Monthly Archives: May 2015

In this post I talked about how difficulty of persuading people that something they’ve never needed could be useful to them.  I spoke early on about, for all the theory and hypothesising, it’s probably my own personal experience that has convinced me the … Continue reading →

In the last post I introduced what is essentially my own understanding of what I’m calling ‘frameworks’ of foundational knowledge.  They may well be the same thing as schema from cognitive psychology; I’m only avoiding that term because I think it … Continue reading →

Is not really what this post is about. If you’d like to teach more than just what’s on a GCSE exam, then when asked “What will a question on this look like on the exam?” answer honestly “I don’t know.” This … Continue reading →

I touched on this topic in a previous post.  I’d like to explore it in more detail here. I recently met the COO of Memrise, Ben Whately.  He gave me a good analogy for how memory works by suggesting it’s … Continue reading →

In the previous post I defined learning ‘holistically’: Holistically: Learning of facts such as ‘names of countries’ that happens amidst, simultaneously with, and as part of learning much more about that country besides e.g. climate, flag, culture, religion, recent history, … Continue reading →

This one’s somewhat lengthy.  Given the complexity of the issue, I really can’t make the post any shorter, and I think splitting it into parts would also confuse its message.  Hopefully it’s worth the read! *** Recently I published this, … Continue reading →

I think this has some real promise; it’s a rather good idea. Rather than providing levels as a measure of assessment in mathematics development, use a ‘MathsAge,’ similar to ‘reading age.’  There are some niceties around clarity of communication with parents … Continue reading →

This was something that came up a bit more in conversation than it did in the online comments.  I’m going to use these two words – which were occasionally used by others – two separately define two ideas: Organically: Learning … Continue reading →