What to do with the clever ones

Last Friday we had an INSET day. Our focus was thinking about how we can push and challenge those students with a high stating point, so that they make even more progress. Our starting point was to think about something we often get wrong in education – thinking that correlation and causation are the same thing.

The previous week, I had been fortunate to hear David Didau talk at the West Sussex Deputies Network conference. David mentioned how The Welsh Education Department had been trying, a few years ago, to identify why students in Wales, were underachieving compared to students in England. They noticed that boys were underperforming compared to girls, and so saw this as a possible cause. This was useful as it seems entirely feasible and is of course, easy to plan interventions around. It’s convenient. The problem is though of course, that it’s a correlation, not a cause. Upon further examination of the data, they found some more inconvenient truths i.e. that there was a correlation between right/left handedness and academic achievement and whether you lived in an odd/even house and academic achievement. This highlights the problem we have. Making every student in Wales move into an even numbered house, is unlikely to fix the problem! But we do this all the time – identify an issue, look for a correlation, mistake this for causation and then plan interventions around this perceived cause. It’s a familiar story, that results in our time and efforts being directed at the wrong thing.

To read the full blog post click here: https://classteaching.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/what-to-do-with-the-clever-ones/