David Didau+

Even good schools are subject to entropy

How expertise, memory and coherence decay over time and what we can do it

The anthropology of school rituals

How rituals create belonging, preserve order and, all too often, outlive their purpose

The economics of attention

Why we should budget attention before we spend it

The ecology of schools

An ecological perspective explains why relationships, feedback and adaptation matter more than isolated interventions

The best case fallacy and the need to audit optimism

Why optimism is often unscrupulous and positive thinking makes things worse

Film review: Nolan straightens out Homer's many-turning man

How Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey smooths away world literature’s greatest creation

Digital exams are a solution in search of a problem

Why we should avoid confusing novelty with progress

The Proxy Trap: how poor are 'poor proxies for learning'?

Why schools can't live with proxies or without them

A letter to a young head of department

A contrarian's guide to surviving middle leadership without surrendering your soul

Why I hate 'beautiful books'

Why students' exercise books make for dangerously unstable proxies for learning and poor revision resources

Wax On, Wax Off Retrieval Practice

Three recent studies show why retrieval practice needs better questions, better timing and better support.

The Gender Trap: why we're seduced by obvious explanations

How we mistake patterns for causes, nature for destiny and moral preference for evidence

A vision for teaching English

The visison statement for English from the Northern Ireland national curriculum

AI, fire and the future of thinking

Five research findings on the impact of AI in schools

The purpose of school inspection is what it does

Systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better

Why we pull when we should push

How schools make some actions easier than others, and why great leadership begins with redesigning the environment

The Dr Fox Effect: Charisma, subject knowledge and the curse of expertise

Why effective teaching depends less on generic performance and more on knowledge organised for instruction.

The myth of the portable teacher

What happens when effective teachers transfer into tougher schools

Why school is the oldest and most effective educational technology

How evolution and culture explain how school have been shaped over time

The Coaching Trap: Why better teaching depends on better schools

Why coaching needs to focus primarily on leaders rather than teachers

Five principles for effective retrieval practice

Moving from recognition to recall, from recall to use, and from performance to learning

The problem with patterns: how good data leads to bad decisions

Collider bias and the misreading of school data

Five principles of effective feedback

Feedback is powerful, but not reliably helpful. The trick is knowing what you’re trying to change.

Phone bans are a good thing…

...but phone pouches are probably the wrong way to go about it

Do Mini Whiteboards have limitations?

Regular readers will know I’m pretty partial to using Mini Whiteboards in lessons.

Seeing like a school: categories, maps, streets and winks

Why the systems that make schools manageable can also mislead them

What primary and secondary leaders need to know about effective writing transition

Same word, different expectations: why writing transition fails when primary and secondary schools prepare students for different kinds of success.

Five principles for effective questioning

This post is the latest in a series focussing on five key aspects of effective classroom practice

Onwards and upwards: my marathon journey

And some tenuous links to writing, endurance and the necessity of practice

Demand, Diversity and the Canon

If we want to broaden what schools teach, the case must be made on significance, not symbolism

Five principles of effective scaffolding

If support is not temporary, responsive and designed to disappear, it's probably not effecive scaffolding

Easy Things Are Easy; Hard Things Are Hard

On teacher charisma, classroom calm and the difficulty of building the habits of hard work

Five principles of effective modelling

Why exemplars so often fail, and how to make modelling genuinely instructive

Does checking for attention help students learn?

Spoiler: yes. Yes it does.

Three Ways That Curriculum Fails

Why students fail to make progress when curriculum lacks specificity, systematicity and subject sensitivity

Chesterton's Library: which fences should we destroy, which walls should we mend?

Chesterton, Frost and the panic over AI, safeguarding and dangerous ideas

On punctuation: distinguishing between knowledge problems and practice problems

One of the difficulties in teaching writing is that not all mistakes are the same kind of mistake.

The principle of reciprocity: a low threat model for teacher development

Why lesson observation so often fails to change practice and how to get more of what we want

We never had it so simple: Why the opposition between standards and belonging is easy to assert but hard to prove

A critique of the evidence on attainment, wellbeing and school belonging

Done Well, Done Badly: should we compare MWBs with Turn & Talk?

Why unhelpful comparisons distort educational debate and make it harder for schools to improve

The blank page problem: creativity and the tyranny of choice

Why freedom stifles originality and imagination thrives inside boundaries

Better schools, better teachers?

What I wanted to say at the CIS event last night