@psteidinger.bsky.social what has captured your interest recently Peter?

If everyone agrees exposing prior knowledge/models of understanding is super important for learning, then please someone tell me how we can do that without first asking the pupils to do some kind of ‘inquiry’ tasks?

For all those teachers and speakers who use slides (all, thus, except John Sweller😂) I give you the 'Oli-Filter' . Please use it! @olicav.bsky.social

#BlueLZ Mini-Whiteboards im Unterricht. open.substack.com/pub/lstam/p/...

We all agree teacher explanations are important. We all agree pupil thinking is important. How do you maximise the thinking pupils are doing whilst you are explaining?

No, movement doesn't replace thinking. But it can hold information at no cognitive cost and to the benefit of retrieval.

When AI tutors become ridiculously amazing at supporting and matching the content and choice of activity to each particular tutee, I wonder what people will say if we will start to see an indisputable emergence of learning styles 🤔

Cybernetics is not the Banana (Part 2) with Benjamin P. Taylor @antlerboy.com is now on YouTube: youtu.be/0IBjnZlcdfQ

Want to teach biology this way? See Difference Maker: cmooreanderson.wixsite.com/teachingbiol...

Time to repost this: #UKEd #EduSky

This summer I started working on a new book for a general audience and really enjoying it. Working title so far: ▸Six Premises to Reframe the Art of Teaching. Six chapters, exploring the consequences for (teaching and learning) of six fundamental principles. A *fresh* look at classroom practice.

Transience is inevitable. Working memory is the ability to resist transience. We have tools and technologies to support our ability to resist transience. We are in a constant stream of information, sometimes we are required to keep up with the stream, sometimes we need help.

Thread on Value Agency Interest Motivation Simulation & Aims VALUE • action causes a change and the sum of the value of the change across multiple aspects is calculated as overall value of the action.

I haven't written anything for a while... Here is something inspired by @claireharley.bsky.social's post from yesterday about values and clarity of communication What Makes Great Leadership? Clarity of Communication & Reducing Uncertainty #UKEd #EduSky musingsofadr.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/w...

There is a lot of talk of what to teach and how to teach, and these are important but they are always at any moment, proceeded by a gestalt awareness of what is needed at that moment. Where is the discussion of this gestalt perspectival awareness of what is needed at that moment? #eruditepedagogy

If you or they are confused. The 1st thing to do is to mitigate the transient effect by moving the information into the permanent. Space is time as we can only pay attention to one thing at a time.

How important is agency to you? How important is agency for your pupils? How important is agency for teachers?

What is not obvious in the moment will be transient if a decision is not made to place it in the permanent.

We cannot get away from our embodied interpretation of the world. Every concept we have is a thing - a thing that is in relation to other things. We cannot remove the way we interpret via spatial cognitive sense making. Visuospatial is fundamental to thought.

Launching my new Substack today! It starts with some key ideas from Chapter 1 of Rethinking Educational Theory — Weekly posts will explore how dialogic education + AI can transform teaching and learning. Subscribe if interested in that sort of thing rupertwegerif.substack.com/p/turning-th...

Christian helps us look at our day to day habits & challenge our assumptions. Shifting our questions from those that unintentionally carry uncertainty of meaning, to those of clarity so pupils get straight to the hard thinking. cmooreanderson.wixsite.com/teachingbiol...

I have just finished reading Difference Maker by Christian Moore-Anderson and would advise any Biology Teachers to give it a read. I have never been so convinced by the pedagogy within a book.

a perfect demonstration of how visuospatial communication can make relational information completely obvious, and where sequential text just fails.

Fioella provides a fascinating description of his work on generative learning activities. He describes 2 ways we try to make sense of information. We verbally self explain as we go by making inferences and we combine this with visualising the situation - both generative. youtu.be/NSzgqVl3CfA?...

How do you imagine knowledge is organised? Whatever you imagined is your prototype of the structure of knowledge.

A lovely example of pupils using a simple explanatory model to really interact with and explore the interconnectedness of photosynthesis and respiration.

#UKEd #EduSky This diagram didn't make the cut for the Organise Ideas book. But looking over it again, I rather like the attempt to coordinate the various theories around visual thinking/communication. It's wider & deeper than just dual coding theory. Sorry.

@cmooreanderson.bsky.social Fritz Zwicky created the Morphological Analysis (now known as the Zwicky Box) in which variations of set elements, laid out in ordered visual fashion, allows significantly more combinations to be considered than when done in one's head.

What distinguishes an explanatory model from a description? What distinguishes an explanatory model from an explanation? How do we know an explanatory model is designed so 1: pupils can actually use them? 2: they maximise for explanatory power?

There is a distinction, otherwise @cmooreanderson.bsky.social would not need to draw our attention to it (counterintuitively). So that debate is settled 😀 I challenge Christian to provide the argument that the negative impact of using the term ‘encoding’ is greater than its usefulness.

If we substituted the word "encoding" for "learning" in many of the eduposts we see today, would it make a difference? In other words, are people talking about the same idea and just using a different word? What advantages does the term "encoding" bring? #EruditePedagogy

NEW BLOG: Managing attention in classrooms is a social justice issue hobbolog.wordpress.com/2025/06/02/m... #UKEd #Edusky #EduBlogUK

Redesigning our Year 9 curriculum to include Semmelweis and Snow, and vaccinations. Explaining through causality is part of our curricular metacontent. So these models build on a culture of explaining. I explain metacontent here: cmooreanderson.wixsite.com/teachingbiol... #iTeachBio #chatbiology

NEW: Are we living in a simulation? open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

I think the biggest problem with the EduCogSci movement is its (almost sole) focus on empiricism. It's produces a view of: data = knowledge = understanding. So people only interact with research results. They miss all the philosophy (of science) that gives it any meaning. #EduSky #EruditePedagogy

If you want to boost your enjoyment of teaching - do this.

Another endorsement for the variation theory of learning. A brief introduction here ↓ cmooreanderson.wixsite.com/teachingbiol...

An excellent and needed alternative perspective on a strategy that has become so accepted within pedagogical language that its validity is rarely questioned. On superficial inspection ‘I do/we do/you do’ seems to be a perfectly approach. But, in your context, is it?

Conference⤵️ Secondary Science Festival (including #chatbiology speakers): Attendees get a free copy of "Difference Maker" 👌 #SciTeachUK #iTeachBio

Excellent advice from Christian complete with reasons and practical suggestions. Co-constructing diagrams and explanations with pupils invites the teacher and the pupils to co-participate in the joint process of learning.

Great blog. Helping us apply the old adage of if it’s too good to be true it probably is. Rational reasons for why something will work are often so persuasive that the belief it will work may mean a particular strategy can linger for years, even though the system has not changed a jot.

The dialectic of educational enlightenment: Questioning ‘what works’ - critiquing the ideas of evidence-based practice and 'edumyths' with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer! #education #research #socialtheory #edusky #uked #criticaltheory #edumyths #teaching mrjoneswhiteboard.blog/2025/04/15/t...

#EduSky #UKEd I had the very great honour of speaking with Merlin Donald today. Author of Origins of the Modern Mind & A Mind So Rare, his theory of humankind's intellectual breakthrough by overcoming transient speech, offers an elegant structure to better understand Cognitive Load Theory.

▸Do you want a fresh way of seeing teaching and learning of science? ▸One not based on ◂computational▸ metaphors of students as processors, storers, and retrievers. ▸But on our ◂biological▸ condition as inference-making social animals? #EduSky #UKEd #SciTeachUK #iTeachBio #EduSci

Does anyone know what mastery learning might look like in secondary science? Is it just a matter of spending longer on the fundamental concepts meaning some 'advanced' concepts are not taught? Does it imply more emphasis on understanding & less on isolated knowledge? #eruditepedagogy #UKEd

How much of your classroom time do you dedicate to activities that are designed to help memory without helping understanding vs activities designed to help memory via understanding? #eruditepedagogy #UKEd #SciTeachUK

Christian demonstrates a way of teaching biology that inspires me to want to teach biology.

When we talk about meaning there is always the potential for semantic equivocation. Propositional facts provide factual meaning. But the relevance of the fact is not contained within the fact. The relevance meaning is contextual & can never be completely captured in propositions. #eruditepedagogy

So many well explained fundamentally important ideas that help us to keep our sights on more meaningful lessons. Thank you @cmooreanderson.bsky.social

Here's a preview of my March 8th conversation w/ @cmooreanderson.bsky.social about Sensemaking & Cybernetics in Classroom Teaching! Search & subscribe to 'Human Restoration Project' on any podcast app or listen on our website: www.humanrestorationproject.org/podcast #EduSky #eruditepedagogy #cogsci