NEW POST on AI, learning and why knowing stuff still matters. Link in reply ⬇️

NEW On the seductive nature of mock exams and why we need to resist it Link in reply...

The 'curse of knowledge': again and again, I see this prevent the curricular thoroughness necessary for inclusion. This is from my speech to Education NI on role of curriculum in school improvement. Full speech is here: education-ni.gov.uk/publications/c…

Latest from us - 3 things education can learn from chess about human flourishing in a world of technological superiority 1/ humans still care about humans! 2/ humans still have to learn the basics 3/ banning tech in matches makes it more useful in training

Here's David Didau on "The cost of borrowed thought: a response to 'Your Brain on ChatGPT'" The learning itself shouldn't necessarily feel "easy," even if eventually gaining automaticity does.

Imagine you are tasked with designing rations for an army. Would you ignore nutritional science because it cannot tell you exactly what the optimal nutritional mix is for every individual soldier?

We've now run four big AI writing assessments, from Year 5 to Year 9. Across them all we have high levels of AI-human agreement, very low levels of serious disagreement - and the disagreements we do have are human error. We are yet to find a serious AI error.

Defending AERO: Evidence-Informed Teaching Isn’t Oppression, It's Empowering. Link in reply ⬇️

Fixing teacher training in Australia will not transform education in this country overnight. It won’t change much in the short term, but it’s still something we should do even if for no other reason than giving graduates value for money. Here’s my five point plan. ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️

If AI is going to be used extensively in office jobs - which I think it will be - then should we be letting students use AI in the classroom? No, and here is why. With reference to 3 important research papers that show why what you do in a job shouldn't be the template for

Assessment isn’t a post-mortem. It’s the lifeblood of teaching. Specify what counts, teach it, check it, fix it. Stop sorting, start teaching. Make 100% possible for everyone. New piece on five principles of assessment that actually improve teaching 👇

Attention is a filter not a spotlight, and noisy classrooms assault that filter from every direction. Today's students rarely suffer from boredom or attention shortages, they suffer from attention surplus. Just because students are physically busy, doesn't mean they are

Not a lot of people understand this... but you actually don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to decide if something is good or bad. Marcus Aurelius says limiting the amount of opinions we have is one of the most powerful things we can do in life.

When middle-class children fail through discovery learning, their parents hire tutors who teach them explicitly. Working-class children just fail.

Blog post for Wednesday, 3rd December 2025. Ideologically driven approach to SEND fails to help "neurodiverse" pupils open.substack.com/pub/andrewold/…

.Blinkist just sent out a scam ad, using my name and photo, offering a list of 5 book recs from me, but it's just an AI-written advertisement for them. They even call me a "Harvard professor." I am canceling my subscription blinkist.com/pt/magazine/po…

Just learned that Desmos seems to have an alternative, easier way for generating random numbers from a list. Image you have the list D = [1 ... 6] and you wanted to get 10 random dice rolls. Old (still works): D.random(10) New (seems more friendly): random(D, 10)

I am very much enjoying the debate-via-middle-man I am having with Carl Hendrick about AI in education. My position is that broadly AI will change very little in education, and Carl definitely disagrees. Check out his thinking on Craig Barton here 👇👇 eedi.substack.com/p/ai-in-educat…

100% agree. When every child leaves school able to read and write competently, then we can start fretting about spurious non-literacies.