Schools are complex and chaotic I’ve become fascinated with how we can use systems-thinking to create schools that allow students to flourish. I’m still a long way off, but I’m increasingly learning the language to be able to articulate the disquiet so many people feel with the hyper-rational way schools ‘treasure what they can measure’. For me, this means seeking coherence rather than control out of the chaos. As always, these are fairly half-baked thoughts - I recognise and welcome the fact I am not yet an expert. Teaching is a joyous profession that keeps those hooked coming back for more.  The sheer variability means no day is ever the same, one lesson you are the best, the next you are the worst.  No teacher has ever, or will ever, teach a perfect lesson.  It is addictive, soaking the working week in optimism and challenge, exhaustion and exaltation. There’s huge parallels here with sports and the creative arts where perfection is an unobtainable infinity, even to th...

Motivating students to work hard and do well when it matters is an essential part of the job. Here is a method for creating the conditions for internally motivated students. A seemingly perpetual struggle in education is motivating students to enjoy school. This issue is magnified in schools in challenging contexts, where I have worked for 15 years. Some schools can easily have 700 pupil premium students on-roll. Just on Dunbar’s number alone, constructing a motivating narrative is an extreme challenge for leaders.  It is of course true that exam results are important but it perhaps truer to say that it is one important aspect of their education. It does not acknowledge their emotional literacy, their practical intelligence and their emerging purpose in life. Nor does it instil in them the courage and resilience to fail repeatedly, nor to wonder, self-direct nor to create. If we are serious about reducing educational inequality, we need to be serious about motivating PP students to...

“It’s not the hearing that improves life but the listening” Mihaly Csikzentmihaly In 15 years of teaching my classroom management has improved significantly because I have learned to gain control by giving it up. Building a classroom ethos that optimises learning requires complex interventions.  Here are things that work for me. I’ve been reflecting this week on the aspects of the teaching job that I might claim to be genuinely good at whilst battling my own set of imposter syndrome demons.  We are all on this journey from Novice to master, from unconscious incompetence towards unconscious competence - its one of the many facets of the job that unite and sometimes divide us. Just when the bubble of your own school tricks you into thinking you are an ‘expert’, Twitter shoots you down, back into place.  At least that’s how it feels to me sometimes.  How often do you look back at your early career years and cringe? One of my most embarrassing traits was to position myse...