-
One of the perpetual cycles in education is harnessing of whatever is popular in youth culture at the time in order to ‘engage’ students in a particular subject. The current preoccupation is with Pokemon Go, a virtual reality mobile phone game that has taken the world by storm. Several ‘hints and tips’ websites offer ways…
-
In Philip Roth’s best novel American Pastoral, there’s a phrase that has always stayed with me and one I’ve since associated with a most unpleasant sort of person. Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov is the blonde haired, blue eyed protagonist of the novel, a star athlete in High school, who marries a beauty queen and expands his…
-
Carl Hendrick In the 1930s endocrinologist Hans Selye differentiated between two types of stress, distress and eustress. We are all familiar with the first term but perhaps less with the second term which refers to a positive response to external stressors leading to a state of optimism, confidence and agency, in other words ‘good stress.’…
-
Carl Hendrick Speaking on the art of direction, Terry Gilliam said that the difference between Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick is that while Spielberg gives you comforting answers, they’re not very clever answers, whereas Kubrick gives you something you have to really think about. For Gilliam, Kubrick’s work articulates a more recondite truth about humanity that doesn’t…
-
In his 1958 magnum opus “Personal Knowledge,’ Michael Polanyi defines ‘tacit knowledge’ as anything we know how to do but cannot explicitly explain how we do it, such as the complex set of skills needed to ride a bike or the instinctive ability to stay afloat in water. It is the ephemeral, elusive form of…
-
Carl Hendrick On the 3rd May 2015, Chelsea won the Premier League title with three games to spare. For manager Jose Mourinho, it was his 21st trophy, marking him out as the most decorated manager in recent club football history. In August he was rewarded with a multi-million pound contract that would see him at the club until…
-
One of the dominant narratives in contemporary education is the ubiquitous assertion that everyone is now a leader. Not only are all teachers now leaders, but even the kids are leaders whether they like it or not. Within such a climate we might want to ask; if everyone is now a leader, then what distinguishes…
-
1. Ben Riley: ‘Learning as a Science’ An incredibly useful and informative talk on the research around how students learn best from one of the Deans for Impact who are “a group of deans from schools of education around the country, that have united to make sure future teachers are armed with information about what…
-
Originally posted on Starter for Five: Name: Carl Hendrick Twitter name: @C_Hendrick Sector: Secondary Subject taught (if applicable): English Position: Head of Research/Head of English What is your advice about? Teaching Secondary English 1: If you’re spending more time cutting up things and putting them in envelopes than knowing your subject inside out, then you’re…
-
In the Times today, Dame Sally Coates claimed that all schools should teach identical lessons in order to address social inequality. She claims that “all children aged four to 14 should learn precisely the same things from a uniform curriculum in the same order throughout their schooling.” This is an impoverished and dystopian view of…
Carl Hendrick 