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Reading By Numbers
The English Education Secretary Michael Gove caused huge controversy this week (not for the first time) when he boldly proclaimed that every 11 year-old should be reading 50 books a year. Let us give...
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Literacy, Film and the Scottish Survey
Moving image texts, in the form of cinema, and later, television, have been with us for a long time. So much so that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. And moving image texts have been...
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Learning to be Independent
“It’s ridiculous to think that kids can be trusted to learn things on their own.” Teacher, anon. A couple of months ago I wrote about a primary school in Scotland which had embarked on some very...
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Testing Times
There is an episode in the American hit TV series The Wire (Season 4) which will resonate not only with teacher-viewers in the USA but with many in the UK as well. Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski, a former...
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A Novel Approach To Reading
Contains more than recipes. Art, geography, history, photography, folklore and classical culture are all covered. Since acquiring an eReader last year, my reading habits seem to be developing into a...
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Here Come The Vikings. With Apples.
There is a story, most likely apocryphal, about a primary teacher who had engaged her pupils in a lengthy project about the Vikings. Anxious to establish what they had learned as a result of their...
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Curriculum for Integrity
This blogpost is re-published with kind permission from its author, Matthew Boyle. The original can be found on his own blog, Each and Every Dog. Well worth a visit for anyone with an interest in...
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All Of Us First
This is an initial working paper of a Common Weal Policy Lab on education (see previous post). It will be developed further based on feedback from those involved in the Lab and others, and it is...
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Still Raising the Scores, Still Ruining the Schools
‘Standardised testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it threatens to swallow our schools whole.’ Alfie Kohn, 2000 This was the dramatic –...
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The Inestimable Dr Memes
There is much talk about leadership in education these days, and there isn’t a day goes by without the publication of a book or a paper, or a tweet or a blogpost on how it should be ‘done’, or how it...
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