research – ThinkEdu Blog

What would this look like if it were simple?

Posted on July 18, 2021 by admin

The notion of “complexity bias” seems to be around a lot in blogs, pinterest posts and Twitter, but I have not been able to find a lot of academic research into it. In fact, the only common definition seems to be this one: “Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.” It a ubiquitous definition, and could perhaps come from Farnham Street blog, but it probably doesn’t.

“Complexity bias” is such an engaging idea though because feels like it make sense. So while I have not found anything beyond blogs to back it up, I do think it is useful to me because it is something that I do in certain situations and contexts: I overthink things, I want everything I do to be amazing, well thought through, complete, wonderful and the best. But sometimes that stops me from just doing things quickly. Perfection is the enemy of good.

I made the little poster below in Adobe Spark, and I often look at it when I indulge myself again in the fog of complexity thinking. It was inspired the article: “The 1 Question That Helps Me Beat My Procrastination” , by Haley Goldberg. The one question you ask yourself is: “What would this look like if it were simple/fun/easy?” Continue reading “What would this look like if it were simple?”

My notes on Collective Teacher Efficacy

Posted on May 22, 2021 by admin

This is an overview of my research and thinking around Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE).

CTE refers to “the perceptions of teachers in a school that the faculty as a whole can execute the courses of action necessary to have positive effects on students” ^a. It was identified by Professor John Hattie as having a very high effect size of 1.57 ^b. CTE is of interest to school leaders because it is an indicator of the willingness by teacher “to invest the time and energy required to attain educational goals and results in greater effort.” CTE is a broad and systemic intervention which leads to “improved student outcomes” ^c. Jenni Donohoo identifies the following six enabling conditions for fostering collective teacher efficacy: Continue reading “My notes on Collective Teacher Efficacy”

Goddard, R. (2001). Collective efficacy: A neglected construct in the study of schools and student
achievement. Journal Of Educational Psychology, 93(3), 467-476. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-
0663.93.3.467 (back)
Hattie, J. (2016). Third Visible Learning Annual Conference: Mindframes and Maximizers,
Washington, DC, July 11, 2016 (back)
Donohoo, J., O’Leary, T., & Hattie, J. (2020). The design and validation of the enabling conditions for collective teacher efficacy scale (EC-CTES). Journal of Professional Capital And Community, 5(2), 147-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpcc-08-2019-0020 (back)

That uncertain feeling in the valley of despair: The joys of the research and writing process

Posted on October 13, 2020 by admin

Every teacher is a writer. We write texts of all lengths and in all styles. I find myself writing so much too, and in so many different contexts. As an Extended Essay supervisor (See my website here about the IB EE) I help students develop their research and academic writing craft. For quite a while now, I have explained the process to them with a graph which is based on my own feelings towards research and writing. Mind you, I love/hate it, but I will keep on doing it because the satisfaction, challenge and joy is greater than the hatred. I have finally committed this graph to the computer, rather than just whiteboards. So here it is: Continue reading “That uncertain feeling in the valley of despair: The joys of the research and writing process”

Tom Sherrington, Barack Rosenshine and ‘CPD’

Posted on September 6, 2020 by admin

Tom Sherrington (@teacherhead) is a good ‘education guru’. I like his straight talking and common sense approach, informed by a realistic approach to teaching and education research that really connects with what I think is important in education.

Since 2018, Tom has been focussing on Barack Rosenshine’s seminal “10 principles”. Here is all Tom’s writing on that: https://teacherhead.com//?s=rosenshine

He recently wrote this post about the PD needs of teachers (Teachers’ CPD needs are massive: it needs more time and more flexibility) which contained a great overview of what we are asking teachers to ‘develop’ in. I am copying the list here so that I remember to return to this, because that is the purpose of this blog for me, a personal and professional notebook about teaching and learning. So here is Tom’s list:

Better conversations, Jim Knight

Posted on February 15, 2020 by admin

I have really enjoyed reading Jim Knight’s “Better Conversations”. It is inspirational in the way it makes you mindful of what we do all day: Talk. We talk at, about, with and to each other. We all know how great it feels to have a truly wonderful, productive and invigorating conversation. What if more of our conversations could be even better? Knight provides some common sense approaches, but to call it ‘common sense’ is unfair because if having great conversations is common sense and easy, then why do we have bad/unproductive conversations, or conversations which could have been better?

I picked the 5 chapters I found most interesting and relevant, and used the mindmaps Knight provides at the beginning of each chapter as my guide to form my own notes and understanding. For this I used the software package MindJet Mindmanager, which our school provides for our students and created this mindmap overview: Better conversations Jim Knight (also see below)

Better conversations (Ch1)
The Better Conversations Beliefs (Ch 2)
Ask better questions to foster inquiry (Ch5)
Redirecting toxic words and emotions (Ch8)
Building Trust (Ch9)

My key takeaways: Continue reading “Better conversations, Jim Knight”

My booksnap notes of: “Why don’t students like school?” By Daniel Willingham

Posted on January 17, 2019 by admin

Over the last few weeks I read ‘Why don’t students like school’ by Daniel Willingham. It was a very popular book when it was published in 2009. Willingham is a professor of Psychology with a specialisation in neuroscience, and I appreciated having these ideas about how the brain learns presented in such an accessible way, although it was a bit too narrative at times for my liking.

While reading I like to make visual booksnaps using Piccollage. This strategy allows the information to rattle around in my working memory a bit longer; I DO something with the info which means that it will (hopefully) be stored better in my long term memory. Willingham explains this in Chapter 1, page 10, “How thinking works”.

I print the booksnaps off and will refer to them occasionally to remind myself of what I have read. You can download all of them here in one PDF.

This book is also part of the holiday reading for the Twitter #edureading group.
All the info you need can be found here: sites.google.com/view/educational-reading-group/

Here are my booksnap notes: Continue reading “My booksnap notes of: “Why don’t students like school?” By Daniel Willingham”

Cultures of Thinking PD program, with Ron Ritchhart

Posted on February 17, 2016 by admin

I have become part of a semester long professional development project called “Cultures of Thinking”. It is lead by Visible Thinking and Harvard Project Zero researcher Ron Ritchhart. It focusses on creating an environment where “a group’s collective as well as individual thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the regular, day-to-day experience of all group members.” ^a.

One of the key components of this program is class observation – not to evaluate the teacher but to learn and become more aware of your own habits, cultures and teaching strategies. Our first day consisted of two sessions, in the morning we were introduced to the cultures of thinking program and questioning techniques. The second was a plenary session in which teachers from four schools came together to learn about how to objectively and non-judgmentally observe a lesson and how to record data so that it is useful for the person/school being observed.

My notes and relevant resources are below.

Continue reading “Cultures of Thinking PD program, with Ron Ritchhart”

See more at: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/cultures-of-thinking#sthash.Lw4Gagmy.dpuf (back)

What is ‘understanding’?

Posted on December 20, 2015 by admin

I was tweaking our Year 10 unit (Geographies of Human Wellbeing) using the KUD criteria (Know, Understand, Do). This scaffold, created by differentiation guru Carol Tomlinson, has been around for a while.

Students will KNOW: (often represented in bulleted forma
t) facts, dates, definitions, rules, people, places, vocabulary, information.
Students will UNDERSTAND : (best stated as a sentence which includes concept-based thought), Essential questions, theories “Big” ideas, Important generalizations, thesis-like statements
Students will DO: (represented with verbs), basic skills, communication, planning/organisation, thinking skills, evaluation, working collaboratively, skills of the discipline: mapping, graphing, collecting data, show p.o.v.

It was a really interesting exercise to represent the unit in a mindmap, it focussed my mind on what it was exactly what I wanted the students to understand from the this unit. The concept ‘understanding’ is hard to pin down.

David Perkins in “Teaching for Understanding” (1993) defines understanding as follows: Continue reading “What is ‘understanding’?”

“How People Learn” Effective teaching in History

Posted on April 2, 2015 by admin

I have enjoyed skim reading the book “How people learn” by the National Research Council. It aims to give practical ideas on how to use current pedagogical research in the classroom.

The three key findings that the book presents are:

Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.
To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must:
(a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge,
(b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and
(c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.
A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.

It has a very interesting chapter about History teaching. You can download that chapter here: Continue reading ““How People Learn” Effective teaching in History”

Teaching online research skills

Posted on February 28, 2015 by admin

It’s sometimes astounding to see the simplistic ways in which some students look for information online. Typing a whole question verbatim into Google and then clicking on the first result is what some kids see as “researching online”. Writer Erik Palmer said that “when we prepare (our students) to conduct quality online research, we prepare them for so much more”, and I agree with that. Learning how to do quality, in depth online research teaches critical literacy and analysis and teaches students that all information comes from a certain perspective. So before any online research project, I often go through these steps:

Teach them how to craft a better search query in Google by using search operators. Show them how to use the “Advanced Search Page” in Google.
Look at the URL. It often contains information that can show you if it’s reliable or not. Not all sites are created equally. This comes as a surprise for younger students in particular. Explain how a URL like http://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change will propably contain more reliable information than a URL that looks like this: http://damn-human-race.weebly.com/blog/the-great-climate-change-science-scandal#.VPG0n_khfYo. Checking the URL should only be their first port of call.
Every website should be checked for credibility, purpose, and reliability.
1. Credibility: Is there a verifiable author or organisation behind the page? Who is this person or organisation? Do they have expertise?
2. Purpose: WHY was the site created? Is there a personal agenda, why?
3. Reliability: Can you find the same information elsewhere? Can you corroborate what this information?
Introduce them to citethisforme.com, currently the easiest to use online citation tool.

Continue reading “Teaching online research skills”

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Thinking, Learning, Teaching by @vanweringh

Tag: research