Beyond Good

Matt and Femi dive into the phrase that you so often hear amongst senior and middle management in schools: "Holding people to account".

Matt and Femi speak to the executive head teacher and founder of Cobham Free School, Michaela Khatib, about the remarkable journey to plan, start and grow a school from nothing to over a thousand pupils.

Matt and Femi discuss the need for teachers to have a basic understanding of how learning happens, as well as barriers and solutions to the problem.

Matt and Femi discuss Femi's experience of working in both state and private schools, what the major differences are for teachers and what each can learn from the other.

This episode has 2 unrelated topics...  In the first half of the episode Femi and Matt discuss what it means to have a culture where you can 'hold colleagues accountable' for the benefit of the whole team.  In the second part of episode (starting at 20:30), Femi and Matt turn their attention to the Power of Video - particularly with regards to modelling and feedback for teachers.

Femi and Matt discuss why improving our teaching (or anything) can be so difficult, and how that influences their thinking around coaching and PD.

Femi and Matt ponder the all too common phrase "people just aren't doing it"!

Femi and Matt discuss the concept of 'disagree then commit' in the context of working in a school team or SLT.

Matt and Femi talk to Peter Lee about how he has managed to found and maintain a school which not only achieves outstanding results, but also has not had any supply bought in for over 8 years!  Among many other things they discuss workload, behaviour, timetabling and lesson structures.

Femi shares his reflections and lessons learnt with Matt on the last 6 months of doing regular coaching - several times per week.

Prompted by Pritesh's tweet regarding the number of observations completed and feedback given in the autumn term, Femi and Matt discuss attitudes and culture around drop-ins.

Femi and Matt wrestle with the concept of students who refuse instructions and what schools can do about it.

Femi and Matt's discussion is prompted by an article of the same name: https://thinkingflexibly.com/2024/10/18/the-lost-art-of-planning/ They discuss the pros and cons of planning lessons, designing lesson sequences and preparing resources from scratch vs having off-the-shelf schemes of work, resources and teaching powerpoints.

Matt and Femi discuss explicit teaching (direct instruction), questioning, AfL and much more!

Matt and Femi talk to Katharine Birbalsingh, founding member and head teacher of the Michaela Community School in Wembley Park.

Following on from their video analysis of his lesson, Matt and Femi talk to Barry Smith about some of his principles for classroom teaching.  Starting from a lense of MFL teaching, we extract the general pedagogical principles that Barry believes lead to exceptional outcomes in the classroom.

Matt and Femi chat to metacognition enthusiast Nathan Burns about metacognition, knowledge, knowledge organisers and much much more. Check out Nathan's resources on his website: https://www.mrmetacognition.com/

Femi and Matt discuss the enactment gap - teasing apart what it is exactly, diagnosing solutions to the problem and then get into the pragmatism of supporting teachers to improve elements of their practice - trying to figure out when and how to intervene if a colleague is struggling with students during unstructured time.

Femi tells Matt about his recent visit to another high performing school - this time Q3 Academy Langley in the West Midlands. This brings up the topics of participation and thinking ratio - leading to a spirited discussion about 'pair talk', 'everybody writes' and other approaches to increasing thinking and participation.

Femi talks to Matt about how he is now thinking about PD - from individual all the way to whole-school.

Matt and Femi discuss duties, handling pupils, being authentic, leadership, supporting colleagues and much more!

See the video podcast on youtube. Video Lesson Analysis: Barry Smith Teaching French https://youtu.be/qs0S4sYvBZ0?feature=shared Barry's Full French Lesson https://youtu.be/WtO1YWhwAGE?feature=shared Doug Lemov's Field Notes https://teachlikeachampion.org/tag/barry-smith/

Matt and Femi talk to Miriam Hussain about whole-school systems for behaviour, for teaching and learning, about SLT, the vision of the head teacher and much more!

Matt and Femi reflect on leading departments, the evolving process of implementing coaching and department meetings as colleagues' needs change over time, and turn their thoughts forward to leading culture change, teaching and learning and implementing coaching whole school.

Matt and Femi are joined by Josh Goodrich, author of 'Responsive Coaching', former teacher and senior leader and CEO of steplab. Responsive Coaching  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Responsive-Coaching-Evidence-informed-instructional-coaching/dp/1036003213 Steplab www.steplab.co