3-Read Friday #115
Social Learning, Discovery Learning and Contextual Assessment
Here are three blog posts I found interesting this week:
1. In Defense of Doing Things Together by James Tucker
One theme I keep returning to in my AI in Education interview series is the question of whether learning is inherently social. Tucker argues that machine-driven learning is seductive precisely because it works — and that’s the danger. Once efficiency rules, the messy business of learning the same thing together starts to look like waste. What gets quietly optimised away, he warns, is something schools exist to protect.
2. The Idiot Who Talked About Discovery Learning at Interview by Chris Reid
Having travelled my own road from well-meaning chaos to explicit instruction, I’m always drawn to writing brave enough to complicate the tidy version of that story — and Chris does it superbly. Reid argues that the real risk isn’t choosing direct instruction over enquiry — it’s a quieter mutation he calls “total instruction,” where teacher judgement gets stripped out entirely. The evidence on method, he shows, is genuinely mixed. The question we should be asking is a different one altogether.
3. The Use of Context in Assessment by Matthew Evans
Matt Evans is a deep thinker, and this post is a great example of that. Evans argues that we fixate on the wrong thing with “authentic” assessment — whether a task mirrors the real discipline. A borrowed idea, semantic gravity, offers a sharper lens: what counts is how a good answer moves between the concrete and the abstract.
Have a great weekend!
Craig
🏃🏻♂️Before you go, have you… 🏃🏻♂️
… checked out my brand-new book series: The Tips for Teachers guides to…
And checked out my Ultimate Retrieval Tool page on my Mr Barton Maths website
