ALT Every year I set myself a teaching target. I start small – usually just one class, usually in a lower year group. To add accountability, I tell the group exactly what I’m doing and why and ask them to prompt me if I stop doing it. Beyond that, I don’t force it – if something works well, I naturally start doing it with my other classes. This is what happened – dramatically quickly, actually – with visualisers.

ALT A volleyball game.

ALT A lovely wooden cabin in a garden. There is an old fashioned clock above the doors.

ALT It is not, of course, impossible for teachers to get much better after qualifying but it requires trust, safety and effort – trust and safety because a teacher must feel free enough to take risks and effort, because substituting strategies and habits that might work well enough for alternatives that might be even more effective when fully developed is very hard work. It took me a full year of hard, effortful work to embed Turn-and-Talk into my lessons because to start with I wasn’t very good at implementing it, and there was nothing that bad about the techniques I used to raise participation ratio. Be Seen Looking, Cold Call questions, Everybody Writes – all of these got most kids joining in and sometimes, as I watched kids flail about talking about nothing much, I did question why I was even bothering.

ALT Knowledge Hub image text. The icon at the end of it is the outline of a green lightbulb,