Finding My Voice

Tom Sherrington recently celebrated ten years of blogging with Emma Turner on their brilliant podcast Mind The Gap. Tom’s blog has inspired so much of the work that I do and I regularly share it with colleagues.

It was fascinating to hear him talk about it, how he got into it and why he still does it today. What stuck out to me in this discussion was Tom outlining why we should give blogging a go and why we should find our voice to be authentic writers.

This got me thinking about my own attempts at blogging in the past, They have been ad-hoc, writing about what I think people want to read rather than writing for me.

Finding my own voice is perhaps the missing piece I need to get into a good routine of blogging like I have done with my podcasting. So what is my own voice? What voice do I want to use when writing about teaching?

When I think about it, it is the tiny details of teaching that really fascinate me, the minutiae of minute-by-minute classroom teaching. This perhaps explains to me why I am captivated by and constantly dig deeper into things like lesson preparation as opposed to lesson planning, direct instruction, scripting explanations, pre-preparing questions and thinking about who we will ask them to and endeavouring to take the shortest path to the learning.

I spend hours reading about and speaking with excellent teachers who do the very same. They research, translate research and practice and share this with great enthusiasm for my podcast (Becoming Educated, it is available wherever you get your podcasts from). Can I use blogging to do the very same?

With this in mind, I am going to set myself a challenge. My challenge will be to write one blog a week for 6 weeks zooming into the small, seemingly insignificant, things we do in the classroom that really drive us towards high impact teaching. Hopefully, they will be of interest to a few and with any luck they will inspire some follow on conversations. Conversations that lead to us thinking deeper about our craft and getting that little bit better every day.

I’m hoping to find my voice and make my own contributions to the great conversations which focus on improving teaching.