Education, Academia & the Absurdities in Between
Welcome to my blog!
Here you’ll find my rants, raves and provocations
about schools, universities and academic life.
These are my personal views, informed by experience and research — and occasionally designed to make us uncomfortable.
Start with these articles
A few places to begin if you’re new here — on universities, research, teaching, and what educational institutions sometimes get wrong.
Academia: Hard to Enter, Harder to Defend, Still Worth It!
Why academia remains worth defending, even when universities make it difficult.
The Publish or Perish Paradox
What publication pressure does to the purpose of scholarly work.
AI Is Not the Problem. Avoiding Effort Just Got Easier
Why easy performance and genuine learning are not the same thing.
Stop Acting Surprised: Teachers Don’t Have Time for Your Research
On the distance between research production and professional realities.
Latest from the Blog
Evidence-Based? Ok. Show Me Your Work.
I have written plenty about explicit instruction, cognitive load theory and the increasingly ubiquitous “science of learning”. My position is pretty simple: Explicit instruction is effective. Cognitive load theory tells us important things about how people learn. Systematic phonics has a substantial evidence base. Teachers should know this, and it should influence what happens in…
Finally, Someone Has Peer-Reviewed the Bullshit
There are moments in academic life when you come across a paper and wonder how nobody had written it before. Pat Thomsonhas recently published one of them. Her article, in the Journal of Education Policy, develops a five-level Policy Bullshit Index for assessing claims made in the name of evidence. Not weak evidence. Not limited evidence. Not the more refined…
Qualified, Deemed Suitable and Given a Number: Just What Every Parent Wants for Their Child
A few years ago, I was invited to a teacher-workforce symposium commissioned by the NSW Department of Education and run, as these things inevitably are, by a large management-consulting firm. Academics involved in teacher education had been assembled to help solve the persistent problem of attracting and retaining teachers. There was the usual discussion of…
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