Curios of the week #121

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week began at Bundoora in Melbourne for the All Schools Cross Country Championships. It was a perfect day for cross country—cold and sunny, with soft ground. My daughter was running and this was a big deal because she had to miss the cross country season last year.

On Thursday, I was in Melbourne for a lunch organised by the Centre for Independent Studies. The guest speaker was Carl Hendrick, who I have met a few times before, and various movers and shakers in the Victorian evidence-informed education scene. Carl has started furiously blogging over at his new Substack which you can check out here.

This week’s Curios include a keynote lecture, offensive comments, a win for cognitive load theory and much more.

Keynote lecture of the week

We have finally found the time to start processing some of the videos recorded at researchED Ballarat back in March. The first one to be posted to the researchED YouTube channel is the keynote I delivered:

I am hoping to post a few more in the coming months.

Letter of the week

I wrote to our community about the fundamental attribution error:

One of the key ideas of behavioural science—the dreaded ‘behaviourism’ that educational progressivists so love to demonise—is the role of circumstances in shaping behaviour. I don’t find this particularly controversial or authoritarian and it’s something teachers have agency over.

Offensive comments of the week

Are 2020s students too quick to take offense and, if so, what should be done about it?