A bit more detail on some projects I’ve worked on over the years.

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Huddle (South Africa)

I’ve supported Huddle’s co-founders, Dom and Sarah, since the beginning of their journey in 2022. I’ve helped them shape their vision & strategy; define & develop their product; figure out implementation; and then monitor, evaluate and learn as we go.

Huddle is building a structured pedagogy programme for South African high schools, built on learning science principles. It aims to improve the quality of the classroom experience for learners, whilst developing teachers’ subject knowledge, pedagogical ability and classroom management skills.

It’s aligned to CAPS and covers 5 key subjects (English FAL, Maths, Natural Science, History & Geography).

The package includes termly, planning; assessments, individual video lessons and aligned workbooks for learners.

Teachers use the resources to support and scaffold their teaching, whilst the HuddleUp training programme explains the ‘why’ behind the lesson design approach, and supports teachers to learn from the exemplar lessons (for example, by training on the ‘Cold call’ or ‘Turn & talk’ techniques).

Some things I’ve supported with:

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Aldridge Education (UK)

I’ve supported Jane, Aldridge’s CEO, since 2022. Aldridge is a network of ten educational institutions in the UK (six academies, two UTCs, one studio school and an adult learning centre).

My main piece of work over this time has been the development, and implementation, of the ‘Aldridge Playbook’ a codification of the network’s approach to school improvement in order to increase understanding and alignment across the organisation.

Underpinning the Playbook are two core ideas: firstly, that by naming the things that are most important the Playbook acts as a ‘framework for focus’. It explicitly states, and describes in detail (with examples), the four things that the network believes are the most important levers for improving instructional quality. These things are then privileged in time, energy and thinking.

The four levers:

• Student culture
• Data-driven instruction
• Curriculum
• Professional development & coaching

The second core idea, is that having a ‘single shared reference point’ for key concepts is essential for evolving a meaningful shared language across multiple institutions and hundreds of professionals. It’s an explicit attempt to avoid ‘lethal mutations’ (Dylan William, 2011), whereby the active ingredients of an idea or approach are lost in the implementation.

The development and implementation of the Playbook has been deliberately slow- creating chapters each year in line with schools’ capacity to digest and implement.

As part of this work, I work alongside the central team and school principals to create each section of the Playbook- norming on the language, testing and refining it in certain schools, before rolling out across then wider network.

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ILI (South Africa)

Between 2016-2022 I supported the creation of the Instructional Leadership Institute, a Principal training programme in South Africa.

Now in its fifth cohort, ILI trains, coaches and mentors school leaders on instructional practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning in their schools.

Modelled on the Relay Leverage Leadership Institute in the US (and created in partnership with Relay), ILI has trained hundreds of school leaders to improve the quality of their leadership of teaching & learning.

The 18-month ILI programme develops the skills of identifying and modeling great teaching practice; implementing teacher coaching; leading ‘practice-based’ professional development sessions; and creating school improvement plans that drive a change in teaching practice.

I supported the design of the programme from its inception, through the first three cohorts, coaching schools leaders from low and no-fee schools across South Africa (including leaders from SPARK, Nova Pioneer, Apex and Common Good schools).

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Ark Teacher Training (UK)

Ark Teacher Training (ATT) is a highly respected teacher training programme in the UK. It has only ever been rated as ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted (the UKs school inspectorate) since its first cohort of trainees in 2012.

I joined Ark Teacher Training in 2013 at the end of its first year until I was seconded to Ark EPG, in 2017, to support the Public Schools Partnership project in South Africa.

Designed from first principles, ATT pioneered the use of three especially important, and impactful, features of teacher training.

Firstly, it was one of the first non-university based teacher training programmes. Trainees were, and still are, school-based; meaning that 80% of their training was spent in school, learning by doing, whilst 20% of time (one day a week) was out of school in training sessions (not lectures- see below). This is a similar model to Teach First & Teach for America

Secondly, we prioritised ‘deliberate practice’ in our training sessions. This meant that our training sessions were built around a single, highly concrete, observable, teaching technique that our trainees stood up and practiced each week (many of the techniques were taken directly from Doug Lemov’s epic Teach Like a Champion).

At least half of our weekly training time was spent in practice mode: teachers scripting out a section of an upcoming lesson, standing up to practice, getting feedback on that practice from a partner, then re-doing. This meant we covered a LOT less theory than other courses, but replaced it with concrete skills that teachers could instantly use in the classroom.

Thirdly, we ensured that every trainee received weekly instructional coaching based on a single action step. Each week the trainee would receive a lesson observation and then receive their single action step via a 6-step feedback model. (This has since been updated to a slightly neater 3-step ‘See it, Name it, Do it’ model).

The logic here was that rather than using the feedback time to provide a shopping list of things that the trainee had inevitably not yet mastered, it was better to pick a single high leverage step (for example, the need to project your voice to the back of the classroom; or how best to sequence, and pace, a particular explanation), and use the time to show the trainee how to do it well by modeling (See it), have the trainee name the key features of doing it well (Name it), and then have the trainee practice it themselves, multiple times (Do it).

Ark Teacher Training has had a powerful impact on the initial teacher training sector, with a number of government reviews citing it’s efficacy, and instructional coaching and deliberate practice now a compulsory requirement for all early career teachers.