Teaching Blogs: Who Needs Them?

Writing this blog is only a very small part vanity project. One of the many advantages of not being on Twitter is that I am not seduced by the number of followers. I have little idea if anyone is reading them.

I can post ideas which I think have value - someone else might benefit - while I force myself to follow the logic of an idea to make it useful.

The Wood For the Trees

Because I am not on Twitter, I tend to subscribe to individual educational blogs. The attraction for me is that I can follow teachers who either have a track record of school progress, or are researched based.

But lately even the best bloggers have caused me some alarm. It isn’t that anything they are recommending is wrong. They write very well about aspects of teaching which make complete sense.

It’s just that I think that they completely miss the main point.

A Training Analogy

They are like taking a marathon runner and saying, look, you are wasting energy moving your arms like that, move them like this.

• Now, let’s do the same for the vest you wear.

• Good, and now let’s look at your socks.

• Now, let’s take a drink at this mile mark and that mile mark.

• Here’s a training plan, with different miles every week.

• And here’s a nutrition plan, with different loadings of carbohydrates.

• Oh, and a recovery plan.

• And so on - an endless list of small improvements, each of which will help.

I come along and say, whatever. Run every other day. Do interval training.

• Session one - at this heart rate interval,

• session two at this one,

• and session 3 at this one.

• Keep going through this cycle, increasing your heart rate by 2 each time.

You might not follow much of that, but bear with me. My analogy is based on rowing the marathon competitively and coming 106th in the world.

The point of the analogy is this. The main thing you can do is reps. Intentional reps. Reps under pressure.

Most of my sessions were 45 minutes to 60 minutes long, although the race took me 2 hours and 55 minutes (and the world record was 2 hours and 25).

I could have obsessed over lots of long rows, many more miles, many more hours. And sure, I would have been faster. But not that much faster. Not enough to justify the doubling of workload.

This is what the analogy means in teaching.

Want to get better at questioning - just ask a whole heap of questions as quickly as you can in key parts of the lesson.

You’ll work out which sort work, and which don’t, which to do orally, and which to put in a quiz. Most importantly, you’ll learn that students can answer many, many more questions than you think.

And you’ll learn that by repeating them, and never letting a student off - they’ll remember a whole lot more.

Reps, reps, reps.

Or, you can spend ages studying different sorts of questions and theorising about how you combine each one, or mover from one kind to the other - shallow, deep, fact, opinion, exploration and elaboration, etc, etc, etc. Where you stand, where you move, your tone of voice, etc.

You can, in short, go on some very long, time-consuming and exhausting runs.

If that is for you, try Blue Bunsen’s blog here.

Or Adam Boxer’s blog here.

Or David Didau’s blog here.

But, that is not what I would recommend. Keep it simple - that way it is easy to maintain. Do it regularly under pressure, and you will simply get better and better and better, because you will see student improvement straight away.

That’s it.

Already subscribed? Please share it with someone else.