3-Read Friday #100

Failure, feedback and QLAs

Before we begin, you may want to check out my brand-new 16-part book series, The Tips for Teachers guide to… here.

Here are three blog posts that I found interesting this week.

1. Some Children Will Always Fail by Kris Boulton

A powerful post from Kris that encapsulates his whole unstoppable learning philosophy. Kris argues that when students fail at multi-step processes, the fault usually lies in instructional design rather than student ability, and identifying which tasks are genuinely multi-step “cognitive routines” is the essential first step toward teaching them effectively.

2. The Forgotten Desirable Difficulty - Reduced Feedback by Paul Kirschner

Paul takes a deep dive into the most underrated desirable difficulty - reduced feedback. He argues that deliberately fading the frequency and specificity of feedback forces students to develop the internal monitoring and self-correction skills essential for durable, transferable learning — but only when they have sufficient foundational knowledge to benefit from the struggle.

3. Death to the Spreadsheet: Why I Finally Ditched QLA by Joel Kenyon

I have long been anti-QLAs, but have never been able to articulate why as clearly as Joel does here. Joel argues that QLA spreadsheets create an illusion of precision but ultimately waste teachers' time, confuse performance with learning, and should be replaced by ongoing formative assessment and targeted, spaced-retrieval practice.

Have a great weekend!

Craig