In early 2015, I separated my personal and school Twitter accounts. I had just started reading more education blogs and decided that my friends from school and university wouldn’t be as interested in my thoughts on curriculum and assessments as much as they were my rants about the England rugby team (who am I kidding, is anyone really interested in that either!?). I wanted to join the conversations on Twitter about effective education. Ok, so it can be a little tribalistic at times, people’s views can be a rather entrenched and there are times when we’re all pulling our collective hair out, but it’s a great platform for finding out about different ideas: practical suggestions for Teaching and Learning, leadership and culture, information about research and cognitive psychology, and overarching educational philosophies.
More recently, I’ve started to get an increasingly wide selection of blog suggestions from Teacher Tapp. If you’re a teacher and you’re not on Teacher Tapp yet…WHY NOT!? In their own words: "At 3:30pm each day, thousands of phones across the country buzz and our community of teachers spend a minute answering our questions about their work and learning from the short articles we give them. They do this so that we can all learn about teachers daily lives, views and the schools they work in. Join us to help give teachers a voice!" I’ve written before about Pocket, an amazing app that helps save posts on websites so that you can read them even when you’re offline and stores them in one central place. One of the other great features of Pocket is that it saves old articles in an archive and you can bookmark favourites. (The biggest drawback is that I save more than I actually have time to read!). The list below is a compilation of the posts I find myself going back to most; these are the posts that have been most influential in shaping my thinking. I have used my Pocket favourites to help me generate this list but there are no guarantees this list is comprehensive. There are certainly other posts that have been important in influencing me, not to mention books, conferences and tweets: you can find a list of some more these on the Recommendations page of this site. So, without any further ado , here are some of the most important blog posts I’ve read to date: (note, the formatting of this page works better on a computer rather than a phone).
This is by no means an exhaustive list and I'm regularly adding to it. Please tweet me or leave suggestions in the comments for other posts I should add to this list!
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*I originally created these posts for the micro-blogging education site Staffrm, which shut down mid-2017. I wanted to re-share these early forays into the blogging world but have not edited any of these posts from their original form. *
“If kids left school at 11, what would we teach them?” This was the final question that Stephen Lockyer posed during his speech at Research Ed’s National Conference in 2015. It’s a question that has stuck with me. Primary schools are based on the levels of their pupils who reach the ‘expected standard’ and whether they have ‘added value’ during their pupil’s time at the school. We often hear the phrase bandied around: ‘secondary ready’. We need to give pupils the best education we can so that they are ‘secondary ready’. Or so we’re told. But we don’t. The clue is in the name. It is Primary education not just because it comes first but because it is most important. Without the basics laid at primary school it would be difficult for many of us to function in society. The basic skills we need to check your change in the shops or write a letter to a friend. Yes, the education we give our pupils is important in ensuring they are ‘secondary ready’, but that is not enough. It is not enough to say that they need to do well so they are ‘secondary ready’, it is our duty to ensure they are ‘world ready’. Now, I’m not suggesting that our pupils are, or should, be ready go out into the big bad world aged 11; there is no doubt that secondary (and tertiary) education are extremely important to the development of our young people. We would certainly hope that our pupils are ‘secondary ready’ by the time they finish Year 6 - especially in areas such as their independence, curiosity and willingness to tackle new problems. I may be alone in this, but to suggest that the aim of primary education is to ensure children are ‘secondary ready’ is just wrong. Then again, maybe I'm misinterpreting the phrase myself. Either way, it brings me back to the question we began with: “If kids left school at 11, what would we teach them?” *I originally created these posts for the micro-blogging education site Staffrm, which shut down mid-2017. I wanted to re-share these early forays into the blogging world but have not edited any of these posts from their original form. *
#educationresearch Over the past few month, primarily through my experiences on Twitter (@educatingholmes), I have become increasingly interested in the role research has to play in education and the extent to which teachers can be active and engaged leaders of research rather than passive practitioners who have research ‘done to them’. Last Thursday I had the privilege of attending my first @researchED1 event (www.workingoutwhatworks.com), hosted by the London Connected Learning Centre. The event was aimed as a ‘starting point for schools and educators who want to find out what they can do, and how they can get involved’ with a short programme of speakers delivering a taste of how to get involved. Whilst much of the event was aimed at a school leadership level, centred on how your school as a whole can become more research engaged, there was much to whet the appetite of the classroom teacher. Time will continue to be perhaps the biggest constraint on teachers’ ability to engage in research but the first step on any path will be the most difficult. Whether it’s picking up a book (my Amazon wish list is filled to the brim with recommendations), taking part in more twitter discussions or attending conferences to start finding out what really does work; I know I want to become more research engaged. Oliver Quinlan (@oliverquinlan) has blogged some excellent summaries of the four main speakers for the day which you can read here: Carl Hendrick (@C_Hendrick): http://www.oliverquinlan.com/liveblogs/?p=1148 Jon Brunskill (@jon_brunskill): http://www.oliverquinlan.com/liveblogs/?p=1150 Kate Atkins (@kateatkins33): http://www.oliverquinlan.com/liveblogs/?p=1152 Matt Walker (@TheNFER): http://www.oliverquinlan.com/liveblogs/?p=1154 If you have the time, I’d thoroughly recommend watching the talks in full yourself: https://plus.google.com/events/cmsg2gghm4topvqsunpn6d3ichc. My thanks go to all the speakers above, plus organisers @tombennett71 and @s_horrox. In particular I must thank Jon Brunskill, who is proving you don’t have to have been a teacher for decades to become research engaged. Key questions that stick out in my mind from the event:
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