William Harris

@MartinCothran What does a lesson plan look like?

A curriculum (if it is really a curriculum) should include lesson plans. If it doesn't, then you need to look for another curriculum. If it does have lesson plans competently done and the teacher still doesn't know what to do, then need to look for another teacher.

@TTRadioOfficial This is so sad. It is so sad that the expectation is that you won't have a home life. Or that you won't be a good teacher if you turn up, teach and then go home. And I don't want to be that "Special" teacher. I want to do a competent job, and go home to my kids.

"If you have the mentality of teaching as a 9-5 job, I don't know how well you will do!" Andrea Rosewell, a headteacher in London, argues that it's difficult to stick to 1265 and have a '9-5 mentality' and be the 'special teacher', what do you think?👇 #teaching #leadership #workload #wellbeing #teacherlife #teachertok #teachersoftiktok

@Headteacherchat Understand that the list of tasks is like a river - it will not stop. There will never be a point where you are "done". But there is a point where you have to go home. School will replace you in hours if you die. Your family cannot do that.

Anon post How do Heads juggle responsibilities outside of school—for example, children or looking after an elderly family member? It just seems non-stop. Any tips would be much appreciated.

@TTRadioOfficial "Persistent disruptive behaviour" ruins the lives of children, classes, and teachers. Suggesting that we lower our standards to allow it in schools just because it feels nice is a massive luxury opinion.

“The threshold for school exclusion is falling!” Phil Banks, Trust CEO, says that the threshold for being excluded is lowering to 'persistent disruptive behaviour' - he suggests that children are now ending up excluded for less extreme behaviours - what do you think? 👇 #teaching #behaviour #inclusion #teacherlife #teachertok #teachersoftiktok

@adamboxer1 @scriptwren Have you seen Northern Irelands new Teacher Education framework. It is surprisingly good.

@scriptwren Unfortunately a lot of teacher training is very bad

I sometimes wonder if I am a worse teacher now than I was this time last year before my training. Just seen some stuff on here about over scaffolding (almost certainly guilty) and exit tickets, which I have been told I ought to do, but apparently are rubbish?

📢 ANNOUNCEMENT | Education Minister, Paul Givan has today published the first Northern Ireland Curriculum Framework for Initial Teacher Education, which sets out the core knowledge, skills and practices that all beginning teachers should develop. 🔗 Find out more: education-ni.gov.uk/news/first-eve…

NEW ARTICLE: Restorative justice- it doesn’t restore and it isn’t just. Apart from that, I like it. My article in @Education_NI latest quarterly. Link below.

"teaching students to memorize math facts is now seen as conservative" Says who? I've talked to parents from all walks of life about math. They all agree they want their kids to memorize times tables. Opposition to math facts is from a small influential group. It's not political

@FixingEducation Its Kafkaesque in its insanity to blame a school for children not attending.

Chronic absenteeism is a major challenge in schools, often leading to student academic struggles. Yet, teachers are frequently blamed for the outcomes. It’s time to recognize that schools and teachers can’t be thought of as the sole solution to all of our kids’ challenges.

@JoshPhillipsPhD I agree. I would definitely take whatever the price of a chromebook for each student is for a year and spend it on photocopying instead. It would have a bigger impact too.

There’s no good reason for kids to have personal electronic devices in the classroom There is no academic benefit. People did just fine with pencil and paper long before phones, laptops, and tablets nytimes.com/2026/03/29/tec…

@adamboxer1 The LLMs are trained on conversations which happen on the internet. Vast quantities of data are trawled from Reddit comments. LLMs lean toward whatever the majority opinions there are. And there is a HUGE amount of misunderstanding around what good teaching is.

Fascinating new paper on AI tutors ringing more alarm bells: "We find that LLMs exhibit Marked Pedagogies: biased instructional orientations drawing from assumptions about student learning needs and identities. While White and high-achieving student attributes received expansive, growth-oriented critique on argumentation, feedback for Hispanic and ELL attributes fixated on grammar, spelling, and formality. For non-White and female attributes, models invoked cultural and gender stereotypes. For students marked as low-achieving or having learning disabilities, LLMs exhibited feedback witholding bias --- an overuse of praise, less substantive critique, and assumptions of limited ability." I know I'm banging a drum here, but I continue to be staggered at how readily the wider education and edtech sector have pursued the idea of putting "personalised" AI-enabled tutors in front of students. This stuff isn't ready, and may never be. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12471 (quotation is from an email summary by one of the authors, not the paper itself)

@WeinsteinEdu What childish "aren't I very clever" posturing. If 30 sick people show up to the hospital with the same symptoms, it's probably a good bet that they have the same disease and need the same treatment. If 30 children need to learn one thing, it's better to teach them all at once.

Do you agree?

@WeinsteinEdu No.

@damechatprrr @BaxterThom @tombennett71 I agree. I tried it once in a sort of effort to at least understand where the insanity in teaching is coming from. It reads like the teenage musings of a guy, stated as fact with no evidence.

@BaxterThom @tombennett71 It's unreadable

A classic from the vaults

@BaxterThom @tombennett71 You mean, because schools are overrun by people who believe that Freire's ideas have merit, and if you have your children at home you can actually teach them? You mean it that way, right?

@tombennett71 For those that care about the question, "why are so many families choosing home schooling?", Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a valuable resource.

@WoodMeena @Samstricko181 @JohnBaldLangLit So the solution is to have an individual teacher for each child teaching them with an individual curriculum?

@planebottle @Samstricko181 @JohnBaldLangLit Employed additional teachers for maths English hums and science (with PP and SEND funding) in inclusion hub. It worked as had better behaviours and attitudes, incremental progress in learning and enjoyment of learning. Flexible model dependent on child. Mainstream not disrupted.

I still hold that one pupil should not be allowed to undermine the learning of 29 other children & disproportionately consume the teacher’s time.

@WoodMeena @Samstricko181 @JohnBaldLangLit Who is it that this works for? Because it seems like it won't work for the already overworked teachers, and it won't work for the 29 other children.

@Samstricko181 @JohnBaldLangLit Children come to school to learn, if the curriculum is inaccessible because of literacy issues, pace of learning, cognitive dissonance, concentration span, of course the child ‘disrupts’. We have it in our gift to adapt the curriculum-pace not age and inclusion hubs. This works.

@Amazingjason2 @largescience @Samstricko181 I think we should run two behaviour systems in schools, ones that the parents opt into. Option 1 - restorative practices and no consequences. Option 2 - Consequences for disrupting learning and removal as an easy option for the teacher. Parents decide where to place their child

@largescience @Samstricko181 We should create a separate class for chronically disruptive and misbehaving students. Let them deal with each other. If they get their act together, they can return to a regular class.

@Samstricko181 This should not be a controversial opinion. Imagine if the 29 students turned on the 1 and victimised him, governments would demand action. But one student abusing their power and turning the other 29 into victims is apparently fine.

@JamesMelville @sequi_simon Ah, the problem here is that you need an awful lot of domain specific knowledge about education to be able to think critically about it.

“I think critical thinking should be a school subject. I've always encouraged my kids to question absolutely everything.” ~ @sequi_simon Completely agree. Critical thinking should be on the school curriculum. But governments hate critical thinkers.