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Skill = knowledge + practice

Jan 11, 2019 | Category: learning
Over the years I've thought a lot about whether we should be teaching children knowledge of the world or the skills to flourish within it. The debate has moved on a lot in recent years and today it's...

Lessons from the dojo

May 06, 2018 | Category: learning
Struck with the inescapable knowledge that I'm not getting younger and, therefore, am unlikely to stay fit and healthy without some investment in exercise, I've struggled over the past few years to fi...

'Understanding' and Occam's razor

Jun 24, 2017 | Category: learning
At the beginning of the 20th century, physicists Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein both concluded independently that measurements of light speed would be the same for all observers. But while both a...

Two types of learning - which one is best?

Jul 04, 2017 | Category: learning
Evolutionary biologists think of learning as being either social or asocial. Social learning is essentially copying - what is everyone else doing? - whereas asocial learning is accrued by interacting...

A Novice→Expert Model of Learning

Jun 21, 2017 | Category: learning
Every artist was first an amateur.Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the best understood principles of cognitive psychology is that novices learn and think differently to experts. These labels are domain-spec...

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue's model of learning? Part 2: The meta analyses

Jun 18, 2017 | Category: learning
To help us better understand how we learn, John Hattie & Gregory Donoghue propose a new conceptual model of learning. I've already written about my concerns with the metaphor of depth in Part 1. In th...

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue's model of learning? Part 1: The problem with depth

Jun 17, 2017 | Category: learning
I saw John Hattie speak recently at a conference on his latest re-imagining of his Visible Learning work. He was an excellent speaker and charming company. I was particularly flattered that he asked m...

O brave new world! The search for 21st century qualifications

Feb 13, 2017 | Category: learning
It's difficult to ignore the appealing certainty that the times in which we are alive are unique and fundamentally different to any that have gone before. The most cited reason for this is the fact th...

Is it worth trying to memorise facts?

Feb 08, 2017 | Category: learning
We can only think about what we know and, no mater how intelligent we might be, we cannot think about something about which we are ignorant. But how well do we need to know things? Is there any point...

Further problems with the 'thinking hard' proxy for learning

Jan 11, 2017 | Category: learning
Because learning is invisible, we can only hope to measure whether students are making progress by observing proxies. Most people now seem to agree that certain activities which routinely take place i...