Half a million hits – my top five posts

Embed from Getty Images

As the hit counter on this blog ticks past 500,000, I thought it would be worth sharing my top five posts of all time:

5. PISA shows you can’t always get what you want

In this post, I demonstrate that the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) keeps finding out things that are the opposite of what it probably hoped for.

4. No best way

Is there really no best way to teach? Maybe. But, if so, why do those who mount this argument write reports that advise schools to adopt specific teaching methods?

3. Four ways cognitive load theory has changed my teaching

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the subject of my PhD research and has been described by none other than Dylan Wiliam as the ‘single most important thing for teachers to know’. In this post, I explain how it has changed my teaching practice.

2. Learning lessons from the failure of Scotland’s “Curriculum for Excellence”

Scotland’s revolutionary new curriculum has been a failure. Why? What can we learn from this?

1. Can teaching be given a score?

My top post asks whether we can measure the effectiveness of teaching and give it a score. It is also the home of one of my post popular diagrams; ‘How rubrics fail’.

Two trends and some advice

I’ve notice two trends since I started blogging. The first is that I am gaining proportionally more hits from Australia than when I began. The U.K. still tops my hits but my home country now comes a close second. The second trend is that fewer people pop up to disagree with me, rebut my posts or criticise them on Twitter. I can only guess why this is the case but, coupled with my own more selective approach to responding, the effect has been for me to be able to focus on my message a little more and expend less effort dealing with criticism.

My hit count is not as high as the top education bloggers but it is much higher than I ever imagined when I started out. If you want to grow your own blog from scratch then my only advice is to simply keep going. Too often, promising and provocative blogs spring up, post four or five times and then stop. I just didn’t stop.