MRMICT

I get asked the same question quite regularly: “Would you be willing to share your slides for this lesson?” It’s a fair question, particularly when I’m already very happy to share tasks, and I completely understand the reasons behind it. We are all busy, and it’s natural to want a shortcut that saves planning time. Like I said, people will think, if I’ve already shared a task, why not the slides that go with it?

The honest and simple answer is that I don’t share slides, and it’s not because I’m being protective or unhelpful. It goes back to something a teacher mentor once said to me during training, before I ever taught long multiplication in Year 5: “You have to do the maths.” What they meant was that I had to go away and do the practice, walk through the steps that the children would walk through, and ultimately, you have to do the thinking yourself. That’s the bit that matters.

Now, that nugget of advice referred to a single idea, but I take that comment with me regularly on trainings and when visiting schools. The task is only as good as the thinking behind it and the intent of its implementation.

Why I don’t share slides

For me, slides are not really a resource. They are a trace of my own thought process as I prepare to teach. They work for me because I have already done the research to obtain whatever subject knowledge I need, I’ve done the sequencing, and the consideration of how children will encounter the ideas in action. When I have shared my slides, people are often surprised at how little is on them. A single picture. A looping GIF. I try, where possible, to keep text limited, and if it’s there at all, it’s a reminder to me or colleagues who haven’t done the explicit planning and are having it shared with them by me. The rest is me talking, questioning, listening, and adapting.

The task is different. For me, a well-designed task is something that can travel. It has the potential to make children think in another classroom, with another teacher, for another subject; it just needs to be adapted. Again, I quote my deputy head here: “Make once, use lots.” This is why I share tasks here rather than the slides. My aim is always that teachers look at a task and think, “I know exactly how I could use this,” or “I can tweak this to fit my sequence.”

Even now, I still get inspired by other teachers or leaders and take their ideas and innovate. For example, the Three Heads, as I’ve said before, originated in Kate Jones’s retrieval book as part of a pick-and-mix retrieval sheet created by Matt Lynch. The Word, Sentence, Paragraph idea was something that Joseph Kinnaird kindly shared, and I get no end of inspiration from tasks shared by James Fitzgibbon, a history teacher.

Additionally, I’m constantly opening up Organise Ideas and looking at ways I can continue to embed thinking models in class, or Designing Tasks in Secondary Education, to give me a renewed sense of disciplinary innovation.

It’s also one of the reasons I think the emergence of AI will revolutionise our thinking and designing. For example, I can ask the LLM (Large Language Model) to take a task and suggest innovations in other subjects for other year groups. I will be sharing how I do this in my upcoming network meeting.

It’s also why I am enjoying working alongside Chalk founder Phil Bell. The way AI can take a simple model and provide endless possibilities for how it’s presented is incredible.

Why this matters

Stuart Tiffany made a good point in reply to my recent post about this: “Does anyone have task design ideas for X?” is at risk of becoming the new “Does anyone have resources for Y.” I share the same sentiment, which is why I will often ask what the learning sequence is or what the children already know. If all we do is swap complete lesson slides, we lose the professional thinking that makes planning meaningful.

The same can be said of schemes and ready-made plans, of which I’m not a huge fan. For example, as a computing lead, I am regularly asked which are the best schemes between X and Y. My response is always nuanced: why do you need or want one? Almost always, it’s because the majority of staff have little subject knowledge, something a scheme doesn’t address. What you can do, however, is adopt something like Teach Computing and then invest the money you would’ve spent on a ridiculously expensive scheme on staff training, upskilling, and CPD. That’s the hard part, but also the enjoyable part. It’s where the craft of teaching lives.

A hint of the wider issue

I also think this connects to what I’ve decided to call the “Oakification” of education. During the pandemic, when Oak National Academy resources were widely used, I surmise that a lot of trainees had less opportunity to practise planning from scratch with limited materials. For some, the habit has been to look for the finished product first rather than wrestle with the thinking. That is no criticism of individuals at all, but it is something we need to be mindful of.

Well, where does this leave us?

So, no, I won’t be uploading slides. I will keep sharing tasks, models, and approaches that can spark thinking. The aim of this group, and of my work more broadly, is to encourage us to ask:

– Why this task?

– Why this way?

– Why now, in this part of the sequence?

Those are the questions that matter. That’s where we start to move beyond worksheets and into genuine task design.

I’ll end by saying another huge thank you to those who keep asking and probing. It shows that the appetite is there for collaboration and professional growth. Let’s try to keep focusing on the thinking, not just the resources.

Karl (MRMICT)