Ofsted: the problem of the ignorant inspector
My argument in this post is that Ofsted inspectors who are not specialists in a subject are poorly placed to make judgements about whether progress is being made by pupils in [...]
Philosophy of education
Within the philosophy of education I am primarily concerned with the relationship between academic disciplines and school subjects.
Teaching and subject expertise: let’s not fall for genericism again
I have a great deal of respect for those currently pushing ‘grass-root’ teacher movements, such as ResearchEd and the College of Teaching. I’m very excited to have [...]
“The students were engaged” – a meaningless phrase
I have frequently on this blog commented on the fact that genericism is one of the biggest problems we face in education (http://viewrz.com/video/genricism). Being generic [...]
Doing a Masters in Education Part 2: getting your disciplinary framing clear
In my last post I wrote about how I think the terms ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ are fairly useless for describing research: at best, they might describe methods [...]
Is education an academic discipline?
I got in trouble last week for suggesting that education was not an academic discipline, and I can see why. For many years, university education departments have been [...]
Why should we research the subject and not just the child?
A great deal is written about research in education and the problems it faces. I rather think that we are passing something of a threshold at the moment in terms of the [...]
Are we training pupils to be historians?
This is a question that gets banded around in education quite a lot. It is quite common – and I have done it many times myself – to tell pupils that they are historians, [...]
History: a vehicle for moral enquiry?
What is history? For me, the discipline of history cannot be defined simply by its object of study – the past is, after all, studied in a wide variety of subjects including [...]
On letting ourselves be specialists
Last Sunday I was back in teacher mode again. I was not a teacher of history, however, but a teacher of winter walking. On a university hillwalking club trip, I took a group [...]
Disciplines and the aims of an education
I am currently reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. The following brief passage summarises, in a nutshell, the role that academic disciplines have to play in [...]
Knowledge, skills and the ignored dichotomy
I have been following the debate online in recent weeks on the knowledge-skills dichotomy, particularly the post written by David Didau. Generally speaking, I am in agreement [...]
On teaching the canon
It is a sad fact that there is insufficient time to teach all that we might want to teach. Whether it is periods of history or works of English literature, there is always [...]
David Carr, teacher training and evidence-based practice
My reading recently led me to a now rather old article by David Carr in the Oxford Review of Education. I have not read as much Carr as I ought to have done, though this is [...]
Clio et cetera 