The Times Festival of Education: Part 1

The Times Festival of Education is to education enthusiasts what Glastonbury is to music lovers. For those of us who might admit to spending their "free" time perusing education blogs and reading books about teaching, this is more than an antidote to England's World Cup exit.

 Six Oakham teachers are here at Wellington College but we seem to have the unplanned strategy of optimal coverage of the wide variety of talks - so I have not even seen some of them.

I still have a day to go but this has already been a valuable trip. My own highlights of yesterday include:

Some tribal singing

Dylan Wiliam's talk on Principled Curriculum Design. As a real heavy-weight in terms of teaching and learning thinking and practice, it was reassuring to hear so much support regarding what we are developing at Oakham. In particular, he talked about the importance of specific disciplines focusing on "domain specific" habits of mind when learning subject content. This supports one key strategy for LHO next year: in the Middle and Upper School to identify and present the most crucial Habits for each particular subject. This leads us to a place where we are authentically teaching subject disciplines with the expectation that students ought to be learning to understand how a mathematician (or historian, or linguist....) thinks and approaches problems. With a broader-based understanding of how the Habits are crucial for independent thinking and learning developed in the Lower School, this later specialisation has compelling research to support its value.


Tom Sherrington, one of my favourite education bloggers, did a talk on why despite the seeming divide between "progressives" and "traditionalists", great teaching uses elements of both. This seems to me to be common sense and certainly is how things are developing at Oakham. It is not so much that they are all really the same thing - there are key differences - but to be dogmatic with one is to cut yourself off from incredibly valuable approaches from the other.

A poor quality shot of a high quality session from Mr Michael Gove

Finally, a very late Mr Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, arrived to "headline" (in Glastonbury-speak) the event. It was very clear that many fellow-teachers, particularly those from the state sector, are not happy with many of he interventions that he has made. We, certainly, are currently engaged in much research and discussion regarding the best way forward with the Upper School Curriculum, in light of the proposed changes. However, I do not think that anyone could deny that his performance in answering questions was very impressive. Surprisingly, for a politician, he does answer questions and clearly believes on a principled level what he is doing. Whether or not you agree with all being changed is certainly another matter.