It’s been a strangely uneven year on teacherhead.com for various reasons. The first half of the year was buzzing – I wrote a lot and each month’s readership stats exceeded the equivalent month in 2022 – until the summer. Then I hit a bit of a block and September was the first month since I started this site when i didn’t write anything at all. I lost the rhythm completely. Largely this was because I was putting all my spare time into writing Learning Walkthrus with @olicav. We finished it in just a few months and it’s ready to go. Despite the hiatus, I’ve written 46 new posts this year.. bringing the all time total to 834 posts. Overall readership has slightly dropped but it’s been a good year in general, the fifth in a row with over 1,000,000 views. 

Looking back at the posts I’ve written this year, I can see various themes have recurred, mainly shaped by the work I do which is largely focused on CPD and coaching issues in schools. However, my ideas are also strongly influenced by the experience of sitting at the back of hundreds of lessons, getting a view of things that teachers can’t always see from their vantage point. 

Here are 10 of my favourite posts from the year, together representing the spread of topics covered. 

1. TPS6: How do I engage passive learners?: This was the most popular new-read on the blog this year so it clearly resonated with people. It’s common challenge and perception of some students -but it’s important not to regard it as insurmountable or an inherent characteristic. It’s more a question of changing their habits.

2. Teaching some vs teaching all: In all the discussion about teaching techniques and strategies, my view is the main arena for improvement is to just be more deliberate in ensuring all students are engaged in all the tasks and activities.. because so often it’s only some and not all: 

3. The SLT-Middle Leader Communication Challenge: This seems to resonate – an area that’s not often explored. I regularly encounter differences of perspective in my consultancy work so it’s worth thinking about whether messages sent and received match and the dynamics of line management.

4. Three Checks: This links to another post about the essential principle of effective teaching. Here I apply the three key principles to observing and teaching lessons:

5. Formative Action It’s refreshing to encounter a fresh take on ideas you think are well established. Here, it’s the superb work of Toets Revolutie.

6. Core Teaching: The Tennis Analogy: I’ve written a few posts on the theme of the power of codifying techniques in teaching. I find the tennis player analogy really useful in lots of contexts so this is the one I chose: 

7. The View From The Back; : Green Penning. I wrote a whole series in the summer on the view from the back exploring different themes. This one exemplifies the whole set; I chose it because it’s only by sitting at the back that you might realise just how badly things can go wrong using a sensible-seeming technique as a daily routine:

8. 10 lessons about coaching. I spend a lot of time talking to leaders and about their CPD and coaching systems and discussing it with others in my line of work. This post captures a lot of that. 

9. Six Design Decisions. When I work with school leaders to help them shape their CPD programmes, these are the six areas we explore. It seems to work well as a framework:

10. Ten Things: Establishing Expectations with a new class. A classic back-to-school post. I was pleased with how well this went down.