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.

Chapters include:
Chapter 1: The purpose of education
Chapter 2: Built by culture
Chapter 3: Is intelligence the answer?
Chapter 4: Nature via nurture
Chapter 5: Can we get cleverer?
Chapter 6: How memory works
Chapter 7: You are what you know
Chapter 8: What knowledge?
Chapter 9: Practice makes permanent
Chapter 10: Struggle and success

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Reviews

Robert Massey
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ It’s nothing to do with ‘gifted and talented’. Children can become cleverer, with our help.
4 February 2019
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David 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.
8 people found this helpful

Mr. M. Enser
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A powerful book on the need for powerful knowledge.
27 January 2019
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This latest book by David Didau has a powerful message about social justice. He shows that the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students has real world consequences and that this gap can be closed by making pupils more knowledgeable – especially by giving the access to Powerful Knowledge. In the final chapters of the book he skilfully sets out how this can be done.
This book is a must read for anyone who cares about social justice and improving education for every child.
6 people found this helpful

Christopher Such
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A must-read for anyone interested in the future of education.
18 February 2019
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Making Kids Clevever is everything we’ve come to expect from David Didau: It is steeped in research, yet accessible; effortless to read yet substantial; thought-provoking yet pragmatic. Nevertheless, this book IS different to Didau’s previous work in that it demonstrates a new level of ambition, one that is vanishingly rare in books on education.

Making Kids Clevever starts from widely shared principles of social justice and attempts to build from these a water-tight case for the type of education that Didau advocates: one that prioritises the successful sharing of culturally powerful knowledge, something he argues is particularly important for those at the sharp end of the socio-economic scale. The argument is persuasive and thorough.

The greatest weakness in the chain of argument – and yet a sign of the book’s ambition and scope – is the section on genetics. Didau seems to agree with the broadly hereditarian interpretation of current genetics research that adults in authority (parents, teachers, etc) have little success in influencing children in the long term. He tries to ‘have his cake and eat it’ by accepting the hereditarian view while arguing for the importance of education for advancing the cause of social justice. This is not an oversight from Didau; he is clearly aware of this potential contradiction and spends some time trying to wrestle the meaning of education away from this hereditarian interpretation that could otherwise persuade educators to prioritise entertainment and – more worryingly – academic selection. (A central figure in genetics research, Robert Plomin, has openly argued that educators could well be wasting their time in giving an academic education to those who might be deemed unsuited to it due to their genetics. No doubt, Plomin has probably said the exact opposite as well, as is his wont.) Didau shows integrity in not shying away from this difficulty and facing it head on, but I’m not sure that he is entirely convincing here. The easier route would be to question the genetics research due to confounding data on the lasting effect that education appears to have on IQ or by discussing factors seemingly not considered in the hereditarian interpretation of the genetics data. Nevertheless, the hereditarian interpretation may well prove to be accurate, and in grasping the nettle Didau has written something that forces the reader to question their assumptions and justify their views.

Quite simply, this book is guaranteed to make you think deeply about almost every facet of teaching. It is an absolute must-read for anyone with an interest in the future of education.
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Fellwalker
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Essential reading for all eductors: parents, teachers, managers and and policy makers.
13 February 2019
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This is one of those seminal books that no one concerned with or about education should miss. Many schools need to move in a new direction if they are to do justice to the potential of all their students – and this book explains why quite brilliantly. An accessible read, it still presents all the explanations and evidence about what cognitive science is telling us – and telling very clearly.
5 people found this helpful

Martin
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A book that EVERY classroom teacher should read – teach smart; make them clever!
11 February 2019
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This 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.
3 people found this helpful

Ms Victoria S Hughes
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ An informative and enjoyable read
7 August 2019
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Having 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.
One person found this helpful

Matthew Evans
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A wake up call to a sleep walking school system
6 March 2019
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Maticulously 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.
2 people found this helpful

Books-for-everyone Customer
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A manifesto to believe in!
19 February 2019
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This book offers such a wealth of information regarding intelligence and how to get the very best for the pupils we teach. An excellent mix of well-researched information alongside practical ideas for supporting our pupils. Throughout the time reading the book, my preconceptions about intelligence have been challenged and my thoughts about my day to day practice changed. It is not a stretch to say that this is a must-read for anyone with any interest in closing the advantage gap in education.
2 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A must read for educators
16 April 2019
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This is the first book by David Didau I have read but it won’t be the last. Having read many blogs I couldn’t wait to read one of his books and this didn’t disappoint. He gives an excellent description of cognitive science, the importance of knowledge and the moral duty to focus on this to close the attainment gap. It is exceptionally well researched with over 30 pages of references and is written in a thought-provoking style. Each chapter offers insight and analysis and even has a useful summary.
One person found this helpful

Christian Moore
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The deeper truths
10 February 2019
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Read this book for a deep view of why we should educate and what we should do about it. This isn’t a book full of activities, it deals with underlying pedagogy and psychology. It is one of the best books you can buy right now for both teachers and management.