Author Archives: drseanphd

Welcome to the second post in the Why School Sucks series. No preface this time, if you read the first post then you understand the context, if you haven’t read it, you can access it here. This second post is going to focus on the student and teacher experience and why, both students and teachersContinue reading “Why School Sucks – Part 2”

For anyone who knows me and my research, this post might come as a bit of a surprise. If you’re not familiar with my research you can check it out here.  A quick glance down the list of my publications would tell you that I’ve been writing about assessment for over ten years and IContinue reading “Assessment Drives Learning… But should it?”

Welcome to my first post in the Why School Sucks series. This series will be what I’m calling short reads: posts that are about 500-1000 words or about ¼ – ½ as long as what I would normally write. Intermittently, I will throw in some short reads, the first three of which will be theContinue reading “Why School Sucks – Part 1”

I was in the middle of writing the introduction of this week’s blog post, which was meant to be part 1 of a three-part series on why school sucks, when I received an email from a colleague that linked to an article about the current review of the New South Wales curriculum and the notionContinue reading “School reform movements and inevitable inaction”

This week’s post essentially continues where the last post left off. In last week’s post I wrote about the nature of constructivism and how teachers often misconstrue constructivist learning with student-centred teaching and how constructivism is a theory of learning that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about teaching at all, despite the teachers who thinkContinue reading “Teaching Strategies Part 1: The nature of ‘student improvement’”

This is something I have wanted to write about for a while, which is why I have made it the first post.  Specifically, it came to be when reading the book, The Knowledge Illusion.  It occurred to me how little we actually know about the things we think we know about. Sloman and Fernbach useContinue reading “Constructivism, social constructivism and what teachers think they know about learning”

Welcome to my blog.  If you’ve read the about section, then you already know about me. This blog is an attempt to give my students, and anyone else who is interested in educational thinking and discourse, more of an in-depth insight into some ideas prevalent in the educational domain. This is an alternative to myContinue reading “Maximising Student Potential: An Introduction”