It’s 35 years since I first taught in NIHE/DCU and I’m inspired to write down some thoughts on my experience, inspired partly by this article by Trinity Professor, Brian Lucey. Now I don’t know Brian personally and no doubt his achievements, at least in terms of metrics, far exceed mine. But I thought his thoughts on his own experience in academia were a little…soulless. Sorry Brian. So here are my thoughts. The most important part of your job is your teaching. You are in the extraordinarily privileged position of being able to affect, for the better, young people’s lives. Go the extra mile ..read more

Ever since the late Sir Ken Robinson gave his famous Ted Talk, “Do schools kill creativity?”, educators have grappled with various issues around critical thinking and creativity. On the one side, there are those who would suggest that without knowledge, meaningful creativity is impossible, while others seem to suggest that acquiring knowledge impedes creativity. I’m pretty much in the knowledge-is-good camp but I do think that the way we assess students seems to impede their ability to think – creatively and otherwise. Recently, I’ve started asking students questions that I label as “The criti ..read more

I’m increasingly struck by the extent to which education commentary has found itself in a bit of a rut.  As someone who is broadly conservative and in favour of what’s known as “knowledge-rich” curricula, I find it a little bit disappointing that the same arguments are being rehashed over and over. Yes, critical thinking requires relevant knowledge. Yes, skills tend to be discipline-specific and not generic and yes, attempting to teach skills in a context-free way has proven to be ineffective. But also, yes, Geary’s ideas about biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge are ..read more

One of my favourite education quotes is Robert Coe’s “Engagement is a poor proxy for learning”. It’s very easy to presume that just because students are busy doing stuff that they are actually learning something. This is not necessarily the case and it seems to me that an awful lot of innovation in education focuses on engagement without really asking if students are learning anything of substance. But the corollary is also true. If students are not engaged, well, then, they have no chance of learning. By “engaged” I don’t necessarily mean having fun; I just mean being committed, being focused ..read more

I’ve been teaching in third level since I was 23 and at the end of every year since I first started, I’ve had a nagging sense that I could have done better. I started each year full of enthusiasm and ready to try new approaches but I invariably I found that half-way through the second semester, fatigue set in and the quality of my teaching began to slip. Although I am an academic who has always prioritised teaching (my research output is modest) there have been times over the years when I have stood outside classrooms dreading the prospect of opening the door, walking across the room and “perf ..read more

One of the worrying trends in education in recent years is the increasing influence that corporations and corporate organisations have on education. The Lego corporation is busily promoting play-based learning while Microsoft and Apple constantly promote their software (and hardware in the case of Apple) as tools for promoting so-called, but essentially non-existent, “21st century skills”. These companies have a vested interest in asserting that traditional education is not fit for purpose and vigorously promote teaching practices that have absolutely no evidence base. Yet they are highly infl ..read more

In my department in DCU, our third year students will soon go out on work placement (INTRA). Most will be paid the minimum wage at least: that’s about €400 per week. There was a time, during the financial crisis, when employers took advantage of the situation and did not pay students at all but thankfully those days are behind us – as far as I know. For many the INTRA placement is the highlight of their degree programme and it is in this period that they learn the importance of communication, time management, initiative and all those soft skills that are best taught in the work environment. Ev ..read more

The parallels between the response to the Covid pandemic and PISA scores are striking. In both situations, observers, often ideologues, cranks or “influencers” trying to make a quick buck, seize on a single idea, or two, and perform extraordinarily mental contortions to justify their motivated reasoning. Most people involved in education will be familiar with the argument, “Finland does X, we need to do something, let’s do X”. The fact that Finland’s PISA scores (On which its reputation is based) are in decline, and have been for some time, doesn’t seem to matter. With Covid, the argument is o ..read more

A few years ago, English teacher and blogger, Adam Boxer, wrote a very interesting blog (I’m sure you’ll be able to track it down!) in which he made a very interesting point, which was this: when we consider approaches to teaching, whether they be innovative or traditional, we need to look beyond whether they “work” or not. We also need to consider how hard they are to implement. I would put group work in this category; it’s potentially extremely useful especially as a preparation for the workplace but it comes with a whole package of practical difficulties that are well documented at this sta ..read more

The difficulties with teaching critical thinking as a ‘thing’ have been well described by Daniel Willingham and we really should not be discussing generic approaches to the teaching of critical thinking any more. But how do we get students to actually think rather than to ‘learn off’ bullet points of information? I think the answer must lie with assessment. Students are astute and, these days, they are skilled tacticians when it comes to exams. Many have realised that ‘shotgun’ answers are often enough to pass exams with a decent grade, if not that elusive H1, and so an approach based on rote ..read more