Thirteen days in, the summer might feel like a distant memory.
This was my first summer in 18 years without the summer break and back to school for September. It got me thinking about that first month of the new year and what I would usually be holding.
How’s it going? Beyond busy, or tired, how is it actually going?
I spend my week in a primary school, sat with teachers after school. These are the reflection questions I’d be asking you. None of them has a right answer, and none of them is a test.
What were you carrying in?
The handover, the data, the conversation by the printer in July. All of it arriving before the children did.
Not all of it was a warning, either. Plenty gets handed over as a sure thing. She’s brilliant, you’ll have no trouble. Just as fast, and just as much a prediction.
You’ve got one account of each child and it’s the school’s. Their friends have another, their family another, and they have their own. Which of those have you had any access to?
So how much room have they had to show you something you weren’t expecting? Classrooms confirm things about children faster than we revise them, and the first fortnight is when that runs hardest. It isn’t that we always get children wrong. It’s that we get them early, and then the room gets busy.
Going into next week: pick a child you think you’ve already got a handle on, and go looking for something you don’t know.
What did you teach them first?
When I’m working with a class and their teacher, I’ll often ask them both separately what it means to be good in this class. Everyone has an answer. Nobody has ever said they don’t know.
The two rarely match. What’s more striking is how much the young people agree with each other. They’ve arrived at a shared, specific account of what this room rewards, and some of it was never taught at all.
I did this with my own class once. Plenty of it was lovely. Sharing your ideas. Asking questions. Working with other people. And then, sitting level with taking care of one another: putting the lids back on the pens.
I’d never said it mattered. They’d picked it up from how I moved around the room, what I stopped for, what made me sigh. They were paying much closer attention than I was.
So the question about the routines you set up a fortnight ago isn’t whether they work. It’s what they’re teaching alongside the thing they’re for. Does this one build anything between them, or only between each of them and me?
Going into next week: if you asked them, what do you think they’d say?
What’s working?
Thirteen days is enough to know some things are going right, and most of us are terrible at saying so out loud.
Not the smooth bits, though. Not the line-up that’s got quicker. Where has there been joy? Where did a group carry on with an idea after you’d stopped talking about it, or two of them find each other who wouldn’t have otherwise?
Compliance and engagement look very similar from the front of a room and they are not the same thing.
So find the moment, then work out what was true in the room while it happened. Were they talking to each other? Was there time? Was there more than one right answer? Were you not the only place an answer could come from?
Going into next week: where else could those conditions exist?
What did you decide in July you weren’t doing again?
Most teachers I work with have something they’d clocked by July and fully intended to leave behind.
Have you reached for it yet?
Mine, one of mine, was a kind of emotional manipulation. I’d build a real relationship with a child and then use it. Oh dear, that makes me very sad. I’d have recognised the same move instantly as coercive in an adult relationship. Knowing didn’t stop me reaching for it.
Think about when things get loose. The lesson that isn’t landing, the point where you can feel the room going. What do you reach for? Not the interview answer. The one that turns up when you’re tired.
It persists because, in the moment, it seems to work. Often we are aware there will be a cost down the line, but in the bustle of September we are more likely to take the quick fix and deal with any problems later.
What shifted it for me was a colleague I could be honest with. Naming it while I was still doing it did more than any amount of privately deciding to stop. It’s like telling someone you’re giving up chocolate. It builds accountability with someone you trust.
Going into next week: catch yourself once. Then later, when there’s space to think about it, what would it cost to keep reaching for that?
What have they told you?
Thirteen days is a long time when you’re the one being taught. They’ve been telling you things.
Some of it out loud. A lot of it not. Where they put themselves when nobody has told them where to sit. What they stop doing when you walk past. Reading that takes deliberate attention, which is in short supply in September.
So who have you heard from? Try naming your class without the list. Which names rush to the front of your mind, and which require more intentional thought?
And what have you asked? Not how they’re finding it, which gets you good. What’s the best part of the day. What would you change about this room. What do you wish I knew.
Then the part that matters most. When one of them told you something you didn’t want to hear, what happened next? They can tell the difference between being asked so you’d know and being asked because something might change, and they’re working out whether telling you things is worth it. They’ll have decided well before half term.
Going into next week: what’s one thing in that room they could genuinely decide?
What do you think you’d get in trouble for?
Every teacher I work with has a list of things they’d do differently if they were allowed. It tends to come out slowly, a few weeks in, and it’s usually three different kinds of thing wearing the same coat.
Some is genuinely fixed. Statutory, safeguarding, a directive from someone who would enforce it.
Some is school policy. Somebody decided that, and decisions can be revisited. Not easily, not quickly, but they can.
And a fair amount is how it’s done here. What the last person in your year group did. An assumption about what would be said if you did it differently, never tested on anybody.
So take one thing off the list. Have you ever put it to a person? Not raised it in a meeting. Asked someone specific a specific question. And if it changed, who would it change things for?
Going into next week: which pile is yours actually in?
By half term
You won’t get to all of these. Nobody does, and thirteen days in you’re already holding about forty things at once.
But none of the answers are fixed yet. What this class is. What it means to be good here. Whether telling you things is worth it. All of it is still being worked out, and most of it will settle without anybody deciding to settle it. That’s the argument for asking now rather than in February.
None of these is meant to be answered on your own. They do more in company. Ask the person next door what they decided in July, or what’s working in their room and why. Give a staff meeting over to one of them and see where it goes. What shifted things for me was never the private resolution. It was saying it out loud to somebody who would tell me the truth.
Then there’s the version of that conversation that’s possible outside your own building, with people who don’t already share your assumptions about how things are done here. That’s what Foundational Learning is: four days across the year with teachers from other schools working through exactly this. Our Foundational Learning dates are now live.
Come and think with us.
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