Recently, I have been working on making my resources more ‘shareable’ to teachers delivering different curricula, which has meant reducing my lesson resources to the bare bones of what strong teaching should be: imparting knowledge and enthusiasm. By using my (or anyone’s) ideas, your mental bandwidth can be employed in delivering your knowledge well. If you have time, these can be adapted to suit your students’ needs. If not, a little flexibility and authentic “pazzazz” on your part will go a long way in explaining the tasks.

Flexibility and “pazzazz” may well create the organic connection most people find compelling. Structuring of lessons and following pedagogical trends comes secondary to learning your students: their likes, dislikes, and quirks often contravene the ideas of the most well-meaning educational academic. Political pundits, for example, will never be able to accurately predict an election result: to do so, one would have to have an omniscient understanding of each citizen’s mood, caprice, what they ate for breakfast on polling day. We, as teachers, have been given a slice of the chaos, embodied by the small group of (albeit young) citizens over whom we have a modicum of control. Over time, we must get to know what they click with, (at least some of the time,) to make our lessons work (at least some of the time.)

So: get to know your kids before your educational theorists.