Curios of the week #140

Everything you need to know about education right now

Last Saturday, I was in Victoria Park, Ballarat, to watch the band, Crowded House. My wife and I watched the same band nearly 20 years ago in Hyde Park, London, and so it was a nostalgic event. I am not usually a fan of large music concerts. Most people can easily trade the cattle treatment off against the pleasure they gain from attending, but I find that hard. So, this was something of a departure for me.

This week, Clarendon welcomed our Term 4 tours, with teachers visiting from across Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. It is always a pleasure to talk about what we do here. We certainly don’t have all the answers and are not here to tell others what to do. We like to visit other schools and we always learn something from them.

This week’s Curios include a nightmare, an apology, a curriculum review and much more.

Writer of the week

David Didau is a renowned educational figure I first became aware of when I started blogging. This was the heyday of educational blogging and Didau was a standout. He was prolific and had published books back in the time before John Catt democratised education publishing. Didau is an English teacher by training who I understand is currently working on an approach to writing instruction that dovetails neatly with The Writing Revolution. However, as a maths and science teacher, I have always found his writing on general education principles and cognitive science to be of most interest.

Didau went through a fallow period on his blog, but like many, he has recently discovered Substack and is as prolific and provocative as he ever was. For example, this is from his post, The Dual Coding Delusion where he warns about how dual coding can go wrong:

“Teachers, seeking to make content ‘more visual,’ may inadvertently strip away the linguistic challenge that builds long-term knowledge. Students remember the picture of the Battle of Hastings but forget why it mattered. They can point to the arrows in a PEE paragraph poster yet can’t write a coherent analysis. The visual replaces rather than prompts thought.”

I recommend his Substack and if you ever get a chance to see him speak, go for it. I understand he may be visiting Australia soon.

Thuiszitters of the week

Christian Bokhove is a professor of education based in the UK, but originally from The Netherlands. He is by far the most knowledgeable and impartial observer of education social media, or so he would have us believe. I am not convinced. When he gently points out the inconsistencies and fallibilities of others, those others tend to be advocates for explicit teaching, a knowledge-rich curriculum and whole-school approaches to behaviour. This is not coincidental.

Bokhove has been doing a little comparing. He has been comparing England and the Netherlands on their publicly available figures for school suspensions and expulsions.

When you compare these two countries, it turns out that the figures for suspensions and expulsions are much higher in England. At a surface level, Bokhove’s analysis gives support to anti-discipline campaigners who argue suspensions and expulsions are too high in England and this may be why Bokhove has chosen to make this comparison.

However, this difference could potentially be due to the way these figures are compiled and reported in the two countries. For example, in the Netherlands, only suspensions lasting more than one full day are required to be reported to the education inspectorate. Only then are they included in the publicly-available data. By contrast, in England, nearly 50% of recorded suspensions are for a day or less.

There are also differential pressures within each system. For instance, in The Netherlands, if a principal wants to expel a student, they must have already organised a place for them in another school. This disincentivises formal expulsion and if it is possible in The Netherlands, would push principals and parents towards informal routes. Conceivably a principal could ask a parent to keep their child at home for a while. A parent might acquiesce to avoid some more troubling consequence or a formal record.

I don’t know enough about The Netherlands to assess how many, if any, students are informally excluded in this way. However, researchers suggest there are at least 70,000 students in The Netherlands who are described as ‘thuiszitters’ or ‘homebound’. In other words, they don’t go to school. There is no directly equivalent category in England. They skew heavily towards the secondary years and so some of these could well constitute students informally excluded.

It may be the case that The Netherlands excludes far fewer students, either formally or informally, than England. It may also be the case that there is a passion for recording everything in the English-speaking world that is not shared by the Dutch and that this mostly explains the different figures. It could be some combination. We cannot really tell because Bokhove is comparing English apples with Dutch oranges.

I would be interested in the opinions of any Dutch readers.

Joke of the week

There is a joke at the end of my recent letter to the Clarendon community. It’s not a very good one.

Behaviour of the week

One of the frustrating aspects of teacher retention is the coyness of researchers in naming one of the most significant factors—student behaviour. A new paper in Teaching and Teacher Education by Tim Pressley and colleagues illustrates the problem well.