Nine Lies about Work - is a great explanation of why so many elements of the modern workplace are ineffective and annoying.

The nine lies are...

amzn.to/3DsDoAK Lie 1) People care what company they work for...

No, they care what team they belong to.

People join companies - so companies make themselves look good.

But they stay because of the team they're in.

1) Can women read 4 sentences in their local language?

Based on surveys across 87 countries, this fascinating paper by @Alenestour @lhmosco & @JustinSandefur uses this to estimate how educational quality has changed over time.

With depressing results.
cgdev.org/sites/default/… 2) Literacy has increased in the developing world.

But this is almost entirely because more students are in school, not because schooling has got better.

You may remember the classic Anders Ericsson study of violinists (1993) – the article that launched the ten thousand hour rule and deliberate practice more generally (here): mrbartonmaths.com/resourcesnew/8… The centrepiece was an analysis of the role of deliberate practice among violinists. In this paper, @BrookeMacnamara and team have conducted a careful, preregistered replication of Ericsson's work. artscimedia.case.edu/wp-content/upl…

How can you teach teachers to be responsive to students’ needs? Particularly if you’re using practice…? Doesn’t it risk creating automata?

In this cool study, @sskavanagh examined video of teacher educators' practice in encouraging teacher responsiveness. Two key findings: 1) The _more_ constrained teachers’ choices about what text to study, what discussion format, the more they could focus on responding to students’ points. Responsiveness is hard, you need to be able to concentrate on it. K1 and 2

1) Excellent paper by @BrookeMacnamara and colleagues on growth mindset. They test six claims from growth mindset advocates (e.g. growth mindset people pursue learning goals, respond well to negative feedback). artscimedia.case.edu/wp-content/upl… 2) They find:
- No support for three claims
- Very weak support for two claims
- One claim in the opposite direction (specifically, people with a fixed mindset respond significantly _better_ to negative feedback, not worse, as predicted)

1) I have been very sceptical about growth mindset over the last few years, but a new study has substantially changed my mind… 2) In research-design terms, this was bulletproof: pre-registered, randomly-assigned, teachers didn't know which students got the growth mindset intervention and analysis team didn't know the hypothesis or which group was which.

1) Feedback is great, right? The meta-analyses show it is - but this fascinating study by Stefan Ekecrantz takes those meta-analyses apart. He examines Hattie and Timperley; they rely on Kluger and DeNisi; Ekecrantz looks at what it contains very closely, diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva… 2) For example, Kluger and DeNisi's meta-analysis includes studies looking at the effect of feedback on workplace productivity, on hockey teams' use of body checks, and on Extra-Sensory Perception (feedback helps).

Absolutely sensational article from @CogSciLearning on habit formation ($). Most useful valuable thing I have read all year. link.springer.com/article/10.100… He notes that habit crops up very rarely in educational research, even though habits are central to people’s success.

1) Very interesting paper compares the effect of practice with either a) reflection, b) coaching or c) live-coaching during practice + coaching afterwards 2) Crucially, it's a specific form of coaching (and this protocol shows just how much an effective coach can achieve in five minutes)

Coronavirus: we’re washing our hands, we’re working from home and we’ve got toilet paper – now what? Some social problems we may encounter over the next few months and a few ideas to address them: 1) Problem: Travel becomes impossible + national borders solidify. One solution: spend a day ‘visiting’ another place. Look around on Google Maps. Read the news from there (maybe) or local authors. Watch a film set there. Cook a local meal. Write a review on Tripadviser.

1) Still reeling from one of the most breath-taking scholarly articles I've ever read: a meticulous demolition of Anders Ericsson's claims about deliberate practice from @BrookeMacnamara and her colleagues. 2) The authors highlight shifts in definitions: Ericsson has claimed that deliberate practice a) must be designed by a teacher, b) may be designed by a teacher c) need not be designed by a teacher.

1) Are some subjects harder than others: yes, says this review. The hardest GCSEs are a grade harder than the easiest ones; the hardest A levels are two grades harder than the easiest. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… $ 2) If we aligned them (so that, on average, a student is likely to get the same grade in each of their subjects), this would lead to substantial changes in the grade distribution/students' results in some subjects.

3) The result is that these new recruits get more out of the coaching than coachees did the previous year: interesting study showing how an existing professional learning culture and structure can really help new entrants to a school. d-scholarship.pitt.edu/26185/2/653469… 4) Study #2: You can’t stop time and review teaching through description – but you can with artefacts from the classroom.

I am currently reading experiment and quasi-experimental studies of professional development. This thread will collate impressions as I go... 1) What do you do when half the teachers leave your multi-year study of coaching...?