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Making Kids Cleverer Paperback – Illustrated, January 31, 2019
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In 'Making Kids Cleverer: A manifesto for closing the advantage gap', David Didau reignites the nature vs. nurture debate around intelligence and offers research-informed guidance on how teachers can help their students acquire a robust store of knowledge and skills that is both powerful and useful.
Foreword by Paul A. Kirschner.
Given the choice, who wouldn’t want to be cleverer? What teacher wouldn’t want this for their students, and what parent wouldn’t wish it for their children?
When David started researching this book, he thought the answers to the above were obvious. But it turns out that the very idea of measuring and increasing children’s intelligence makes many people extremely uncomfortable: “If some people were more intelligent, where would that leave those of us who weren’t?”
The question of whether or not we can get cleverer is a crucial one. If you believe that intelligence is hereditary and environmental effects are trivial, you may be sceptical. But environment does matter, and it matters most for children from the most socially disadvantaged backgrounds – those who not only have the most to gain, but who are also the ones most likely to gain from our efforts to make all kids cleverer. And one thing we can be fairly sure will raise children’s intelligence is sending them to school.
In this wide-ranging enquiry into psychology, sociology, philosophy and cognitive science, David argues that with greater access to culturally accumulated information – taught explicitly within a knowledge-rich curriculum – children are more likely to become cleverer, to think more critically and, subsequently, to live happier, healthier and more secure lives.
Furthermore, by sharing valuable insights into what children truly need to learn during their formative school years, he sets out the numerous practical ways in which policy makers and school leaders can make better choices about organising schools, and how teachers can communicate the knowledge that will make the most difference to young people as effectively and efficiently as possible.
David underpins his discussion with an exploration of the evolutionary basis for learning – and also untangles the forms of practice teachers should be engaging their students in to ensure that they are acquiring expertise, not just consolidating mistakes and misconceptions.
There are so many competing suggestions as to how we should improve education that knowing how to act can seem an impossible challenge. Once you have absorbed the arguments in this book, however, David hopes you will find the simple question that he asks himself whenever he encounters new ideas and initiatives – “Will this make children cleverer?” – as useful as he does.
Suitable for teachers, school leaders, policy makers and anyone involved in education.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown House Publishing
- Publication dateJanuary 31, 2019
- Dimensions6.14 x 0.8 x 9.21 inches
- ISBN-101785833669
- ISBN-13978-1785833663
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Schools and parents alike invest so much energy in teaching children and yet often understand relatively little about what exactly it is they are trying to achieve. In 'Making Kids Cleverer' David Didau reviews everything we know from cognitive science on how to enhance children’s learning, and delivers a powerful argument that we can – and must – help all children succeed at school.
- Professor Rebecca Allen, Director of Centre for Education Improvement Science, UCL Institute of Education
David Didau has done it again! 'Making Kids Cleverer' is an engaging, highly readable analysis of the latest research on how we learn and what we can do to improve the achievement of our pupils.
Like his previous books, David’s latest offering contains many strong claims. Your initial reaction, like mine, may be that he has made these claims for effect, but he sticks so closely to the research evidence that you have to take his arguments seriously.
Anyone involved in the care and education of children and young people would gain a huge amount from reading this book. Highly recommended.
- Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London
In 'Making Kids Cleverer' David Didau provides us with a brilliant and accessible account of why knowledge is opportunity, and of how we can increase children’s knowledge through a thoughtful and scientific approach to schooling.
More than ever, children need a core set of ideas, facts, procedures and other forms of knowledge in order to help them navigate the ever-changing work environment they will encounter and to fully participate in the many opportunities afforded by the modern world. In this book, Didau offers an incisive argument for the importance of knowledge and a solid framework for how to improve the knowledge base of all children.
'Making Kids Cleverer' will be an invaluable resource for parents, teachers and policy makers.
- David C. Geary, Curators’ Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri
Written with great precision and clarity, and with a good dash of humility and humour too, 'Making Kids Cleverer' is a truly magnificent manifesto. Everything David Didau says chimes deeply with what I know to be true and what I am trying to accomplish in our schools, and I am of course cleverer now than I was before reading it. It is an absolute joy to read, and an incredibly timely tour de force that can, and should, have a national impact.
A must-read for everyone in education, from trainee teachers to inspectors and policy makers.
- Lady Caroline Nash, Director, Future Academies
David Didau’s latest edu-blockbuster is a compelling and endlessly fascinating read. Weaving together a wealth of evidence and ideas - from the philosophical to the practical – Didau confronts the taboo topic of intelligence head-on. Didau shows us that by teaching children powerful, biologically secondary knowledge we not increase their intelligence but also prepare them for happiness, wealth and whatever adult life throws at them.
I have not read another education book that brims with as much insight and stimulating thought as this. Every page serves up a new surprise or gentle provocation. Making kids cleverer should become the priority of all schools and teachers. A thoroughly recommended read.
- Andy Tharby, English teacher author of 'Making every lesson count' and 'How to explain absolutely anything to absolutely anyone'
About the Author
David Didau is a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, trainer and author. He started his award-winning blog, The Learning Spy, in 2011 to express the constraints and irritations of ordinary teachers, detail the successes and failures within his own classroom, and synthesise his years of teaching experience through the lens of educational research and cognitive psychology. Since then he has spoken at various national conferences, has directly influenced Ofsted and has worked with the Department for Education to consider ways in which teachers workload could be reduced.
He is the author of the hugely successful titles 'The Secret of Literacy', in which he urges teachers to make the implicit explicit , and 'What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?', in which he turns his attention to the myriad unexamined assumptions that underlie education and explores how schools might realign their practices with how children actually learn.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown House Publishing
- Publication date : January 31, 2019
- Edition : Illustrated
- Language : English
- Print length : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1785833669
- ISBN-13 : 978-1785833663
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.14 x 0.8 x 9.21 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,206,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,020 in Educational Psychology (Books)
- #3,463 in Educational Certification & Development
- #8,444 in Instruction Methods
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

David Didau is Senior Lead Practitioner for English at Ormiston Academies Trust. He also dabbles with training and consultancy. He also co-hosts It's Your Time You're Wasting, a weekly education themed YouTube show: www.youtube.com/channel/UCSBHaqO9ehDgOBL-OJnAmaA
His training has been described variously as being "like bottled lightning", "throwing a grenade into a still pond" and "quite good". For more, visit https://academy.learningspy.co.uk/
Customer reviews
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2019Format: eTextbookVerified PurchaseMost educators in the US aren't taught how to teach and they aren't taught how kids learn best, so teaching methodologies are all over the map. Many teachers are quick to pick up the latest fads or they adopt any technique that have even the slightest bit of plausibility.
They don't realize that there's been a lot of research into the best way to teach children and there's a consensus among the experts about what works and what doesn't. I've read about a dozen books that delve into the research, but Didau's book is the most thorough, so you should start here. Use his references if you want more.
The good news is that the important ideas are simple, and they will eventually make your job simpler, but you'll first have to rethink everything you do.
Top reviews from other countries
- Dr Robert MasseyReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars It's nothing to do with 'gifted and talented'. Children can become cleverer, with our help.
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseDavid Didau’s new book Making Kids Cleverer is subtitled ‘A Manifesto for Closing the Advantage Gap.’ This immediately draws attention to one of the burning educational issues of the day, our repeated failure as a society to narrow the excellence or advantage gap between disadvantaged pupils in secondary schools and their peers, rightly condemned by Ofsted and successive specialist reports. Didau, teacher, blogger, contrarian and iconoclast, has positive news: schools can make children cleverer with the right peer culture and, as Paul Kirschner adds in a telling Foreword, everything hinges on teachers. How are these big claims to be achieved? Chapter by chapter Didau takes the reader on a learning journey through complex issues with a surefooted balance and a lightness of touch that can only come from a vast amount of reading and research on behavioural psychology and cognitive science inter alia set out in a Bibliography of 20 pages. This man knows his onions, but reading Cleverer won’t leave you in tears. Some of it is hard, but the author has a way with a telling analogy or a pithy summary which will bring you back to the essence, and the end-of-chapter summaries allow you to test your understanding against his conclusions. Didau attacks myths, none more important than the idea that intelligence cannot be raised: what he terms crystallised intelligence (largely to do with memory and knowledge) can be boosted even if fluid intelligence or raw processing power remains largely fixed. Chapters on how memory works and how we can become cleverer are godsends for teachers needing quick takeaways from this book for the classroom; other chapters cover struggle and success, the importance of purposeful practice and the need to teach powerful , culturally rich knowledge – among much else. Counterintuitively, Didau argues that we need to increase the influence of our genes to make society more equal. Genes interact with their environment, so the better we make our schools the more schools can make kids smarter. I have reservations about how far Didau pushes some of his points which I don’t have the space to go into here, where I’m basing my assessment on two criteria. First, will practising teachers (and parents) learn a lot from this book? Yes, beyond doubt. Secondly, will they be able to take away ideas and turn them into actions in schools tomorrow? Yes, again. Children are not ‘gifted and talented’; we can help them all by teaching them in the most stimulating environments possible in order to close the excellence gap.
- Ms Victoria S HughesReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 7, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars An informative and enjoyable read
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseHaving read the work of a number of authors who are pushing the 21st century skills agenda, and being impressed by their philosophies, I came to this book rather sceptical that knowledge was the single most important thing we can teach our children, but Didau is a persuasive author and the ideas in this book really make sense. It is an enjoyable and horoughly researched piece of work with evidence from cognitive science to back up its claims. Some of the ideas that have stuck with me are: knowledge is what we think about and with, therefore the more we know the better we can think; use of the term ‘procedural knowledge’ in place of skills; tacit knowledge; the Lindy effect; practice makes permanent; mental representation; cognitive load theory; and the distinction between performance and learning. There is so much more! This book has prompted me to carry out further reading on Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’. I am a teacher with 12 years experience in the classroom and though much of what I am learning from these books is already taking place in my classroom, I only wish I had been encouraged to access this type of high quality educational research from an earlier stage in my career. There are many ideas I am taking from Didau’s book which justify the way I am doing things, but many more ideas which will lead to an improvement in my practice. Thank you for a wonderfully engaging and thoroughly researched book, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
- Rachel BallReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 20, 2019
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent - a book school leaders need to read
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseReally enjoyed this book. It's steeped in research, but with real world examples. I'll admit some of the science went above my head but I believe it has very real practical advice for school leaders about a knowledge based curriculum, the importance of retrieval, and how we help can close the advantage gap.
- Martin FergusonReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars A book that EVERY classroom teacher should read - teach smart; make them clever!
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis book offers a guided tour from science of the brain to how we can use the research to refine our approach to teaching. Not only does this book reinforce the importance of understanding how we impact on children's learning experiences, it also gives an insight to the complexities of our profession, and how we can have a profound and life changing impact on our young people. Credibility and recognition have been stripped away from teaching, but people like David help restore the role of the classroom teacher. When others are busy undermining our profession with ridiculous demands and policy changes, people like David are doing the real work behind the scenes and combining relevant research with practical application. Our education system [however imperfect it might be] needs more of this and this book [like The Secret of Literacy] is a game changer.
- Matthew EvansReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars A wake up call to a sleep walking school system
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseMaticulously researched and carefully constructed, Didau’s book brims with erudition. He silences the misleading babble about what makes an intelligent person and makes a compelling, evidenced-based, argument for how to equip children with the knowledge they need to survive and thrive. There is a moral purpose to this book, but Didau’s crusade is not fanciful; he calls for no excuses, and the elimination of shoddy education practices in our schools, to give the disadvantaged every opportunity to be just as smart as their advantages peers. If you have anything to do with schools, read this book.