Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. This is weird! A podcast made by AI for my recent post. Hmmm

Pip: Teacherhead is back with the kind of post that makes you realize professional development season has arrived, whether you packed for it or not.

Mara: Tom Sherrington has been visiting schools and lessons at scale, and what he keeps finding points to three connected areas of teaching practice — inclusion, responsiveness, and oracy. That’s the territory we’re covering today.

Pip: Let’s start with what those three areas actually are and why he thinks they matter right now.

Three Big Areas for Development in Teaching for 2026-7

Mara: The frame here is that these three areas — inclusive teaching, responsive teaching, and teaching through talk — aren’t separate agendas. The argument is that they’re one agenda seen through different lenses, all pointing at the same goal: every learner, actively involved, every lesson.

Pip: And the post is direct about where the current default falls short. The line that sets the whole thing up is this: “We need to do some pretty serious work to reverse the default of ‘can anyone tell me’ to become ‘is there anyone here who isn’t sure?'”

Mara: That’s the inclusion problem in one sentence. The post on systematic inclusion — “Is literally everyone thinking, talking, practising, learning?” — calls this a collective habit rather than an individual failure, which shifts the responsibility usefully toward school culture rather than individual blame.

Pip: Right, and the thought experiment post — “The inherent challenge of teaching a class of individuals” — makes it concrete by asking you to follow the daily experience of the least confident student in a room. Once you do that, the volunteer-based question-and-answer model looks pretty thin.

Mara: The EEF’s new guidance on inclusive teaching gets a mention too — specifically its insistence that frequent checks for understanding must involve everyone, not a sample.

Pip: Which connects directly to the second area: responsive teaching. Knowing who’s struggling is only useful if you do something about it.

Mara: The post on Formative Action Loops is where that argument lives. The concept, drawn from the Formative Action School, is that teachers need to evaluate responses generated during a lesson, interpret them, and act. The word that carries the weight there is action — not just assessment, not just noticing, but changing course.

Pip: Schemes of work that assume everyone moves forward in lockstep don’t leave much room for that kind of agility — which is a structural problem, not just a habit problem.

Mara: The third area is oracy, and the post “Student Talk: It matters” makes the case that reluctance to speak isn’t a reason to do less of it — it’s a reason to build stronger talk culture. Voice 21’s Oracy Benchmarks get a specific endorsement as a practical framework.

Pip: The reframe that lands hardest is the simplest one: oracy isn’t an add-on. It’s how inclusion and responsiveness actually show up in the room.

Mara: And “Putting Teaching Ideas into Action” ties the whole thing together — arguing that professional development needs to address both the purposes behind these practices and the techniques for running them, not just one or the other.

Pip: The stakes underneath all three areas are the same: students who find learning hard matter as much as those who don’t, and the structures need to reflect that.

Mara: That’s the through-line — and it points toward what schools actually need to build, not just believe.

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Pip: Inclusion, responsiveness, talk — three labels, one question: is every student actually in the room, learning-wise?

Mara: That’s the work. We’ll be back with more from teacherhead next time.