A long time between drinks but here’s Teacher Ollie’s Takeaways number 110!

I hope you enjoy it : )

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First rate example of primary curriculum planning, via @EminaMcLean

I absolutely loved watching this presentation by Emina McLean about what’s going on in the curriculum planning space at Docklands Primary. If you want to see what quality primary curriculum looks like, look no further!

Improve assessment by increasing the size of your ‘negotiated assessment domain’, via @Smithre5

In this great blog post, Reid Smith writes about how, with too much individual teacher autonomy over curriculum, we end up with conversations like this:

“I didn’t teach addition of fractions involving different denominators. Can we get rid of that question?”

“My kids wouldn’t be able to work out the fractional amount of a whole from a worded question.”

“I spent a fair bit of time on ordering mixed numbers – let’s add a question about that.”

And a ‘Negotiated Assessment Domain’ that looks like this.

This means that much of the curriculum gets missed in both teaching and assessment. Not good.

Smith argues that we should move towards a model that looks like this:

This can be done by specifying our curriculum in more detail (see Takeaway 1 from this week), or by changing assessment processes (e.g. writing the assessment and having teachers commit to it prior to the unit, or having an experienced external writer create the assessments in such a way that both students and teachers don’t see them beforehand).

I think that the idea of the ‘negotiated assessment domain’ is very useful, and I’m sure I’ll refer to it again in future.

How to teach students to better evaluate the credibility of digital content, via Sam Wineberg, ht @greg_ashman

One of the studies that I featured in Tools for Teachers featured Sam Wineberg’s work in determining what it is that expert fact checkers do that enables them to more quickly and more reliably check the credibility of digital content. It turns out that what they do is ‘lateral reading’, i.e. checking out the credibility of the source, rather than ‘vertical reading’, which is focussing on the content of the given article.

This new study shows that this skill was successfully taught to highschool students over six sessions. Very exciting news in our post-truth world!

Put a box on the board for students to add their homework queries to, via @greg_ashman

‘I have a box on the whiteboard where students can write-up homework queries at the start of the lesson or add a tick to a query someone else has raised. Usually, the same question causes problems for several students and so I can tackle them with part of the class as the other students work independently.’

A great idea! From this article…

Greg also says he’ll be blogging about how he teaches maths soon, so watch this space!

Maybe autonomy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, via @jrsmcintoshNI

Full thread here.

It’s an interesting read.

Here are two stimulating tweets from the thread:

Everything you need to know about psychedelics and mental illness, via @StuartJRitchie

The potential benefits of psychedelic drugs has been getting a lot of press in recent years. This is a great, down to earth article by Stuart Ritchie pointing out some of the potential challenges and limitations to this research.

I took away three main arguments from this article:

  1. There’s a lot of motivated research going on (psychedelic aficionados and companies driving it)
  2. Some legitimate research is being exaggerated by its own authors
  3. There are large methodological challenges with doing good research on psychedelics, because participants very quickly identify whether they’re in the control or the experimental group, and this can bias their reporting of results (this is called ‘compromised blinding’, i.e. the participants aren’t really blind to their treatment)

For anybody interested : )

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