oliver caviglioli

CLT and presentations. What to avoid. An old blog post: olicav.com/blog/2020/4/14…

@josephkinnaird @HLearningPD Looking forward to reading this, very much.

My book Secondary RE in Action is out later this month! The book brings together the latest research in our subject alongside practical strategies for teaching and assessing in RE. Preorder here: amazon.co.uk/Secondary-Reli… @HLearningPD #TeamRE

@davegray calls this The Egyptian Perspective, as opposed to The Chinese Perspective (set at 30*, parallel lines; all figures same size fore or background), or The Italian Perspective (that you know)

@WALKTHRUS_5's Chloe is an Isotype! Read of her origins, around 100 years ago from the minds of utopian philosophers Otto & Marie Neurath. And, although not mentioned in this article, the Austrian graphic artist Gerd Arntz theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

We have just a handful of places left to join our final cohort of the year for Coaching WalkThrus. Our certified programme to support the development of technical pedagogical coaching using Teaching WalkThrus in your school. Don't leave it too late to grab your space!

I’ve read a few things recently that I have initially recoiled from because of an apparent forced certainty in the tone and title. X is wrong; Y is right Y (good thing) is totally different to X (worse thing) X (thing lots of people do) is a waste of time. Y ( thing I like doing) is way better. Most X is bad - except my version which is great. This over confidence around details of practice is off-putting but also has no actual roots in evidence beyond a person’s preferences and their evaluation of what they’ve personally observed. I know I’m probably guilty of sounding like this too. Unfortunately this tone - with its implicit critique of others - actually can overshadow the good ideas themselves. I re-read something just now mentally inserting a liberal dose of qualifying phrases and found it much easier to absorb: ‘my personal preference/interpretation is ..,’ ‘a routine I’ve found that seems to work well is… ‘ ‘As an alternative to X you might find Y works better… ‘ ‘One possible solution to A is to try B….’ This helps me not to get wound up by overconfident assertions and claims to superior practice. The nature of implementing educational research in practice is that multiple techniques can and do deliver on the same core principles. Maybe it’s up to readers to apply a filter of this type rather than expecting writers to constantly add these qualifying phrases - but one way or the other it’s worth pausing to dial down on certainty ..

@tombennett71 @SWLiteracy I remember the same thing some 20+ years ago in Scottish education.

This is inevitable: when boundaries become optional, and behavioural expectations are ambiguous, when consequences are inconsistent and unpredictable, all levels of anti-social behaviour rises up. And boys raised on junk media, absent of strong parental guidance, will start decaying into ancient cruelties, like misogyny. We know how to tackle, this. But the current guidance for Scottish schools ties the hands of staff. It's tragic. You can't just tut at sexual harassment and say 'sexism is unacceptable.' You have to make it unacceptable.

@warmMagnet Your tweet is a syllabus in itself. Thank you.

Scattered thoughts this morning: Both uncertainty and imperfect knowledge are the norm in perception. Dealing with uncertainty is a process. Improving how one deals with in-context uncertainty is a kind of skill acquisition. We tend to think of skill as related to motor plan learning, but sometimes skill acquisition is better characterized as perceptual than (purely) motor. At the same time, perceptual skill often relies primarily on vision for info pick-up and is largely tied to the skilled efficiency of eye movements, as we see in the case of reading. This is especially true when we look at the emergence of properly defined reading, i.e., reading for meaning. The efficiency of eye movements markedy improves as a child's ability to read for meaning emerges. Both uncertainty and imperfect knowledge are the norm in reading for meaning. Reading comprehension and thinking critically about what one reads must always deal with uncertainty and imperfect knowledge. Even though it’s possible to rather objectively compare young readers in terms of how well they understand an author’s intended meaning, reading comprehension is most accurately viewed as a very personal take-away.

@alephlove I'm grateful to you for the alert.

Im happy that this book is being discussed. To more good books being discussed!!

@MrLeeBates Yes I've an exercise I've done in keynotes for teachers to experience the transience of split-attention.

@olicav This means even if a person is looking at a diagram with text as close as it can be to the diagram there is still a transience effect because of the shift of the persons attention from one to another. /4

Intro to Rethinking Cognitive Load Theory. Despite Sweller explaining the Transient Info Effect to be primary (Fröyd's Toolbox Episode 56), I notice its significance is still missing. Merlin Donald's evolutionary theory would rectify this blind spot.

@MrLeeBates From a 1st Person viewpoint, the image or text disappears from view (& therefore WM) upon turning one's head. Transience is also the ever-present danger in Worked Examples, as Fred Jones beautifully demonstrates (using different terms) in his A Picture For Every Move YouTube vid

@MrLeeBates Yes all very revealing. What interests me — although insufficiently to get me going — is a manifesto paper (no mere One-Pager of others' work) on Transience in CLT's Effects. In keynotes I've explained how Split Attention is only superficially understood..,1/2

Purposeful Oracy: 24.06.2026. Structuring opportunities for learning to and through talk in your school? Join Voice 21 and Teaching WalkThrus @WALKTHRUs_5 to examine classroom practices for oracy, theory and practice, broken into five visual steps.

Teaching WalkThrus Summer conferences: 11.06.2026 London, 12.06.2026 Manchester. Join @WALKTHRUs_5 to deepen practice on core pedagogical techniques – formative action loops; exemplars; success criteria. Embed practice through team coaching. Examine case stories of impact.

Sports have quick and objective feedback loops...especially track. You ran faster or didn't. That loop allows for us to to learn via running mini experiments. The best training systems stick around. It's why real world training is always decades ahead of research

Student Talk: It matters - not only to deepen learning but because it also just does. teacherhead.com/2026/04/02/stu… via @teacherhead

@RichardWh84 @dperkinsed Yes (!). Just as there's a belated acknowledgement that WM challenges will limit some pupils' access to academic success, similarly so with content's communication overly through syntax. As Larkin & Simon (1987) saw, diagrams are more computationally efficient than syntax.

@olicav @dperkinsed Yes they have created some task designs to make student think a little deeper and make connection but agreed doesnt mean learning is visible.Perhaps making learning connections may have been a better phrase. Or even "organising ideas" i think I have heard that somewhere else.

Expertise matters, but making thinking visible is the catalyst for growth and making meaning. If the depth of student thinking remains invisible, we can't build on it. How are you surfacing their thinking to bridge the gap between instruction and deeper learning?

@RichardWh84 @dperkinsed No, it's the use of the word 'visible' (as Hattie did) when it simply means manifested in writing. Of course, that's also down to my slant, reading 'visual' when reading 'visible'.

@olicav @dperkinsed Is your issue the volume of activities then? As if you sift through them all you get some that are ok. This to me seems like an attempt to develop a students schema and organise their thoughts.

@alephlove Thanks very much. Will definitely get!

@olicav Plus, I think you would also appreciate this book as well. amazon.com/Rethinking-Cog…

Would be interesting to compare from an ecological psychology of things!