There are films you are better off not touching. They belong to our collective memory, to lessons people believe they have learned, to that lingering feeling of this is who I want to be. Dead Poets Society is one of those films. And John Keating is one of those teachers. So let me say this… Read More Why I Wouldn’t Want John Keating in My Classroom: Carpe Diem Is Not Pedagogy
A question has been resurfacing recently, including in a conversation during a professional learning day some time ago. Is the idea of “effective teaching” at odds with “evidence-informed practice”? I notice that it tends to emerge precisely when people feel that research is being used to close down doubt rather than to open it up.… Read More Is “effective teaching” at odds with evidence-informed practice?
It was a central theme in 2025. There is little reason to think this year will be any different: curriculum, sometimes with the prefix knowledge-rich, sometimes without. An international overview of curriculum policy by the Centre for Education Systems, with Lucy Crehan as lead author, is therefore a timely starting point for the new year.… Read More Curriculum Without Silver Bullets
The debate on the effects of inclusive education keeps resurfacing, and too often it misses the point. People usually framed it in absolute terms. That is understandable. Everyone involved wants the best for children. The problem is that people rarely define “the best”. Inclusive education is then presented either as a moral duty that harms… Read More What Inclusion Does to “the Rest of the Class”
Last Friday, I was in Paris for what was, without exaggeration, one of the best lectures I have seen in recent years. Barbara Oakley was on stage, doing what she does better than almost anyone else: making complex insights from cognitive science and neuroscience clear, without flattening them. She touched on the importance of knowledge… Read More Why Knowledge Matters More in the Age of AI
When a new analysis of PISA data on growth mindset appears, the temptation to draw quick conclusions about what schools “should do” is never far away. That temptation only grows when the dataset looks impressive. The PISA 2022 study, for example, covers 74 countries and includes more than half a million students. A recent PLOS… Read More Growth Mindset, PISA and the Limits of Correlation
As we move towards the end of 2025, the pattern has become hard to ignore. Over the past twelve months, the same sequence has played out again and again. Concerns rise about young people’s mental health. Attention quickly turns to social media. And before long, a policy proposal appears that promises clarity and decisiveness: an… Read More The (Overly) Simple Story About Youth Mental Health
Anyone using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude today relies, indirectly, on an idea from 2017. Barbara Oakley reminded me of this today. That idea appears in a paper with a strikingly confident title: Attention Is All You Need. In hindsight, the title was not bravado but an accurate summary of what followed. Oakley also noted that… Read More How a Relatively Small Paper Laid the Foundation for ChatGPT and Gemini
Every teacher knows that textbooks shape how students think. And we discussed earlier how this can go wrong with psychology textbooks. That’s why we tried to write a better one. But this is not only happening in psychology. A new global review by Marek Vydra and Jozef Kováčik of 93 studies analysing 1083 biology textbooks… Read More What Biology Textbooks Around the World Consistently Get Wrong
Anyone diving into research on AI in education today will find plenty of promise. They will also find quite a few studies that do not fully deliver. There are intelligent systems that provide feedback, robots that support collaboration, and adaptive platforms that personalise learning. Yet the moment you look beneath the pedagogical and learning-psychological surface,… Read More AI in Education: Plenty of Technology, Not Much Learning Theory