maths class and English class and Science class and PE, etc. Seems to me she's describing the traditional, standard model that probably 90% of schools around the whole world use, and then pretending it is a fringe concept.

Jane Manzone was my teacher.

With respect to the chess example, instead think of people being asked to memorize lists of letters. If the list of letters is given as words, the letters will be easier to recall compared to lists of randomly distributed strings of letters. The Grand-masters don't store thousands of chess positions, what they do is "read" the position, whereby the different positions of pieces spell different words, that is, a meaning is conveyed. When I have a word for something the individual letters that spell that word are no longer seen as independent entities, my mind prioritizes the "meaning' over individual letters. That's what the master chess players are really doing.

Such an expert and yet you only taught for two years. I suppose this is why you rely so heavily on other people's research in Seven Myths of Education. It's a great book but your delivery is dreadful.

Critical thinking is hopefully a skill To enjoy thinking is the aim

With

Very interesting topic to deal with

Very interesting topic the teachers should think about

Hegel had a point. There is so much more to history than meets the eye at first glance & A.C. Grayling is so very good at it.

Difficult debate to have because questioning the sacred cow of inclusion makes the questioner look like a bad person. Too many arguments are made on moral grounds, which is not appropriate for a an honest debate.

Pretty lame discussion from a bunch of traditional teachers.

Inclusion does not work. Lately in New Brunswick we have been trying to find why and if we should continue forcing inclusion on people. Bringing kids with problems in school will evidently bring problems in the school. My child's class has over 6 special needs students. I follow the curriculum and can see that we are far behind. These special needs children also have bad behavior. More than once my child has came home crying or with marks ..because some kids are toooo exited..they push and slam doors with disregard to the safety of others. Firstly, I personally know that most of them have a horrible environment at home. Hardly any study time with their own parents. Hardly any routine at home either. For all those who do indeed have a learning disability ......they have no tools in our schools. Only ridiculous excuses, that eat up our taxes. The tools to keep up is one on one. Inclusion to me... is the reason I was sexually harassed by a boy with a wheelchair ...the reason why we had a severely handicapped boy jerk off in our school bus. Poor them, was the excuse I was given by inclusive minded people. Inclusion to me reminds me why I had no challenge writing in English or learning science in a French school. But they ...ohhhhhhh they need spinners, they need computers they need exercise bikes......why because they have ODD and are compulsive liars? They don't need spinners and they don't need to l listen to music while they work.....Because yes they will ask for these props in the work place.....and that is not at all supposed to be in a academic settings. Get them off to public institution that will tend to their needs. Let us not be fooled we do indeed have standards and we are letting them spoil.

We need a era of fundamentals and rigor taught to children, this is crap. WE need to teach children critical thinking skills not test them to death. Dewey was fraud promoted by the Rockefeller foundation which is behind the dumbing down of America. NO testing just better teaching is the answer.

Thank you for your stimulating discussion Daisy. I largely agree with the general thrust of your account of AFL's failure but, unlike you, see the issue less in terms of a tax on short term memory (an intra-organism perspective) and more in terms of a failure to learn the semiotic codes of the various discourses that are valued in school (an inter-organism perspective). To me this is a very important difference because consideration of the latter opens the door to recognizing more precisely the cause of much educational failure and iniquity in the school system: namely, failure on the part of the teaching profession to sufficiently attend to understanding the languages of schooling or academic discourses and developing the pedagogical possibilities that follow from this. Since academic discourses operate with distinct "grammars" it is possible to describe these and design pedagogies where this is made explicit and productively available to the novices who don't know the semiotic codes, or have the requisite experience to draw upon the appropriate semiotic resources (rather like the expert chess players who are familiar with possibilities). Learning an academic field has a lot of parallels to learning a new language and not least because there are "languages" of uncommon-sense registers to master. I don't believe this angle has been adequately exploited in the education of teachers despite the obvious phenomenon of so many children being alienated from the academic aspect of the school experience. But thankfully there has been a lot of research inspired by work in applied sociolinguistics (e.g what Americans call "The Sydney School") and a tradition within the sociology of knowledge ("Legitimation Code Theory", Karl Maton) which together have developed the metalingustic/metasociological tools not only to better describe what's at stake here but also to support lesson-design principles compatible with the "deliberate practice" principle that you endorse. Still, I would have to add that this latter idea is not enough by itself. We need to understand what to be deliberate about in our pedagogical designing. (In your terminology, you talk about a "mental model") For example, students still need to master the meaning making principles of a field if they are ever to be seriously productive in it and that means, amongst other things, learning certain academic genres like evaluations, explanations, reports, and arguments. These are not just any old genres - their rhetorical functions correlate with the imperative of the fields that use them (and I'm simplifying here - for each field really has its own takes on the three genres I mentioned). Teachers could benefit students enormously by showing how to deconstruct these important genres. But, to really pull this off requires knowing something about the grammar or codes of a field and a sophisticated and uncommon way of thinking about grammar which would be at the heart of a metalanguage. Nevertheless, the social-semiotic nature of learning should never be forgotten. Perhaps it is time certain psychologists joined up with these linguists and sociologists! By the way, if I'm understanding you correctly, I'm not entirely swayed by your description/explanation distinction: I'm a big believer in accurate description for unlike poor description, it seems to me it is intimately connected to explanation - e.g. music theory not only describes certain musical phenomenon it's based on a systemic and therefore explanatory view of the phenomenon (of course that's not to suggest it exhaustively explains it). Not surprisingly, a metalanguage like music theory (which consists of accurate descriptions) has been found to be very useful for teaching music.Finally a quick note about deconstruction. For me, deconstruction is less an exercise in atomism - breaking up something into bits or "smaller chunks" as you put it - and more a matter of grasping how things are related systemically and stratally - and that's a whole other discussion but perhaps the major difference between the way we're thinking about what might go into an effective lesson design that takes feedback (I would call it joint constructing and scaffolding). All the best and thank you again! I hope we can get a dialogue going in this very important area. JEd

How anybody who says "off of" can ever have been employed to teach English is beyond me!!

I look great in this one.

But you *can* do problem solving after you have mastered "enough" to get you started. And it can involve deep thinking that changes cognition if it generates enough interest to want to persist. If learning is always dissconected (from the learner's point of view), how can it get synthesised as the end product when most have turned off "before the game".

Well, I think we just found the spokesperson for private computer corporations who want to sell learning software - break complex learning into smaller skills that can be practiced over and over. Daisy does a good job with identifying why AfL struggles - it's not the problem; it's our implementation of AfL that is the problem. But she seems to think that her proposed way of teaching is better and different than AfL, when in reality, breaking complex learning into smaller pieces, is just good teaching. Four years experience as a teacher is hardly enough classroom time to understand all learners - repeated tasks, disconnected from the authentic world - does not cause learning. That's compliant learning to get a reward.

Is there a list of sources for her claims?

mis gedge taught me

I love the way grayling makes sense of it all.

This is brilliant and so honest! Thank you Sam Freedman. I'm sharing this with the Politics in Education eCourse subscribers, they'll love it.

Excellent.

This is excellent. Perfect example of why teachers need to pay attention to research and ignore embedded practice. In a sense, as teacher training doesn't do this (deliberate practice), practices gets stuck, don't improve and gets fossilised. So the summative essay becomes a fossil that gets embedded and other forms of feedback are backwardly engineered (summative in disguise) or ignored. Ericsson, Bjork etc - standard stuff but largely ignored in practice. Tragically, so much teaching and learning is, therefore, the illusion of mastery. Sadly the reaction is often toblame the 'man' or 'Government' rather than sort it out within the profession.

Really useful talk - thank you.