Primary teacher & leader. Dad & husband. Seeking clarity, calm & honest scholarship in education. Wanting space for teachers to deepen as thinkers in our craft.
North East, England
Joined July 2025
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1)
Too often we treat cognitive science as the ceiling of teaching. It isn’t.
It’s the foundation - the non-negotiable ground of memory, attention and load. Without it, everything else collapses. But it cannot end there.
2)
On that foundation we build a floor of substantive knowledge.
This is the secure base pupils walk on daily.
Upon it rises the pillar of agency & application - the means by which knowledge is used, tested & made purposeful.
1)
Perhaps the test of intellectual maturity in our field is the ability to compromise without feeling diminished.
In larger arenas, the fear of loss of status often outweighs the gain of shared understanding.
2)
In school corridors, teachers compromise daily - it’s called teaching.
But in bigger debates, compromise gets dressed up as weakness. We need to learn from the classroom: nuance isn’t capitulation, it’s craft.
Humanities so often miss out in CPD because compliance (safeguarding, SEND) and core subjects absorb the oxygen.
But when history, geography & RE are undernourished, pupils lose breadth, cultural capital and intellectual curiosity.
Narrow CPD = narrowing minds.
@TeacherTapp
Helping children distinguish reading for pleasure from reading for purpose matters. One nourishes identity & joy, the other secures knowledge & discernment. Teaching both frames ensures reading not performative drudgery, but a habit of mind that flexes between delight & inquiry.
Six week school breaks at age 8 was 3% of your life.
Six weeks at 40 is 0.3% of it.
Childhood summers felt endless because they were vast slices of our lived time.
Adulthood shrinks them not by days lost, but by proportion.
And it stinks.
Hmm.
"Censory smearing" is real.
Words like fascist/racist get thrown around too easily to close debate. But hyperbole doesn’t erase fact that some behaviours are reprehensible. Being humbled is sometimes necessary; dismissal of all critique as smear is a dodge for some...
Lots of us have had this done to us - @Adrian_Hilton gives us a phrase for it: censory smearing.
They try to shut you down by calling your whole moral being into question.
Use this to push back against the practice! 💪🏽 spectator.co.uk/article/the-…
Stuart Rowntree retweeted
And this one from Australia journals.sagepub.com/doi/ful…
I've read this before, I think.
The “moral panic” around men in early years says more about our culture than about children’s needs.
Media suspicion + lazy stereotypes turn care into “women’s work” and men into risks.
The real losers? Kids, starved of diverse role models.
This may be of interest sciendo.com/article/10.2478/…
Ownership & politics of legacy media matter. It's lazy, but easy.
A few billionaires shape coverage.
Demonising immigrants deflects anger from structural crises - housing, health, wages - onto scapegoats.
Look over here...not at us.
Stuart Rowntree retweeted
I think it’s even worse in early years. Male student teachers often have their motives questioned.
"That's not real teaching then is it?"
"Isn't that just crayons and that?"
"You just did it to work with women, I know your game!"
And these are family members and friends...
Nearly half of male primary teachers (45%) say they’ve received negative comments about their role - and 18% heard them as recently as this year. 👎
For your daily dose of data, download the @TeacherTapp app!
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We often justify “bleak” narratives in schools as toughening children for the real world.
But research suggests fear and deficit frames heighten anxiety and sap belonging, while hope tied to clear strategies is more protective.
Are we mistaking pessimism for preparation?
There’s something quietly mesmerising about these shots @stoneman_claire
The symmetry, the light, the sense of liminal space.
It feels like a metaphor for education itself: ordered yet transitional, austere yet full of possibility...
Or am I thinking too deeply?
Seating in primary classrooms is never neutral – it shapes attention, peer talk & identity.
Structured groupings can aid collaboration, while others argue cognitive load favours forward-facing rows @ProfDanielMuijs
@P_A_Kirschner
Which arrangement best balances in your context?
