The Post You Write Is The Thinking You Did Not Know You Had
Most teachers know more about their practice than they can say out loud. Writing it down in public is the fastest way to find out what you actually think, and the cheapest way to leave yourself a record you can return to.
There is a gap between doing a job well and being able to describe how you do it. Teachers and trainers live in that gap constantly. You make forty small decisions in a lesson, most of them by feel, and if someone asks afterwards why you changed the grouping halfway through you may find you have no answer beyond a shrug. The knowledge is real. It is simply held in a form that has never been asked to become language. Writing about your practice in public forces the translation. You sit down intending to describe a straightforward thing you did on Tuesday and discover, three paragraphs in, that you cannot actually explain the reasoning, which means the reasoning was thinner than you assumed.
That discovery is uncomfortable and it is the entire point. A post is a test you set yourself. It does not matter whether anyone reads it. The work happens in the composing, in the moment where you delete a confident sentence because you notice you cannot support it. Teachers who write regularly tend to report the same thing: they became better at explaining their choices to colleagues, to managers, to students, not because they learned new vocabulary but because they had already done the explaining once, alone, at a keyboard, with nobody watching and nothing at stake. The public part matters only in that it raises the standard slightly. You write a little more carefully when the thing might be read.
Continue reading