Hi Andrew, You misunderstand me!
I agree that something has gone wrong with the establishment. See another blog where I call it incompetent. I’m not a member of the ‘esetablishment’ I’ve never had a government job, a university job, I’ve always been a teacher and writer, and I’ve always criticised educational policy in this country. (I also applaud Daisy’s stance on OFSTED’s teaching advice in the above piece):
https://geoffpetty.com/why-is-uk-educational-policy-so-confident-yet-so-incompetent/

I am delighted that Daisy won the award you mentioned, I don’t feel sour grapes, but the award doesn’t mean that everything she says is true.

I agree that the more knowledge a person has in a given domain the more skillful they will be in that domain. However that does not mean you CANNOT teach skills except by teaching knoweldge. Skills are improved by teaching students procedures that improve their performance in that skill, along with metacognitive processes that help them manage that process. We need to teach both skills and knowledge, and we know how to do this so that students improve both their knowledge and skill learning. What’s not to like? See chapter 21 of my Evidence Based Teaching for how to do this. It’s an approach to teaching skills that has been found to work very well:
https://geoffpetty.com/teaching-students-skills-is-possible-and-necessary/

Effect sizes have been criticised, but you exaggerate how much. RCTs are generally considered to be the gold standard, and are the only means of showing cause and effect, and effect sizes are the only way that allows teachers to sift through factors that might affect achievement, and choose which ones are most likely to improve learning in their classrooms. If you abandon effect sizes because they are imperfect, what are teachers to replace it with, as a way of sifting methods that might be worth trying? Just their own experience and the bias of others. I’ll stick to effect sizes thanks, they show for example that formative assessment (done well) has a very high effect size, Daisy agrees in her new book, so effect sizes can’t be that unreliable.
https://geoffpetty.com/the-uses-and-abuses-of-evidence-in-education/

Sorry to overload you with more blogs to read. The problem, I am beginning to realise, is that the approach to teaching generic skills suggested by past governments was not based on summary research and so didn’t work (a typical government initiative). Teachers were cross, very justifiably. But if it doesn’t work to do something badly, that does not mean it won’t work if you do it well.
Enough! (if not too much!) Thanks for your interest and your thoughtful response.

Hattie says “integrate facts”. Christodoulou says “you need facts to think.” I see no contradiction.

Given the actual establishment are the ones pushing the skills agenda I’m hardly surprised “her ideas seem almost to have become a new orthodoxy.” The orthodoxy in the blogosphere IS largely that something has gone wrong in the establishment. So it’s clearly not her job to present a balanced account. It’s a myth-busting critique first.

Given she won the Global Education & Skills Forum it’s pretty hard not to see this as a sour grapes hatchet piece by one of that very same establishment.

Furthermore Hattie’s effect sizes have been severely questioned by statisticians and education research in general has the lowest rates of replication going. Meta-analysis can’t fix junk-in junk-out.

Unsurprisingly we teachers are looking for evidence outside the ideologically strictured faculties of education research.

Hi Anthony, are you THE Anthony Haynes? Yes, I agree, and I worry that the new ‘knowledge curriculum’ developed for Primary in the UK is labouring under the misapprehension that if you just teach knowledge, students will discover skills by themselves unaided.

Yes, Daisy does say skills and knowledge cannot be separated, and its true you can’t be skillful in, say, economics if you don’t know any economics. My point is that even though knowledge is required to be skillful in any subject, you can still teach the skills at the same time as the content, she says you can’t, that’s our difference. As I mention in my piece there is direct empirical evidence that skills such creative and critical thinking can be taught and research reviews on this evidence. However, some ‘progressive’ approaches to teaching these skills don’t work as Daisy correctly points out. To be successful, teachers have to teach the skills with the content, as Abrami’s review of research shows, then skill teaching works well. See chapter 21 of my Evidence Based Teaching to see how this can be done, its quite tricky as you have to teach for transfer of the skill.

Daisy specifically refers to knowledge and skills as ‘scrambled eggs’ and a ‘double helix’, i.e. they can’t be separated. Your objections, even in the update, seem unfounded.

Thanks for this interesting post Lidia. I certainly agree that the more you know about a subject, the better you can think about it. I doubt anyone would disagree with this. So we need to teach the facts first as you say, then get students to think about these facts. Indeed the deeper their thinking the better they learn those facts.

But teaching students facts is not the only way to teach them skills. You can teach the skills separately and deliberately as well, as the Abrami paper shows. A new paper by him and his colleagues confirms this.

I’m dead against the teaching of skills ‘in a vacuum’ (without the background knowledge) and this has been shown not to work well, if at all. Daisy argues that some ‘progressive’ educationalist advocate practising skills by themselves without the background knowledge, and I agree with her, and you, this won’t work well.

One example of critical thinking skills that needs to be taught directly, and doesn’t seem to be understood by many teachers despite their background knowledge, is the misconception that if there are more arguments in favour of doing something than arguments against doing it, then one should do it. But there might be another strategy that takes less time and trouble, with even more arguments in favour of it, and even less arguments against it. So a ‘Strengths weakness opportunities and threats’ (SWOT) analysis is not helpful by itself. Evaluation is almost always comparative. Background fact teaching doesn’t teach that kind of skill. The idea that evaluation must be comparative, is best learned by being taught directly, and by using this skill in context, ON the background knowledge. That’s just one example showing that skills need teaching directly.
I’d be interested in your thoughts after reading the book. I think she does clearly say that teaching skills is a waste of time as one of my quotes from her book shows.

Hi Peter, I have changed the blog a bit to answer your question putting in some quotes at the end of my blog. There is one from page 81 for example that makes her position clear I think.

Thanks Geoff! I have indeed ordered the book today from Browns.
Best regards,
Chris