Have you been asked to teach like a champion? Have you spent some INSET time discussing classroom routines? Are you and your teaching colleagues encouraged to use consistent language when describing pedagogical processes? Perhaps you've even been given a script to follow. If the answer is yes to any of the above, then you are … Continue reading Pedagogy alignment: fad or fixture?

According to our school's mythology, some terrible changes were enacted in the 1990s by a new, progressive headteacher looking to make his mark. One of these changes was to modernise the names of the old school houses, changing them from the traditional house names that had been around since... forever. It was a controversial move, … Continue reading Schools falter when they have no memory of how to succeed

I should start with a trigger warning: this post will talk about going back to school for the start of a new term. But not just any new term. I want to talk about the special case of the start of the new school year, in particular the INSET day that is the threshold over … Continue reading The New Term Dilemma

When it comes to developing your teaching practice, what you do matters somewhat less than what everyone else does. Such is the interdependence of teachers in a school. Why does this matter? It matters because many of our attempts to help teachers improve ignores this interdependence and assumes that the impact of a teacher's pedagogy … Continue reading Developing teaching: What YOU do matters less than what EVERYONE ELSE does

In The Earned Autonomy Trap, I made the case for purging the phrase earned autonomy from our professional lexicon. My core argument was that autonomy is undesirable in a knowledge-building profession as it equates to isolation, and that neither teachers nor the system get better when the knowledge-builders are isolated. Instead, I argued, greater expertise … Continue reading Anything goes

Have you been to the gym today? Perhaps you've done some DIY, caught up with some study, or read that non-fiction book that has sat beside your bed for months. If you are a school leader, your mind may be turning to the governors' meeting next week when you will be asked for an update … Continue reading Things can only get better

I recently attended a conference organised by the police about school lockdown procedures. It was an eye-opening insight into how emergency services mobilise in response to possible threats. One of the most important things the various agencies need to do when arriving at the scene of an incident is to quickly develop what they called … Continue reading Developing shared situational awareness