I delivered this talk at researchED London in early September 2024. After recording the session, I used ChatGPT to transform my ramblings into a written post, which still required significant editing. If only the entire process were automated—it wouldn’t have taken me four months to publish! Artisan teaching—where teachers create their own lesson plans and …
Continue reading Generative AI and the Future of Artisan Teaching
Sometimes (i.e. rarely) economic theory presents ideas that aren't intuitively obvious. One such idea is that teacher shortages are designed into our schooling system. Understanding this perspective is important if one wants to battle the government about pay. Worker strikes seem odd to most of the general public because they work in more conventional labour …
The University of Durham’s initial teaching training provision has not been reaccredited by the Department of Education. I know nothing about the quality of this course or about the quality of their application. And yet, I want to persuade you that this is probably *a bad thing* for education. This is why. Joining the profession …
Continue reading Falling out of university and into teaching
In my last post, I made an argument that diversity of teacher instruction should be allowed to flourish in a wide variety of circumstances in schools. This is a short post to balance that perspective and give three circumstances where consistency and alignment are a good idea. The first two circumstances are obvious. If we …
Continue reading When should we force alignment in teacher practice?
In our book, The Next Big Thing in School Improvement, we have a chapter where we talk about how diverse teachers are in their beliefs, motivations and instructional practice. We decided not to write a great deal about how much diversity in teaching we felt was optimal, but it is a conversation I have repeatedly …
Continue reading How much classroom diversity should there be?
I have been talking to many teachers and school leaders recently about what information needs to be recorded, whether in a markbook or in a centralised system, for a teacher to teach effectively. The answer is, partly, that it depends on what information the teacher is able to hold in their head, without the need …
Continue reading It’s not (just) what teachers know, it’s who teachers know
Towards the end of last year I took part in a debate about the quality of CPD. I was asked to take one side of the argument, so this is my deliberately one-sided perspective on it. The wonderful people of edu-twitter helped me compile the bizarre examples of CPD that you’ll read below. Everybody remembers …
Continue reading If CPD is so important, then why is so much of it so bad?
Last week I published a paper I wrote with Jay Allnutt about the impact of Teach First on GCSE attainment. We received a large amount of feedback on the paper, via a seminar presentation at BERA conference, comments on a blog I wrote, twitter and email. Rather than simply present these research findings at researched2013, I …
Continue reading How can we learn if Teach First is working?
Chris Cook, the Financial Times education correspondent, has been writing about the Department for Education’s suggestion that the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB)should consider whether greater variation in teachers’ regional pay is needed. He notes that greater variation in teacher pay would create a bizarre situation where schools in our most successful region (London) become even more generously funded, with a deterioration in funding in places where schools appear to struggle.
This observation raises the interesting question as to why London schools do so well, given that the high cost of living should make it difficult for them to recruit and retain the highest quality teachers. Why don’t the capital’s best teachers simply migrate to Stoke or Blackpool where their salary would provide them with a nice family home and a higher standard of living?
I would suggest that there are four possible explanations for this phenomenon, and it is…
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Becky Allen 