More tips from Sonia Thompson
Video transcript
let’s dive straight into what’s your first tip you’ve got for us today the first tip i’m really passionate about and it’s be a teacher who reads and a reader who teaches read read for pleasure and read for progress that’s my first tip amazing tell us a bit about this i think i’m a really big advocate of teachers wanting to learn and understand more and i think reading is such a great way of doing that of course there’s podcasts and there’s blogs but i think diving into a really good book and i just think we’re in a golden age of edgy books um you know i think there’s something for everybody’s taste so i just think if you are a teacher who wants to improve their pedagogy their understanding subject knowledge if you want to go deep if you want to do a little bit of light reading i think there’s just something for everyone but i also think that if you are a teacher and just to enjoy books and ensure that your children love reading whether you’re primary or secondary so that’s my reading for pleasure b and i’m a really massive readable pleasure advocate well this is great so let’s um let’s talk about this reading for kind of professional development have you always been a reader and for for kind of teaching tips that come a little bit later in your career i think for me i’ve always been a reader i’ve always been someone who’s from being a child i’ve loved libraries i was a librarian um and i that was my job for a couple of years um and then i’ve been english lead so all of that just means that i’m very passionate about reading i think reading educational books has kind of been part of my leadership journey and i think everything every kind of pd that i’ve been involved in i’ve always wanted to to read behind the kind of headlines of everything and find out what is who’s saying what and why and i just think that gives you a level of confidence not not because somebody’s telling you exactly what you can do in your school i don’t think there’s ever any time that anybody pins that down but i think when you can read the arguments behind why people are saying we should be doing things i just think that that arms you as a teacher with either saying yes or actually i need to think about that a little bit more yeah what what are your reading practices if this is a deaf question so if you’re reading or reading a book are you a skinner are you from page one till the end are you taking notes what how are you digesting there’s the kind of key takeaways i am a page one to the end but i’ll i’m if i’m ready for pleasure i’ll read the end first you’re joking i do i know people hate that they hate that craig they hate when i say that but i do because i can’t wait i am i’m one of those people who just can’t i’ve got to find out what’s going to happen it’s like if i’m watching anything like you know a line of duty or anything like that i’ll watch that last episode i need to know what i know it’s terrible it’s terrible but i’ve got to do it i can’t wait um and i enjoy it more when i know what’s going to happen whether good or bad so i read the end but i am a post-it note person i i’ll post it no i don’t like to highlight books i know some people really highlight and write on books it depends on what i’m reading it for but usually i’m just a post-it note write on the post-it note type of person yeah and if you’ve got if you um kind of come across an education book and first how do you decide what to read is it recommendations what do you do you have a filter system how do you decide what gets you tied i am very much about recommendations i read you know if somebody’s suggested something um i do use twitter a lot so lots of recommendations come from twitter but also i um it’s you know got a great opportunity because we are a research school there’s lots of kind of background reading that we have to do so something if i’m running a particular program something will spark me and i’ll think gosh it’d be great to actually read a little bit more about that so it might be a paper it might be a blog it might be a book but i just think as teacher and and that makes me more confident particularly for my if i’m delivering that because i can i know the kind of story behind it so um lots of kind of things spark me to read yeah and let’s think about your staff now so if you read something interesting i guess two things really first how do you share the kind of key stuff with your colleagues so that it sticks and makes a difference and yeah how do you encourage teachers to read more because you get the classic thing like we don’t have time and so on yeah what are your responses to that we we have got a staff pd library um where we are constantly and we and we again we based that on teacher recommendations as well as those kind of leadership ones that we think would be good for staff to have and we are that that school that does the we’re sending something out and we’ll make time in a pd session to talk about it not spend ages on it but just to to flag up a couple of headlines if people have read something then we kind of say that’s the let’s talk about that let’s think about it a little bit more so i think as a school if you do what any you know when people talk about time time is we are it’s so time short in teaching it is that thing that if we could make the day longer um without making ourselves even more exhausted we would but um it is if we want it to to to work we’ve got to make time for stuff to read you know little chunks of time consistently throughout the year making that time for stuff to read yeah and when you say you send out the kind of headlines how do you do that song is that an email is that a newsletter is there a regular thing how does that work yeah because again being a researcher is great because we have monthly newsletters that we send out anyway so all of our staff get access to those um so again there’s a real range and we will review for those um research school newsletters but we also if we’ve got a pd coming up and we’ve got a little chunk of reading that we want stuff to read we’ll email that out um in good time though making sure that you know we’ve kind of planned out our pd sessions and making sure that we give staff time to do that and if they don’t we’ve got a little bit a little chunk of time in that pd session to have a read through um and work as a group just to summarize and make some you know pull out some key headlines as i said fantastic and final question just just on this one i’m still by the way trying to get over the family you read the ending of books the final question of this is and it’s a bit of an impossible question but what have been some of the big biggies the kind of the key books perhaps over the last 12 months or so that either have had a profound impact on you as a leader or perhaps your staff in terms of their practice just pick out a few few headlines for us i mean i have to talk about leveraged leadership um getting better faster because i am i’ve currently just finished my year-long leveraged leadership pd right and i’ve done by actually the author paul bambrick santoyo was my tutor and that has been oh it’s been i know it sounds really creepy but it’s been quite life-changing for me um because being part of that the the leverage leadership institute and the fellowship has been fantastic the book has really changed some of our practice in terms of coaching and the support and the way that we support our teachers it’s been really influential because we’re videoing some of our sessions and some of our practice routines and systems so i think that book has been really quite powerful for us um i don’t know if anybody knows but we’ve written a book as well um set matthews we’ve written an ethic of excellence ron berger’s book um and it’s been great because i’ve gone back to an ethic of excellence but what’s been really nice is that we’ve been able to link research to a lot of the practices that ron berger’s talked about so again a couple of my senior leaders have written chapters so it’s been great to have that book for staff to give that book to staff to really go through and we’ve we’re using it for pd as well um most recently um i’ve read i’m reading a book and i thought i had it here um the name’s gone out of my head but simplicitous has been fantastic um emma turner has really kind of captured primary and i think often we kind of forget the uniqueness of primary and i think that book has been has been really powerful in really capturing some key messages around what we should be thinking about as primary practitioners particularly when it comes to curriculum and the way that we um the uniqueness and what we need to really make sure that we don’t lose as part of that uniqueness of primary so yeah amazing some great recommendations