On my travels I meet so many great people wrestling with the challenges of school development. At times. their ambition and enthusiasm exceed their capacity – there’s a lot going on; lots of initiatives on the go – and it seems to me as an outside observer that they’d do better to calm thing down a bit and focus on fewer things, giving them the time and commitment they need to succeed – and then to be brilliant. You can spread your time and energy so thinly that nothing really gets much better at all.
So, looking at the year ahead, what might be good contenders for things to focus attention on? They have to be things you do a lot of – so the time invested in CPD has maximum impact. Some things can have immediate impact on lessons across a school right away; others need time invested in developing resources so you’re doing the work now with a pay-off that might not be realised for a few months.
My list of possible things – based on my school visits and my general sense of gaps in practice – would include the following: (And rather than go into each area, I’m just sign-posting blogs for further reading.) As you can see – there are a lot of contenders. The trick is to isolate specifics and properly focus on them. Just getting one of these areas right is a big win – and of course they all overlap; doing one thing well now will help with the other agendas later.
1. Nail Classroom talk
Class Discussion Forensics. Generating and exchanging ideas; involving everyone.
Class discussion is cornerstone of so many lessons and subjects. We want to engage students in airing and sharing ideas, listening to each…
Think, Pair, Share Forensics.
Think Pair Share is a powerful and important technique that should probably play a key role in every teacher’s repertoire. It’s the…
Cold Call Forensics: purpose; spirit; details.
I probably discuss cold calling more than any other teaching technique. I think this is because I feel it makes a very…
2. Make reading high profile, high volume.
Five Ways To: Weave Reading into the Curriculum
In my travels to various schools, one of the variables that I’m struck by is the emphasis placed on reading. I included this description of the range in a previous post on seven variables between…
3. Nail Do Now and Retrieval Routines so they actually work.
The View From The Back: The Trouble With ‘Green-Penning’ (Corrections)
A series of short posts, focusing on the challenges of teaching all students successfully, informed by lesson observations. A common, logical technique in teaching…
Schema-building: A blend of experiences and retrieval modes make for deep learning.
Learning is complicated so it can be useful to use conceptual models to help understand and discuss it. For me, a powerful concept is…
Five Ways to: Do Daily Review
Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. It’s now very common practice for teachers to begin a lesson with…
4. Make Teaching More Responsive -adapting in real time.
Five Ways to: Scaffold Classroom Dialogue
Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. The essence of scaffolding…
Formative Action: A brilliant, refreshing take on formative assessment and responsive teaching.
Recently I spent time with the Dutch team led by René Kneyber, Toets Revolutie where they…
The art of modelling… it’s all in the handover.
Some of the most interesting discussions I’ve had with teachers in recent times have been about…
A big part of this is the issue of scaffolding. A powerful area to focus on might be designing better scaffolds and deploying them more effectively, as the needs of each subject dictate.
5. Tackle the All vs Some challenge head on.
Teaching some vs teaching all. This is where the action for improvement lies.
A theme I explore in most of my CPD and coaching work is the challenge of teaching everyone in a class…
Three Checks: For teachers and observers.
As I explored in a previous blog post, it can be useful to condense the complexity of teaching down to just…
The View From The Back: The Power of Circulating
A series of short posts, focusing on the challenges of teaching all students successfully, informed by lesson observations. Sometimes I do…
6. Establish better routines and higher expectations.
Five Ways To: Foster Student Agency
It’s common to come across situations where the idea of independent learning is being promoted. However, this can be quite a nebulous…
10 things: Establishing expectations with a new class.
Those first few lessons with a class are a golden period for setting out expectations. You have the opportunity to establish routines,…
Great Teaching. The Power of Expectations.
Image credit: Melbourne Child Psychology As each new term approaches, it’s worth reflecting on the powerful Bill Rogers concept that, as teachers,…
7. Focus explicitly on meaning making
Meaning Making and The Power of Students Talking Things Through – a common missing piece.
Ever since reading Sarah Cottinghatt’s blogs and subsequent In Action book about Ausubel and meaning making, I’ve found it a…
Rehearsal first; retrieval practice later – an important distinction.
In December, Efrat Furst delivered a superb masterclass as part of our In Action series where she explained the stages…
Building Word Confidence: Everyone read, say, understand, use, practise.
A very common phenomenon in many lessons is that students encounter new words. The way we approach this ought to be…
8. Give all this the CPD time and Follow-Up needed.
Three Aspects of an Effective Coaching System: All need attention or it just won’t work
Talking to school leaders and coaches in the UK and the US in recent weeks has…
Making the most of Learning Walks.
What is a learning walk? To start with, it’s important to have a shared understanding of…
Team Meetings as Team Coaching. A pragmatic, effective solution for sustained CPD.
In my work with Walkthrus, I talk to lots of schools leaders about their plans and…
You have the solutions.. you have the people… you just need to find the right focus and stick at it.
Good luck in 2024!
teacherhead 