Eminent cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, is responsible for one of my favourite quotes in education. "Memory is the residue of thought." His argument is that "memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember, it's a product of what you think about."(1) Therefore, you should tailor your work with children to focus on what you want them to think about, because that will be what they will tend to remember. This has important ramification

Collaborative Practice and collective efficacy are two prominent themes in education currently. Both are aimed at enabling educators to be as effective as possible and raise the opportunities for the students in their care. Whilst the research around collective efficacy has been around for some decades (Albert Bandura) it has re-emerged as an important impact on student learning. John Hattie (https://visible-learning.org/2018/03/collective-teacher-efficacy-hattie/) has been a

Our society has a great focus at the moment on habits. We look at habits of viewing, spending, social media use, eating, exercise and the list goes on. Companies use a lot of resources to try to get to the bottom of these habits so that they can get a competitive edge over their rivals. In education, habits are just as important. Teachers have habits that have built up over many years of school experience. Whether that be the habits they witnessed as students which have b

In July of 2015, I stepped off a plane in Melbourne confronted with temperatures of 4 degrees having spent the past two weeks in the summer temperatures of Spain and France. The purpose of my trip was to attend the 17th International Conference on Thinking (ICOT) in Bilbao, Spain. Along with colleagues from the ONWZ of the Melbourne Archdiocese I spent 4 days listening to some of the pre-eminent speakers on education and the importance of developing a thinking curriculum.