Beyond Good

In this episode Femi and  Matt speak to Aparna about her experience of education as a mother of two exceptional children.  The conversation shines a light on some of the challenges students, their families, teachers and schools face when the children don’t fall into that broad middle 99% that we are accustomed to working with.   Hopefully the conversation provides some awareness and stimulates thinking about those children who live life at the far edge of the distribution– whether that is in terms of physical or emotional needs, natural ability, cognitive approaches, or any other dimension of relevance to a successful schooling.The trio discuss the dangers of schools placing these children in boxes simply because those categories are the familiar ones, and the challenges and frustration of trying to unpick that, the importance of making an accurate assessment of what students can actually do – which might not be revealed when the analysis is at the level of a single number summarising the score on a standardised test.  They debate whether cognitive science implemented in schools does or does not cater for the exceptional, or whether this is a failure of quality first teaching and it raises the interesting question of how deep we should reasonably expect teacher’s pedagogical skill and subject knowledge to run to truly qualify as quality first teaching.  The conversation touches on the idea of cognitive underload and the need to frame learning within a wider context, how students fundamentally need to feel they have something interesting and challenging to do in lessons, opportunities to ask their bizarre questions and feel included, possible classroom strategies, the importance of having a centralised plan and it not being left to each individual teacher, and the possibility of teachers even just acting in more of a coaching role – equipping these students with material and then checking in and following up with them.

Matt and Femi turn their attention to the subject of Departmental development plans and, as you will hear, this is a topic that they come at from quite different perspectives.   They discuss the issues with development plans in the way they all too often appear in schools, vision and ambition for the department, auditing the current state of affairs, and the importance of pricing in the available capacity to enact said plans.  They touch on the tension between the need for differentiated individual development vs commonalties across the whole team.  Line management, the relationship with a line manager and what line management should really be about feature heavily and there is also some discussion about the culture of teacher development in schools, or lack of it.This is yet another episode which runs across all subjects so hopefully all colleagues will enjoy and find value in it.

The central theme of the discussion in this episode is ‘teaching low ability students’.  In a fairly wide-ranging discussion, Femi and Matt touch on expectations, setting and sink groups, profiling, behaviour, avoiding conflict, and some common pitfalls they have seen, amongst other things.  Although they do cite a few maths-specific examples, on the whole this is another episode that is largely not specific to maths teaching so should be of interest to teachers of all subjects.  

In this week's episode, Femi and Matt mull over a topic which seems to get a disproportionate amount of air time on social media, which is teachers’ thoughts and feelings about their SLT.   As always, the Beyond Good team would love to hear your thoughts and responses to the episode: @BeyondGoodPod 

In this episode of The Beyond Good Podcast, Matt and Femi discuss resilience.  There is an old adage that students should be working harder than the teacher, and they explore this, discuss what they each think is right at the core of good teaching, talk about engineering success, what that looks like in the classroom and how it evolves over time, metacognitive understanding and touch on teacher resilience amongst other things.

The theme of Femi and Matt's discussion in this episode is “things that schools could get rid of - or at least do less of”.   While it is rarely the case that these ‘things’ are totally ineffective, more likely they are effective to some degree, but in the cost-benefit analysis do they meet the threshold of being effective enough to justify our time?  Could they be culled in order to allow us to spend more time doing things that are even more effective?With no subject specific element to this topic, and colleagues from all walks will hopefully enjoy the discussion.  

In this episode Femi and Matt discuss what they were each doing at the beginning of their teaching careers that they felt was very effective, and as importantly what they were not doing, and then what other aspects came in later when more bandwidth came online as they developed automaticity (unconscious competence).This is a discussion about low hanging fruit / first order effects / climbing the steepest part of the curve as quickly as possible and the law of diminishing returns.  For the most part this episode is not maths-specific and there is value here to teachers from all specialisms.  The duo also talk about how important it is to be constantly striving to improve teaching and share what they are each working on at the moment.  They elucidate the 'soft' metrics that they were using to test their own competence while developing skills in these core areas.  Alongside this is the emphasis on sticking with an approach, reflecting and refining the ability to make it work effectively, and not giving up and looking for the next silver bullet.

This week Femi and Matt discuss ‘making the most of your training year’ – in response to listener demand!  Much of what is covered will be useful for trainees and ECTs, as well as mentors and anyone thinking of taking on a mentoring role.  Indeed,  some of the conversation is ever-green as they do cover areas such as planning, resources and feedback.  

In this episode the seemingly mundane topic of 'meetings' comes under Femi and Matt's scrutiny.  Both have sat in meetings, like so many of us, with utter dismay at the terribly ineffective  use of time and frankly sometimes callous disrespect for colleagues' time as lengthy agendas are gradually ticked off with a series of mainly one to one discussions...In this conversation Matt and Femi don't do much complaining: instead they focus on what they are currently doing differently now that they are in charge of how their meeting times are used.This has a huge effect on the culture and morale of colleagues so really is worth thinking about... and as always, the boys do not shy away from getting into the fine details that are the differences that make the difference.

In this episode Matt and Femi speak with Sam Roberts.  Sam Roberts is best known for his work in sports broadcasting - particularly as a rugby commentator.  However Sam is also a teacher, and so is able to speak from the intersection of a fairly unique Venn diagram – bridging the worlds of teaching and elite-level sports performance.As you will hear, Sam speaks passionately about performance mindset and mental fitness for teaching.   He discusses how he was inspired by Don McPherson and the millennias-old concept of ‘monkey mind’, thinking about teachers as elite performers and how they can benefit from mental fitness and mindset coaching.  The trrio cover some of the barriers to do this effectively in schools, the effects of self-talk and your inner voice, the importance of belief, imposter syndrome, the concept of the accidental mind-coach, coaching vs giving advice, the role of HR in supporting teachers, and other topics.