About The Answer in the Room

We want the blog to reflect the fact that at our heart we are a teaching and learning community and whatever TLR or management role we have, we are still teachers first and foremost. Some of the topics currently in focus in the blog relate to teaching and learning aspects of our School Improvement Plan such as Growth Mindset, oracy and the development of innovative digital practice, others map our development of a range of mechanisms and strategies to facilitate closer cross Trust collaboration and innovation.

Our Trust Lead Web Developer, Andy Taylor and Deputy Headteacher, Kate Wragg, who leads on digital technologies, at Whalley Range and across the Trust, reflected on the various options and devised a standard format for blog posts which would bring structure and coherence to contributors’ inputs.

The template is straightforward to use, title, description, content – what you did and why/how you came to be doing it, details of what you did, activities/sessions you ran, barriers you encountered and how you overcame them, where applicable. All posts include the name and photo of the contributor and the subject they teach, if they are a member of the teaching staff. We want the blog to reflect the fact that at our heart we are a teaching and learning community and whatever TLR or management role we have, we are still teachers first and foremost.

Our aims for the blog and standard format have been shared with staff in our three Trust schools and now we are in the business of encouraging staff to share their practice and ideas in print. Part of the challenge is getting staff, both teaching and support, to realise that what they have done and are doing is of value to others and worthy of sharing, another is encouraging them to just do it and not put it off or be too precious about getting it 100% perfect before submission, ‘it’s a blog post not a Man Booker submission’!

We are still experimenting with tags and organisation of the content but this will naturally evolve as we get into our stride. We are excited about launching the blog and hope that it will soon become a useful resource for all those working within our Trust and in education beyond. We hope sharing what we are doing may interest, help, motivate and inspire others…