Why I Called It Redrafted

The Question

After more than ten years in teaching, I have never taught what I would describe as the perfect lesson. I’ve taught good ones, and lessons I was genuinely proud of, but I have never walked out of a classroom thinking there was nothing left to improve. For a long time, I saw that unfinished feeling as a weakness: a sign that something could have been done better.

I remember arriving at an interview at a familiar school, confident that I had the teaching element firmly in hand. I had been given the class profile, information about the pupils and an overview of where they were in their learning of science. My preparation felt sound, with a clear plan A and resources to support it.

It soon became apparent that the pupils did not know what I had anticipated. My carefully constructed lesson was no longer enough. I needed a plan B, then a plan C, and potentially several more beyond that. Standing at the front of that room, I realised I had planned for the lesson I expected to teach, rather than for the learning that might actually take place.

That lesson changed how I plan. A well sequenced set of activities and some lovely resources are a start, but they aren’t enough on their own. I now think much harder about the misconceptions pupils might bring, where different pupils might be starting from and what I’ll do when their understanding isn’t what I expected. The plan gives me a direction. It shouldn’t stop me responding to what is actually happening in front of me.

When I sat down to name this blog, the question I kept coming back to was simple: what if that unfinished feeling is not a weakness at all? What if it is the whole point?

The Thinking

Redrafted comes from a simple belief: no lesson, idea or teacher is ever the final version.

Writers understand this instinctively. My wife, who has a degree in creative writing, grasped this far quicker than I did. Nobody expects a first draft to be the finished article. You get your ideas down, step back, read them again and make them better. Then you do it all over again. To a writer, a redraft doesn’t mean the first attempt failed. It’s simply how good work gets made.

Teaching works the same way, but we rarely talk about it like that. We plan, we teach, the bell goes and we move straight on to the next class. Yet every time I teach a topic again, I know more than I did the last time: where pupils get stuck, which explanation lands and which question really opens up their thinking.

Dylan Wiliam puts it better than I can: every teacher needs to improve, “not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.” That idea has stayed with me throughout my career, and even more so since moving into leadership and coaching. The teachers I’ve learned the most from are not the ones who seem to have all the answers. They are the ones who are still curious, still tweaking and still willing to say, “I tried that, it didn’t work, so here’s what I’m doing now.”

My reading has pushed me in the same direction. Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, and Tom Sherrington’s work with Oliver Caviglioli bringing that evidence into everyday classroom practice, gave me a language for what effective teaching looks like. But none of it arrives as a finished script. Every principle has to be tried in a real room with a real class, adapted, reflected on and tried again. The research helps me start from a much better place, but I still have to do the redrafting myself.

That is what teaching and learning mean to me. Learning is rarely a straight line, for pupils or for teachers. It’s a series of drafts, each one a little closer to what we meant.

This is also how every post on Redrafted works. Each one starts with The Question that got me thinking, shares The Thinking behind it, offers The Redraft I’d try and ends with The Reflection on what I’m still unsure about. Each week I’ll share an idea, a strategy or a reflection from the classroom, along with the thinking behind it and what I’d do differently next time. I’ll always name the research I draw on and keep a clear line between evidence and opinion.

The Redraft

So what does redrafting look like in practice? Here is the habit at the heart of this blog, and one I’d encourage you to try this week. After a lesson that matters to you, take two minutes and answer three questions:

Two minutes really is enough. If it turns into an hour of reflective writing, it won’t survive a busy half term (trust me!). The point is to catch the thought while it’s fresh, before the next class walks in and it’s gone.

Write your answers somewhere you’ll see them again: on the slides, in the planning document or on a sticky note at the front of your planner. The next time you teach that lesson, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re starting from version two.

Sometimes the need for a redraft is far less obvious than a lesson unravelling at an interview. I remember a lesson with my own class where I wanted to push the boundaries of my usual practice. I designed a carousel activity in which pupils gathered research, discussed their findings and shared their ideas with others. On the surface, it looked like an excellent lesson: pupils were engaged, conversations were taking place and the classroom had an energy any teacher would welcome.

Yet when I returned to my learning objectives afterwards, I realised the intended learning had not been achieved as successfully as I had hoped. Pupils had enjoyed the experience, and that mattered, but had the activities genuinely moved their understanding of science forward? I’m not sure they had. A buzzing classroom and a classroom where pupils are learning can look very similar from the doorway, and I had confused the two.

Asked straight after my carousel lesson, those questions would have given me a simple answer. What worked was the energy and the discussion: pupils were talking about science. What didn’t work was that I had no idea whether they had actually learned it. The redraft would have been to keep the carousel, but build in a quick check on the key content before anyone moved on. Nothing dramatic, and I wouldn’t throw the lesson away. One honest change would have made it a much better lesson.

The Reflection

I’ll be honest: writing this feels a little exposing. It’s much easier to share polished ideas than half-finished ones, and there’s a voice in my head asking who I am to be writing about teaching at all. I don’t have all the answers, and I’m not going to pretend that I do.

But that’s exactly why I wanted this space: somewhere for teachers who like to think about their practice as much as they plan it. I want to think out loud, rethink ideas openly and learn from other educators along the way. Some of what I write will be wrong, or at least not quite right yet. I’d rather redraft it in public than never start. A few times a year, I’ll revisit something I’ve completely changed my mind about, because that’s part of the process too.

So this is my first draft, and I hope you’ll help me improve it.

What’s one lesson, idea or habit in your own teaching that you’ve redrafted over the years, and what changed?

Every lesson is a draft. Share what you’d redraft in the comments.