Spring 2025 Quarterly Newsletter
Hey there! Welcome to my first ever seasonal (quarterly) email newsletter.
Spring has sprung and vegetables are just going into the soil, heralding the best
time of the year: tomato season. It’s a reminder that education advances when we
set conditions well, measure what matters, and prune what doesn’t.
I come across a lot of interesting things the education industry throws
up… perhaps some of it is of interest to you.
There are subsections: Signals = news. The Breakdown = a big idea. Sketchpad = an
interesting image. Badly Drawn Lines = where I cast shade upon an education
diagram. This Season's Progress = stuff I'm working on at the moment.
Apologies in advance if you're getting this and didn't want to. Please unsubscribe
at the bottom…
And I am always open to criticism, critique and suggestions for how to make this
better.
Cheers
Ben 🌈
Signals
Lucky Dip
ANU on “try harder” myths
Motivation matters, but the big lever is study productivity. This piece shows how
better instruction and targeted supports lift the return on effort, especially for
disadvantaged students.
reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/want-your-kids-to-do-well-at-school-it-takes-more-than-motivation
Dean's Lecture Series - Prof John Hattie on five big ideas from the latest Visible
Learning research
Think what you like about John Hattie, he always has something interesting to say!
A fellow Timaru kiwi… I think one of the things I like about his meta-analyses (hint: it
ain't the maths) is that he always puts the teacher at the centre of the equation…
Captain Obvious research for the season
To try and seem smart I'm including a journal article. The tl;dr… more recess = less
anxiety
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12293798/
McKell Institute report: Teacher workload! (one of my favourite rants)
Big theme is freeing up teacher time with smart support so learning lifts.
Policy-ish, but with practical implications for workload and classroom
productivity.
mckellinstitute.org.au/research/reports/freeing-teachers-to-teach/
Free webinar: Writing matters – what you need to know to lead a writing instruction
framework in your school
I am not wading into the argument about AERO but free learning is free learning...
Webinar on intentional play
Play is not a free-for-all. This webinar digs into planning with purpose in ECEC so
play leads to learning, with clear takeaways…
Also, it would be lovely one day to convince more people that play-based
pedagogy is not just for junior primary!
The breakdown
One big Idea, Made Plain
Frameworks: Norm, Criterion, Standards
Norm-referenced
Compares a learner with a cohort. Outputs ranks, percentiles, bell curves.
Useful for selection and system snapshots. Limited for diagnosing what to
teach next.
Criterion-referenced
Judges’ performance against clearly defined skills or tasks. Evidence shows
what the learner can do and the next teachable move. Best for formative
use, progress tracking, and targeted feedback… e.g. developmentally written
rubrics!
Standards-referenced
Judges work against externally set achievement standards. Signals whether
the expected level is met, often with exemplars and pre-set cut scores.
Good for fairness, portability, and moderation across classes and schools.
Implications
Classroom teachers
- Plan and give feedback from criteria so students see the next step
- Use standards to calibrate judgements and moderate with colleagues
- Use norms carefully for placement or extension decisions and always
explain limits
Students
- Norms tell you where you sit, not how to improve
- Criteria give you precise targets to practise and evidence to collect
- Standards show if you are at the expected level and what evidence
would lift you
Parents
- Norms are simple to read but light on guidance at home
- Criteria turn reports into concrete practice goals
- Standards clarify year-level expectations and help track progress
when changing schools
Education providers
- Use norms for benchmarking and market positioning, not proof of
learning impact - Build offerings around criteria for micro-credentials, skill maps, and
demonstrable growth - Align to recognised standards for compliance, funding, and portability
across systems
Practical takeaways
- Lead with criterion for teaching, feedback, and growth evidence
- Anchor with standards for consistency and fairness through
moderation - Reserve norms for selection, screening, and high-level benchmarking
only
I had a rant about this recently at the Melbourne TeachMeet (come to
November's one here) because our curriculum is standards-referenced…
except what are those based on? Unlike norm-referencing which is based on
data and criterion-referencing which is based on observation, who decides
the standards? I find them inconsistent, often overly ambitious and not
always obviously sequential. I feel like I must be wrong on this point so
please reach out and explain what's wrong with that view.
SketchPad
Visual Ideation
Badly Drawn Lines
We Don't Do Learning Styles
Don't feel bad if you fell for this. I did as well until very recently…
Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience is one of those things that should have
stayed in the 1940s. Dale himself never put percentages on it, never claimed
“people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear…” and yet
that dodgy version is plastered across teacher PD slides everywhere. The
actual cone was just a visual way of showing that learning can happen
through different types of experiences, from abstract (reading, listening) to
more concrete (doing, simulating). It wasn’t a hierarchy of effectiveness, and
it definitely wasn’t a learning retention formula.
What’s frustrating is how quickly it got turned into gospel truth, with
trainers waving around the “10-20-30-90” numbers as if they’d come
straight from peer-reviewed research. They didn’t. They were made up
decades later and bolted onto Dale’s picture.
The result? Generations of teachers have been guilt-tripped into thinking
reading or lectures are automatically useless, when in reality it’s the design
of the task and the clarity of the feedback that matter most.
If you see the cone with percentages, treat it like a bad chain email from the
90s. Looks convincing, but the source is thin air.
This Season’s Progress
What I’m Trying Right Now
Me and Rachel Parker from Global Play Lab are showcasing a game I made over a
decade ago which is now played all the way from NZ to Australia via Tasmania and
Norway.
The game:
It is totally open source but to build it yourself takes some time. I'm going to
canvas interest to see whether or not I should get it profesh printed so people can
buy it ready made (I think even at no profit it would still be $100-200).
I've been immersed into a certain type of rubric writing, pioneered at the
Assessment and Evaluation Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. I
started teaching evaluation this year and the wonderful Associate Professor Amy
Gullickson pointed out that this type of rubric could be very useful in evaluation.
We did a full six hour workshop at the International Australian Evaluation Society
Annual Conference in Canberra in September. The entire process was mindblowingly enlightening. I am so lucky to work with someone who can see the connections between two separate but related fields.
We took developmental rubrics, normally used in education, and showed how they
can work for evaluators. Instead of vague rating scales, we broke criteria into clear,
observable steps that link directly to evaluative reasoning. We tested them against
messy program examples, checked where they helped make judgements clearer,
and spotted common traps like making the criteria too broad or too numerous. The
shift was from “rubric as a scoring grid” to “rubric as a reasoning tool” that makes
evaluation decisions easier to explain and defend.
Besides that, the conference was epic and I swear it was the friendliest one I've
ever been to!
I hope you have a great spring, don't have to spend too long in the weeds and have
everything you plant ripen with promise 😉