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The Learning Spy is alive and well on Substack

Feb 03, 2026 | Category: Featured

If you've been missing my regular posts and wondering whether the blog is still going, I'm happy to tell you that you can subscribe to The Learning Spy over on Substack.[caption id="attachment_74820"...

How do I know all students have made sense of what has been taught?

Mar 24, 2025 | Category: Featured

This post was published first on Substack. Please consider subscribing if you haven't already.In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I wrote that all teachers need to answer four questions every lesson: H...

How do I know all students are paying attention?

Mar 22, 2025 | Category: Featured

This post is also on Substack. As a reminder, I'm planning to stop posting here in the short to medium term so I'd be really grateful if you could subscribe over there. Thanks, David In Attention, Mea...

How can we teach so that all students experience success?

Mar 17, 2025 | Category: Featured

A reminder that I'm shifting my output over to Substack, so it would be wonderful if you could subscribe over there. I've been reworking some older posts on this blog and publishing them there so you...

Attention, meaning and mastery: The questions every teacher needs to answer every lesson

Mar 13, 2025 | Category: Featured

After a loooong hiatus from blogging I've decided to give substack a try. You can subscribe here.For the next few blogs I'll also post here on the Learning Spy site but, depending on how things go, I'...

It's always better to know

Mar 12, 2025 | Category: Featured

Over the last few years I've made a habit of teaching demonstration lessons in the schools I work with in order to make it clearer how to teach effectively. One of the things that makes this useful is...

#hinge point questions #check for understanding #cold call

Why bother with 'turn & talk'?

Jun 07, 2024 | Category: Featured

Beyond the notion that it's nice for students to chat, or 'do oracy,' is there any real merit in getting them to talk to each other during lessons?Recently on Twitter, Barry Smith got in touch to go o...

Messy markbooks: monitoring participation in (and across) lessons

Jan 20, 2024 | Category: Featured

Since taking the plunge with mini-whiteboards (see this post) over the past few years my ability to know whether students are paying attention, thinking and practising has dramatically increased. Beca...

#Doug Lemov #mini whiteboards #Claire Woozley

Earned autonomy and shared responsibility

Jan 05, 2024 | Category: Featured

Having just gotten around to reading Matthew Evans' blog, The Earned Autonomy Trap, I feel moved to break my blogging silence of the past few months.In my book, Intelligent Accountability, I present e...

#school improvement #intelligent accountability #lead

Should we seek to balance teacher-led and student-led lesson activities?

Oct 29, 2022 | Category: Featured

For as long as I've been writing about education, many commentators have argued that teaching should seek to balance teacher-led and student-led activities. Although this is often presented as self-ev...

#group work #student-led #teacher-led