August 2025 – teacherhead
2 posts published by Tom Sherrington during August 2025| teacherhead
Classroom Voices is a series of guest posts providing a platform for teachers to share their ideas. All posts including all images are shared without comment or edits. To contribute, use this link: Guest Author: Isabelle Wolfe Isabelle Wolfe is teacher of French and Head of Grade at the International School of Aberdeen in Scotland. @Isawolfe04 […]| teacherhead
Classroom Voices is a series of guest posts providing a platform for teachers to share their ideas. All posts are shared without comment or edits. To contribute, use this link: Guest Author: Shaf R…| teacherhead
In late 2023, John Tomsett, Mary Myatt and I hosted an event at the Regent Hall on Oxford Street. 200 people gathered for a celebration of curriculum thinking and an exploration of the way ahead. I…| teacherhead
One of the most common areas of development in schools over the last few years has been in the area of retrieval practice – supporting students to remember what they’ve been taught, gra…| teacherhead
Having written about lessons that mis-fire, I was asked to suggest what people should do instead. That’s a mighty big task because, what you might do depends on what exactly you want students to kn…| teacherhead
A very common phenomenon in many lessons is that students encounter new words. The way we approach this ought to be something teachers think about explicitly so that effective strategies…| teacherhead
There are far too many distractions from the sustained hard work needed to deliver and maintain effective PD programmes that lead to improved teaching and improved outcomes. I worry that just as we’re making progress, more distractions are coming. It seems so obvious to me visiting schools – everywhere – that there’s just so much […]| teacherhead
I’m often struck by just how deeply embedded some ineffective teacher habits are. I see it as a collective more than an individual problem. Faced with the inherent challenges that teaching …| teacherhead
Encoding is a key concept in our theory of learning but I continually find that it is under-emphasised in the ‘how we learn’ discourse and in the practice that this translates into in classrooms. …| teacherhead
In my work with Walkthrus, I talk to lots of schools leaders about their plans and practices around CPD and coaching. Increasingly I’m finding that all kinds of complications arise building u…| teacherhead
I find the concept of schema-building incredibly useful when thinking about curriculum design and teaching. It’s a really a spatial metaphor more than anything physical/concrete – but it has fantastic explanatory power and can help teachers consider the whole process of securing each student’s understanding of a set of ideas. I”ve written about this before […]| teacherhead
Earlier this week I got sucked into a stupid ‘debate’ about subject knowledge after making some comments on X and replying to some other posts. It seemed to me that various people – at least five, separate people – were posting about how important subject knowledge is and how it’s more important than generic teaching […]| teacherhead
There are SO MANY issues that teachers have to think about every lesson just to run the room and work through the curriculum – and there are SO MANY concepts and ideas from research and the world of cognitive science to explore ….it’s just a bit overwhelming! Realistically you can only work on so many […]| teacherhead
Working with schools around the world, a strongly consistent pattern I encounter is that it’s always the effectiveness of teams and team leaders that lies at the heart of establishing the standards…| teacherhead
In December, Efrat Furst delivered a superb masterclass as part of our In Action series where she explained the stages of learning using the models used in her brilliant blog posts such as Within t…| teacherhead
In many of Dylan Wiliam’s talks and publications he references five ‘key strategies’ that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies e…| teacherhead
As I explored in a previous blog post, it can be useful to condense the complexity of teaching down to just a few key ideas. Here’s what I came up with: Obviously there’s a lot to unpac…| teacherhead
