As schools develop their teaching and learning ‘strategies’, or ‘policies’, or ‘principles’, they have to grapple with the balancing of autonomy with consistency – of teacher or subject difference with common expectations. Speaking to the Confederation of School Trusts in 2024, Sir Kevin Collins painted a bleak picture of the more extreme prescriptiveness, which he... Continue Reading →
Thoughts on what keeps pupils learning through a lesson, and why this might be difficult for the robot teachers of the future A few years ago, I wrote something about engagement, suggesting that saying pupils are ‘invested’ rather than just ‘engaged’ implies that they are more than just on task. The question ‘How will you... Continue Reading →
A notoriously unhelpful piece of lesson observation feedback is that there was insufficient ‘pace’. Of course, in discussion this might be teased out and made sense of, but sometimes it is left unclear, or (worse) it can reflect a misunderstanding of what the teacher was doing, or of how a subject works. The difficulty, of... Continue Reading →
James Durran 