On the Underpants Gnomes in education

Free professional development for secondary English teachers

I’m currently reading When Can You Trust the Experts: How to tell good science from bad in education and Daniel Willingham has come up with the perfect analogy for the gap between research and practice in teaching. He recounts the story of the Underpants Gnomes in South Park. It’s worth a watch, but their great plan for profiting from the collection of underpants is neatly summarised in the still shot below.

The parallels are obvious to anyone who has engaged with research and wondered how it might transfer to the quotidian chaos of the classroom, but I would argue that this gap is even more pronounced for early career teachers.

New teachers often enter the world with an extremely thorough appreciation of detailed lesson plans that they rarely have time to generate in daily practice. They may know how to design a tech-based unit for a school with no reliable internet. They might even learn how to ‘engage’ students with fun activities, designed to somehow moderate student behaviour. Twitter tells me that not that much has changed. If early career teachers are anything like I was, Phase 2 is still the big red question mark.

I’ve been on my own for most of my evidence-based learning journey. It started with suspicion at university that the science of learning had come a lot further than the Skinner box. But pop psychology was what I got - no Rosenshine, no Hirsch, no Sweller, no cognitive load theory.

For these reasons, I’m offering a free crash course in evidence-based practice, specifically for secondary English teachers. I will distill what I have learned and give some springboards for further learning. It will be fast and furious and you can be guaranteed that you’ll either a) receive affirmation that you’re on a good path with your practice or b) walk away with a toolkit to support you in making a real impact on the confidence, skills, and knowledge of your students in an evidence-informed way.

You can learn more and register here.