Curios of the week #118

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week began with a return to Ballarat from Sydney, where I had been attending MultiLit’s Advancing Effective Education summit. Despite resolving to do better in advance, I managed to take almost no photographs at all. One day, I will look back on these events and wonder if I imagined them. If you were there and have any photos to share then please get in touch.

I have also been working on a side project that I cannot tell you about yet and so you will just have to wait. It is very exciting. Well, if you find that kind of thing exciting, that is.

This week’s Curios include a polemic, some revolting academics, an announcement from Northern Ireland and much more.

Foreword of the week

Dylan Wiliam, the formative assessment expert who was pretty much the only education academic mentioned during the early part of my teaching career in England, has much more time for Guy Claxton’s arguments than I do. In fact, he has so much time that he wrote the foreword to Claxton’s 2021 book, The Future of Teaching (which I reviewed here). He has now made that foreword available online.

I don’t think Claxton’s book represents anything like the future of teaching and Wiliam is too generous about it for my taste, but the foreword is worth reading as a meditation on the meaning of teaching and how we might propose to improve education. It contrasts the radical with the possible in interesting ways, with Wiliam sometimes sharing a perspective with Claxton and, at other times, diverging from his approach.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

“…Guy moved to Devon as a founding faculty member of Schumacher College and my career involved alternating periods of active research with a number of stints as a university administrator, but our paths crossed again when Guy and I became closely involved in the work of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust as it was known at the time. Guy’s work on ‘Building Learning Power’ explored a radical vision of what education might be like in supporting young people to be able to lead flourishing lives while my own work had a much more modest focus, which was to help teachers harness the power of formative assessment to improve classroom practice.”

I worked in a school that attempted to implement Building Learning Power and it was pretty awful. Seen through the lens of Wiliam’s foreword, perhaps this was because it sought to impose a set of values and objectives on teachers rather than seeking to help teachers do what they themselves saw as important.

Kindergarteners of the week

Can the growing achievement gap between boys and girls be traced all the way back to kindergarten?