As I explored in a previous blog post, it can be useful to condense the complexity of teaching down to just a few key ideas. Here’s what I came up with: Obviously there’s a lot to unpack in each area but since I produced this I’ve found it incredibly useful a reference point when I’m observing lessons and talking to teachers: When I go into lessons, and sit at the back, I scan the room and check in with the students around me to experience the lesson from their small corner. I find I’m basically checking whether each of these five elements are present as far as is possible. In discussions wit ..read more

This thread was posted a couple of days ago.. and seemed to resonate. A few people asked me to post it here to make it easier to share, so here it is: Was meaning to blog this but was getting distracted so a rare:  I see 100s of lessons and teachers and it’s clear to me the best teaching appears fluid and artful but is always built on sound techniques deployed with purpose; intentionality; precision.. /n  These techniques support ALL students to engage, to listen, think, practise and make sense of the ideas. The techniques provide feedback to the teacher about how students are doing ..read more

There are few absolutes in teaching but when you watch as many teachers as I do, it can be pretty obvious when things are said or done that seem like a bad idea. Some are quite common – easy traps to fall by into. I often imagine that classrooms could be wired with a QI studio wall klaxon that flashes and sounds an alarm when contestants say the obvious but wrong answer. Whenever you fall into one of the traps.. the klaxon sounds to remind you: no – don’t do that! (Hypothetically of course). I’ve done all of these things.. so partly here I’m listing ‘things that make me cringe about my own tea ..read more

Recently I spent time with the Dutch team led by René Kneyber, Toets Revolutie where they shared their work on their concept formative action and the training programmes they run for schools. I first encountered this at the London ResearchEd in 2022 and it immediately made sense to me. The concept has been described extensively in Dutch and, with help from René, I posted a translation of their own blog so you can read it for yourself here: Here I’m going to explore my take on the process. In general terms, it’s a reworking of the idea of formative assessment as described by Dylan Wiliam.: In a ..read more

I’m starting to think that, even if time was unlimited and not a constraint, with two or three people in a team to coach, I would prefer to coach them all together than one by one. I don’t know if any research has been done to compare these configurations and, to coaching purists this might seem heretical, but I would argue that the advantages of teaching in pairs or threes might outweigh the downsides. Here’s why…. First of all, let me clarify the system this would operate under. The coach meets the teachers together for the coaching conversation but will still see them teach individually or ..read more

Talking to school leaders and coaches in the UK and the US in recent weeks has reinforced my sense that we really need to get a lot of things lined up for a coaching-orientated professional learning process to be really effective. Sometimes school leaders or coaches focus on just one aspect and, because the other two weren’t given enough attention, progress is slow or negligible. The three elements are represented here: The coaching process is about the nature of a coaching conversation; the debate about making it facilitative, dialogic or directive; the discussion about trust, power dynamics ..read more

In 2022, I had the pleasure of hearing René Kneyber and Valentina Devid from Dutch organisation toetsrevolutie.nl at the London ResearchEd event. They explained how the concept of ‘formative assessment’ or ‘AfL’ had never really taken off in the Netherlands, partly because of specific associations with ‘assessment’ as an end-point and not part of a learning process. Keen to introduce the underlying ideas more strongly into Dutch education, they conceived the idea of Formatief handelen or Formative Action. This places the emphasis firmly on what teachers and students do with the information gat ..read more

When you observe lessons analysing what teachers do, it’s phenomenal just how many techniques are deployed at different phases of a lesson or running in parallel at any given time. I’ve written about lots of these details over recent years – I like to get into the details. Here’s a round-up of 10 – each one of which warrants attention and focus in a CPD or coaching process as people build up and hone their repertoire of go-to techniques: 1. Signal, Pause, Insist 2. Sustaining Attention 3. Modelling 4. Explaining 5. Checking for Understanding 6. Cold Calling 7. Think Pair Share 8. Mini Whiteboa ..read more

A run-away hit on this blog site is this post, with over 200,000 views. It’s my attempt to highlight how Dylan Wiliam’s ideas in Embedding Formative Assessment link to various other sets of ideas like Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction: The five strategies are a very helpful, powerful framing of key elements in a successful responsive teaching-learning process with lots of emphasis on what students have to do alongside what teachers have to do. We summarised them in our Walkthrus Volume 1 – and here’s the summary of the summary: Significantly, Wiliam stresses that the ‘five’ are strategie ..read more

A series of short posts, focusing on the challenges of teaching all students successfully, informed by lesson observations A common observation from the back is how often in a lesson a teacher will hear only one person’s answer to a question and then assume that, with the answer having been said aloud, everyone else will now know it. It’s common for teachers to tell me they feel that it would be weird or pointless to repeat a question that’s just been asked. However, often without the teacher realising, it’s really very common to find that multiple students did not process whatever was said an ..read more