Casting a critiquing eye over current education practices, Didau’s book will make for useful reading for professionals keen to develop their pupils’ critical thinking skills, and develop their knowledge further than simply ‘learning-to-the-test’.
What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
Synopsis
In his third book, What if everything you knew about education was wrong? Didau examines the distinction between learning and performance: the latter being what we can observe and measure during instruction, the former about long term retention and the transfer of skills and knowledge over time. A good school education should equip pupils with three important qualities for learning he argues: retention, transfer and change.
Didau suggests important areas in education rely more on performance than learning. These include assessment for learning, lesson observation, metacognition, mindsets, independent learning, differentiation, motivation and behaviour. He presents a series of research that offer practical strategies for adjusting teaching to ensure pupils retain what they are taught, are able to use it in new contexts, and are effected by it.
An education centred more around learning than performance, he concludes, results in more rounded pupils better able to deal with the world around them.