Love it, Craig. It's extremely aligned with my thinking. There's probably two slight tweaks I would make or two ways I would try to build upon that. One is ensuring that there is agreement that it's a problem because there can be a challenge. Even if the person you're working with goes and collects evidence of students potentially not listening, that doesn't guarantee that every teacher who's impacted by it is going to agree that there is a challenge So that's one thing. And something that can help that, and something that I always do whenever I'm trying to implement anything, is I try to always split up, split problem identification and recognition and proposed solution into two separate discussions that are separated by some sort of time break, like a week or something. Oh, interesting. And the point of that is that you don't necessarily, like in some context, this is totally fine, but in a more tricky to convince kind of context, you don't necessarily want people to feel like you're coming with the solution pre-planned. So it's actually, I have found through experience that it's really helpful to spend like a whole session, a whole half hour conversation or something like that, defining the problem, looking at evidence around the problem, coming to an agreement about the problem and coming to some sort of agreement about what a better outcome would be. Not a solution, not a solution path, but an ideal outcome. And then for you as the person leading this to say, is it okay if I go away and do some research to find out what might help us to address this and I invite other people to join me on that or come back with ideas and I'd be really happy if you'd be happy for me to do so. I would love to come back and share with you whatever I've encountered in our next session. Because this means, well, two things. One, you can adapt any messaging around the solution based upon what you found about interpretations of the problem in between. You might even be able to do a bit of, and I talk about this in Tools for Teachers, a bit of like behind the scenes work and coalition building in between to kind of, if you know there's an idea you want to introduce, you can have some quiet conversations with some of the people who you know are going to be most influential or might actually be blockers in the session and try to start to build that coalition to ensure that you're going to be met with a bit more of a warm audience on the day. And you can also authentically build in any suggestions that come in the interim. And then when you come the second time around, it's like, okay, we identified this challenge. I went away, I did some research. I think that this is probably going to help us. And crucially, presenting that second idea as a hypothesis of something that's going to help, which you were kind of talking about in terms of let's go away, let's try it out, rather than like, this is the thing that's going to solve our problem. So that kind of two things building on what you were saying that I think can be effective additional tweaks to.

Interesting. So let me push back a little bit um on that so definitely the hypothesis thing definitely if

you present

this as a solution forget it here's a here's a potential solution that we're going to try but that that idea i mean i think it's interesting that idea of breaking it up into into two and presenting understanding the problem first and then essentially i guess kind of co-constructing the solution in a way, right, in between. First, I just think there's an efficiency problem there as well. I think obviously it's going to take longer. You're going to need two sessions, you know, potentially split up by a week, two weeks or whatever. But my bigger kind of red flag there is, and again, I don't know if this is a problem because I've never done it this way and you'll be able to speak better to this. I just worry that before staff have tried a solution or a potential solution, you're already getting their kind of biases coming into play and the kind of co-construction of the solution. And I wonder whether you just end up with a bit of a compromised solution that nobody's entirely happy with because this kind of body of people have come together and they're chucking in the suggestions. It feels to me just kind of like a bit like kind of co-construction in disguise. And I think what I'd rather do is have everybody trying one thing. So we've all got, it's like a better experiment. We're all trying the same thing and then we can observe and reflect on why we've got the different outcomes so i think from an efficiency perspective and i think for an effectiveness perspective i'd rather the discussions come after everyone's tried a proposed solution but i'm i'm guessing there's a there's what's what's your reason why you're doing it the other way i don't think i did suggest it coming the other way i mean but you're i'm not having that gap, right? So I'm presenting the problem and I'm saying I've got a potential solution that we're going to test. You're presenting a problem. You're going away to research a solution and potentially inviting other people on that journey with you on that kind of researching and coming up with a solution. So I'm not doing that. I'm cutting out the middleman here. I'm just saying, let's all give this a go. Yeah.

So I think that it's still your role to lead whatever it is. And often when I've done this, I have had this solution in mind during the whole time that we spend focusing on the problem, right? But I don't share that for two reasons. One, because people might actually have some input that helps to influence and improve the solution I have in mind. And two, for optics purposes, right? In terms of how people are interpreting it. So I think you heard it as being more co-construction focused than what I meant. This is more of a technique and approach to be used in a scenario where it is a harder to, like, I think what you're suggesting can work 100%. But in a scenario where you're not sure where people are at, if they're going to be willing to give something a go straight away, you're going to build a lot of buy-in if people have the sense that you have taken on what they interpret as a challenge. You've gone away, you've done some work to try to find a solution to help them out and you've come back and you've shared it. There's just like a massive motivational and buy-in benefit to structuring it that way rather than coming and saying, hey, there's this thing that's going on in your class um here's how you can fix it give it a crack and let's have a chat you know in a couple of weeks about it not that you said it that way but yeah oh

it's not far off it's not far off right so i think i mean i agree with you the buy-in is the key right but i think if like imagine if you're in a school right and someone's doing some CPD and they've identified, let's stick with checking for listening, but it could be anything, right? And let's say they've identified that kids aren't listening across the school and you're sat there thinking, you know what? Potentially, yeah, potentially they might not be listening in my lesson. What are you going to prefer there? Someone who says, all right, by the way, here's something I've seen work in 20 other schools, or here's something that these three papers suggest is good, or here's, you know, something with a bit of credibility. Here's a solution I'm going to give you now that I'd like you to try out. Versus, like, I'd just be annoyed if they, like, a little teaser, like, oh, by the way, I'm going to now try and figure out how to solve this. Particularly if I suspect that the person presented already knows the solution and they're kind of holding it back a little bit. I'd be just thinking, I'd be getting really annoyed with that. So I've never found the buy-in thing to be a barrier. If the buy-in thing was a barrier, I agree with you. I think you could potentially get more buy-in doing it your way. i think you pay a bit of a price in terms of efficiency and also maybe reducing the buy-in of some people who are just getting a bit frustrated and thinking look just tell me i i want to try it i

think we're speaking from different perspectives i think you're talking more from the perspective of a external person who's been hired to come in and support a department, in which case I definitely suggest that what you do is the way to do it because you're meant to be an expert, you're meant to have the answers, and you've been asked to provide answers. I'm speaking more from a perspective of someone who's come in to lead a department. They haven't necessarily won the department over as yet. If they haven't won the department over, then, you know, faster cycles of iteration, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're in the early stages of leading a department and you're trying to drive some initial change in a space, I think spreading it out is a really good move. Interesting.

It'll be interesting listeners' perspective, right? What they, yeah, either what they prefer, what they've experienced. Yeah, if anyone wants to let us know that, that'd be, yeah, that'd be good.

That

was a good one, Al. Yeah, that was good. Okay, you made a good start there. That was good. Yeah, good. All right.

Before I have yours, I need to ask a follow-up question from last time, which was, you said that in your next training, there was a potential of when you got people to kind of break things down into atoms of knowledge. We talked about thinking about whether there's any correlation between that and things like the level of expertise of the teacher. And there was something else which I can't remember, but I know what meant to follow up on it. Any insights on that? Yeah,

big insights, right? So we're not going to talk about this today. So this will be a good one just just to just to break off on so as listeners may know atomization is my current kind of obsession here so um yeah i did some training so would this have been last week yes yeah it was last week and i yeah it's really good i had nine teach nine or ten teachers in three different groups and i set them all the same challenge so the challenge was they were all teaching a product of prime factors to year eight so for non-maths teachers you'll be you're absolutely loving this is where you split any number down into its prime number factors that multiply together and so on so first our first challenge i set them was um what's the first example you're going to use for this and that was fascinating right so we've talked about this the importance of that initial choice of first example how easy do you make it how generalizable do you make it so so we had an interesting discussion about that and then i said right do you working out on the left hand side of the piece of paper and on the right hand side and i just kept it vague i said list the knowledge your kids would need to have to be able to solve this problem and I thought, just keep it vague. I give everyone the exact same prompt. And I took pictures of all the lists that they got. So I think in number, it ranged between three and 12. Nobody had the same. They all interpreted, they all had different ways of framing it. Like some people were saying like um understand your times tables other people were saying like no each time tables fact between 12 and 2 and all this kind of thing so i had a look and there did seem to be a a correlation not a massively strong one but the more experienced you were the more atoms of knowledge you tended to break it break it down into so this is the world's smaller scale experiment but i will um i'll be continuing that experiment throughout all that's

interesting that's really interesting and the i recall or i look back at my notes and i think the other thing um that the other factor that we thought might influence it is the students they had in mind or the students they were picturing when they did the activity i'm not sure if that came into into it yeah so

again that it's tricky so i need to separate those two variables out, right? So this is the problem. So yeah, I didn't collect the data of which classes they taught. So yeah, I'll park that for now, but I'm going to be doing lots of this work next year. So I'll get onto it. And in fact, this is my dream day. working with their with four members of their maths department for an entire day on atomization next year and we're going to go so deep into this so i'll be able to get yeah some more feedback for you there be good all right what's

your first takeaway this week right

i've got some interesting ones here for y'all so i had seven that i could have gone for um so i'll give you one that didn't quite make the list just to tease listeners to get them to tune into next year. So I did some work just yesterday with the department where we've devised a departmental lesson structure that we're going to try and use in each maths lesson. And it's going to be super controversial. So I'll park that for now. We'll come back to that because I wanted to kind of theme my three takeaways today because I have experienced two of the best CPD experiences of my life in the last couple of weeks. And as a little teaser, I'll do your promo for you here all. For all these Patreons and the bonus thing at the end of this show, we're going to be talking about our best CPD that we've experienced. So I'm not going to choose either of these two. But these are two of the best I've experienced. number one as i teased last time i was lucky enough to attend cpd run by the legend himself doug lamov and then also i'll i'm counting as another of the best cpd experiences i've had was your conversation with harry fletcher wood which i've it's the podcast i've taken the most notes from so i'm going to weave in my three takeaways i'm going to incorporate both of those. So I'll start off with a quick one. So Doug Lamov, my takeaways are two things that Doug did in his CPD that made me uncomfortable, but I think are effective. And one thing that he did that I thought, why the hell don't I do that? All right. So I'm going to share these with you. to set the scene uh this was in telford it was um for an academy trust there was about 700 teachers in one room there was flipping twinkly lights and everything and lamov's there flown in especially for this and he's doing cpd and i was on in the afternoon and i i said look please and if you listeners remember my time slot is getting shortened by the minute because people want to hear Doug anyway I'm on in the afternoon so I'd asked if I can come in the morning to watch Doug so I've never never seen him deliver CPD so he comes on looking smart as anything those of you who've been to Doug's training will know he uses a lot of videos and the videos are so powerful because he essentially, I looked at the content, like maybe he used 10 slides in, you know, nearly three hours, whereas I'm, you know, 100 slides, 150 slides, but because he had videos and we could watch the videos two or three times to reflect on them, it was, it was powerful. So yeah, video's really good. Anyway, what are the two things he did that made me uncomfortable, but I think are really powerful? I'll do the big one first doll i've never seen anything like this in my life right 700 people in a room so i'm sat there thinking right if i need to kind of zone out a little bit here you know send a message to cakes one of our kids was ill so just send a message check check they're all right and stuff i'm going to be fine 700 teachers i'm going to be safe because i'm certainly i'm not one of these who's put my hand up volunteering at anything right what's doug got right he's got a bloody seating plan right of everyone in front of him so at any point during the day and the first time he did this he caught the guy out right so at any point he'd go he'd make a point and then he'd go right table 13 i've got ollie lovell on that table let's get a mic to ollie what do you think of that and this guy who first got p is like what is going on here now as soon as he does that once of course what's going to happen there everyone's hanging off his every word right so the fact he cold called i mean it was a it was a cpd about means of participation specifically about writing but the that he cold called early on, the participation ratio kind of went through. The attention ratio went through, certainly for me. And on my table, you could see people looking around thinking, whoa, okay, this is interesting. So that is something I've not been brave enough to try it yet, but I could imagine that could be super powerful. Now, you'd have to do a couple of the things that you need to do with cold call in a class so you don't want to make it to catch people out it's got to be a positive experience so it's doug said look if you don't want to say anything you just say pass that's absolutely fine no one's gonna you know there's no problem with that and the other thing i was thinking was what i would love would have loved him to do was that classic thing where you cold call somebody who's already spoken fairly recently. Because this guy who got cold called first, he was probably the only person in the room who was then relaxed, right? Because he thought the 700, no one's coming back to me. Now, if Doug had returned to him, wow, all bets are off then, right? Anyone literally could be asked at any stage. So I thought I'd never seen that in training before literally cold calling with names table mics over at you and so on so that was number one that made me do you

know how he'd plan the seating plan and what he'd based it on so he'd

asked in advance right so he'd he just said send me a copy of the seating plan and he just had it on a clipboard in front of him people were sat they were it was loads of different schools and from my understanding they were sat roughly in departments but again a few of the small departments would be merged together but he was working the room he was picking out he knew the subject as well i believe we've got a teacher here i'm calling for that it was amazing it was amazing so that was good right so that's number one um the second thing he did and this is a bit more of an obvious thing you talked about this with harry fletcher wood he made us switch partners so um we had to talk to somebody we hadn't talked to before now i'm a bit of an introvert when it comes to kind of social situations and i i'm fine talking to one person and i develop a bit of a rapport there but i get into my comfort zone then so when then i had to find someone i i hadn't spoken to yet and i ended up by the end of it i think i spoke to four different people and it was interesting i 100 could see the benefits of it but it made me feel initially quite uncomfortable so i'll be interested in your take on that because i know it's something you discussed i know it's something harry mentioned he would prefer people to speak in breadth particularly if it's a one-off cpd session then in depth to to to one person so i thought that was quite interesting did you use a pseudonym nobody cared all right i was so under the radar p teachers don't care who i am or anything so it was absolutely fine the only thing that made me stand out is my weird northern accent but yeah i was couldn't be more anonymous they didn't realize i was one of the uk's top five education influencers adam boxer would have had a big bloody rosette on or something and t-shirt listen to my podcast but yeah i was i'm more subtle than that i'm more subtle um so the so they were the two things he did that made me feel uncomfortable i thought were effective the third thing he did which I thought was so simple but really powerful so he has a handout that goes with his slides because he does a lot of writing we'll talk about writing in my second takeaway um so there's loads of space for writing now I've been to CPD where they've got handouts before and that's you know I can be really powerful but what Doug did that was really good is every slide he had the page reference of the handout so at any point you knew exactly where you were in that presentation so if for whatever reason you tuned out for a little bit you could look at any slide you could see bottom right hand corner page 11 so you could go to that page in the handout to go through it so I thought if I was ever doing and I've never seen that before so if I was ever doing handouts, I'm now always going to do that with the slide numbers. Because why wouldn't you? It just reduces the chance of people getting lost around it. There's no downside to it. So there you go. What do

you think of those three? That's good. That's good. The first one's really interesting. I'm just thinking we're running a training here with harry and josh in like two weeks and i'm like oh do it um you don't even need page table numbers you just need a list of the attendees which exactly which we already have it's

more efficient for like you can find the person quicker if you know where they are but again names would work fine right you

could get someone to run around at the start with the and then write the table number next to their name.

Definitely do it all. If nothing more, just so we can chat about it, definitely do it.

All right. Now no one's going to come to the PD. There are people listening. I was thinking about coming to that one, but not anymore. Yeah, switching partners 100%. So with the page references, I, and at StepLab Trainings, we've done that a lot. I think it's really helpful for participants. Two downsides from a presenter's point of view. One, if you ever change your workbook or your slides, it creates cascading issues through your whole presentation. If you change one early page on your workbook, you just create a massive headache for yourself. And it has this almost backfire effect. So if you have them all and it works, you look like super organized and everyone loves it. If you have one page number wrong everyone's like oh this person's this is this is all out of place i've completely stuffed it up right so um i i i think that that works really well if you've delivered the same training a whole heap of times and you know that it's at the point where you won't need to make many changes it's just more tweaks from there then i think it's a really worthwhile investment to make interest from a presenter's point of view I have actually deleted all those workbook page references because we're still at a point where we're refining our trainings, we're updating them, we're always changing them, we always wanted to do things better. And if you make a small change the night before, you do not want to have to go through 200 slides, look for all the page references and change them all accordingly. a massive headache and i've done it several times so that's

good hey al just on the um just circling back to the partner like switching partners where are you on that like and let's talk for a one-off you're a one-off pd session well what do you do there do you because there's pros and cons right the the depth versus breadth is an interesting one and i always say the reason i do just speak to one person typically one is because i feel more comfortable doing it and that's the worst reason to do it but the second is often i'll say to people right okay stop stop your discussions there if you're halfway through a discussion you can pick it up again next time we we have the discussions and it just it when it works well you get that real depth you get that relationship that that can last throughout the pd whereas whenever you switch partners you've got that awkward first few seconds where what's your name what do you do you can't get right into the into the into the stuff so where do you stand

on that a few things i think that one of the best things of pds is actually meeting different people and connecting with them. So I think it's beneficial for participants just to be connected in that way. If you are changing partners, I think you need to kind of acknowledge that there is a bit of like meeting and norming that needs to take place with each partnership. So you actually need to allocate additional time for that and even give them some guidance as well. One of the beneficial things about the trainings that we run is we often talk, because we're talking about coaching, we often talk about the importance of building relationships with your coaching. And we give some like example questions that you can use to go deeper than a surface level discussion about, you know, footy teams or where you're taught before kind of a thing. And so throughout the PD, we can actually use those questions and say like, okay, working with a new partner, use this question to start off. And immediately people have a stronger connection. So if you want to do that, I think that's something you need to take account of and build it in. What we usually do, and I would say I haven't fully refined this, and I'm not 100% happy with how we do it, because I know that building relationships is so important, but also it does take heaps of time in the PD. So I find often in PD that's much less effective, people build better relationships because there's heaps of time allocated to like having a chat with your mate. And that makes everyone feel really good and really heard and really listened to. But it's because there's a lack of actual concrete content in the PD. So I think there's also a trade-off there. Like in a day's PD about coaching, there's so much we want to get through and convey to people that there's a trade-off and we're constantly juggling that one. But something concrete we do do is for the rehearsals, we generally do get people, in fact, every time we've run it, coaching rehearsals, we get people to pair up with someone they've never met before. Have a quick kind of contracting conversation. Ask a few questions like, or answer a few questions like, what's something you're excited about for this rehearsal? What's something you're nervous about for this rehearsal? Things that kind of break down those barriers, get egos out of the way a little bit and bring in a bit of vulnerability. And I think that that really helps on the rehearsal side of things too because there's no norm of slacking off between a partner that they've established previously. Or I mean sometimes, and we do find this, a couple of people from the same school just like stand up and like go with each other and then kind of slack off. That's like the worst case scenario. But I think, but most people do a really, really good job are happy to give it a go. And when they are doing with a stranger, they turn it up a little bit and they're a bit more professional. So I think that's really beneficial as well.

Really interesting. Really interesting. Just for a handover to you for your second one, just final little bonus thing Doug did as well, which I thought was interesting. He gives 45 seconds for every turn and talk. So I've alternated between 30 seconds and a minute, but now I'm doing 45 seconds.