Daisy Christodoulou

Q: Daisy Christodoulou

Daisy Christodoulou is famous for her best-selling books: *Seven Myths about Education* and *Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning*.

Q: Daisy Christodoulou

Daisy Christodoulou is famous for her best-selling books: *Seven Myths about Education* and *Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning*.

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Daisy Christodoulou

Daisy Christodoulou is famous for her best-selling books: Seven Myths about Education and Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning.

Knowledge and facts

Christodoulou says the biggest myth in education is that knowledge and fact do not matter. That it would be better to teach students skills.
She argues that a large chunk of evidence tells us that knowledge and facts matter a lot.
To be able to think, we need to have secured facts in our long-term memory.
- The more facts we have stored, the easier it is for use to use our working memory to analyse and critically evaluate ideas.

Direct instruction (DI)

DI is heavily based on evidence and on cognitive science. It really works.
However, Christodoulou argues that many educators still insist on using project-based teaching without the evidence that this is beneficial to students learning.
Many educators also associate knowledge-based teaching with "teaching for an exam", when this is not the case.
DI is about breaking down the knowledge students need, teaching them in chunks and getting students to practise each of these chunks a lot.

Chunking

It is fundamental to chunk the skills and the knowledge that will be taught.
Christodoulou gives an analogy to explain that.
- Imagine that you want to run a marathon and are preparing for it. Running the marathon is your end goal.
- How do you prepare for that? Obviously, you will not be running marathons every day. You will do work-out sessions, sprints, longer tracks, swimming. You will think about sleeping and eating patterns.

Chunking

It is the same idea when we think about teaching.
If our end goal is to teach the students how to write an essay, we cannot simply give them multiple essays to write.
We need to teach them each part of that skill and that knowledge.

Daisy Christodoulou

Daisy Christodoulou is famous for her best-selling books: Seven Myths about Education and Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning.

Comparative judgment

Humans are bad in making objective judgments. Christodoulou advocates that texts and essays should be marked using comparative judgment.
Instead of grading each essay individually, teachers simply compare pairs of essays and chose the best one using their guts.
When you get hundreds of teachers doing that with the same sets of essays, you end up with a sophisticated model that will help students learn how to improve their own writing. And it will save teachers marking time.

The knowing-doing gap

Some teachers say that a knowledge-based curriculum helps kids to memorize things but not know how to use the knowledge. They say that a project-based curriculum or skill-based classes would do a better job.
Christodoulou disagrees. The way to reduce the knowing-doing gap is to focus even more on knowledge and facts, but give students plenty of opportunities to practice each small chunk of knowledge they are learning.

Feedback

When giving feedback, teachers should not focus on generic, subjective skills like “you need to identify a larger number of features in how the writer uses language”.
The feedback should be helpful in practice. So “how to identify features in the text. What are the most important features to look for”.
- Useful feedback like those is usually knowledge-based.
The end goal of education should be skilled, critical and creative people. But, to get there, they need facts and knowledge.