Beyond Good – Details, episodes & analysis

Femi tells Matt about his visit to The Totteridge Academy, which he was thoroughly impressed by.

Following their visit to Copleston High School, Matt and Femi discuss how they would each approach a hypothetical situation of being a newly appointed VP in charge of teaching and learning:  How would they get started and what would they be trying to achieve in the first few months.

Author, teacher, trainer, and expert coach Sarah Cottinghatt joins Matt and Femi to discuss her book 'Ausubel's Meaningful Learning in Action', and coaching!

Follow Sarah's Coaching Cuts on Substack:

https://cognitivecoaching.substack.com/

Contact the pod:

beyondgoodpod@gmail.com

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.