If you follow the educational literature on motivation, you might easily come away with the impression that motivation primarily arises when students experience autonomy. Give them choices. Let them set their own goals. Provide space for their own interests. That idea has had a great deal of influence over the past decades, even though Ryan… Read More Does Motivation Depend More on Structure Than Autonomy?
We all make mistakes. No, really. When we calculate something, write an email, or have a conversation with someone. You might think you know the right answer, only to find out you were wrong after all. But what actually happens after we make a mistake? And does that change as we get older and perhaps… Read More Learning from mistakes changes with age
No, this isn’t (again) about the Stanford Prison Experiment or Milgram (although there have been successful replications there)… Today I want to briefly focus on cognitive dissonance. This is one of those psychological concepts that almost everyone has heard of at some point. Even those who have never taken a psychology course usually know the basic idea. It boils… Read More What if one of the most famous psychology experiments is wrong?
There is something oddly comforting in this short video from Harvard Business Review. Not because it tells people to simply “believe in themselves,” but because it reframes something many high achievers quietly struggle with: imposter syndrome. Arthur Brooks argues that feeling like a fraud is often not a sign that you are incompetent. In many… Read More Why The Imposter Syndrome Might Not Be Entirely Bad
This week, I gave a talk on well-being, motivation, and resilience. But as I drove home afterwards, I realised that there can be something uncomfortable about how we speak about student well-being today, with the focus on “resilience,” “grit,” or “coping,” As if the most important question becomes how students learn to deal better with… Read More Why student well-being isn’t just about resilience
One of the underlying things I keep returning to on this blog is how difficult humans are with uncertainty. We like certainty. Clear answers. Strong predictions. Education debates are full of them, too. Yet reality rarely cooperates that neatly. This short BBC Ideas video featuring statistician David Spiegelhalter offers a remarkably accessible introduction to Bayesian… Read More Why Bayesian Thinking Matters More Than Ever
Social-emotional learning, or SEL as it is often abbreviated, remains one of those topics where discussions veer off in all directions remarkably quickly. For some, it is almost the solution to everything that goes wrong in education: from bullying to learning deficits, and from well-being to citizenship. For others, it has become nothing more than… Read More Does social-emotional learning really work? A new meta-analysis on prosocial behavior adds nuance to the debate.
During a talk in Belgium last week, I was asked a question by a school leader that I seem to hear more and more often: Why are we seeing so many more diagnoses, such as ADHD, than before? Is there really an explosive increase? Have children changed? Or are we looking differently? Not coincidentally, shortly… Read More Why Are ADHD Diagnoses Rising Worldwide? A Different Perspective on a Complex Debate
Whenever an international report, such as the recent IELS study, is published, reactions quickly follow that basically amount to: “See? My solution was right all along.” I’m probably guilty of that myself from time to time. So today I wanted to try something different by putting two very different sources next to each other to… Read More Why do differences between children appear so early in life?
It is quite literally an age-old debate. Are children born as a blank slate, or is everything already determined from the start? These are two positions that have alternated for centuries, usually in slightly more modern packaging, from behaviourism to insights from genetics. One emphasises environment and experience, the other focuses on disposition and biology.… Read More Children are not born as blank slates, but as overstuffed bookcases