Ed Blog / The Public Part

Describing Your Practice Versus Criticising Your Workplace

The line is not always obvious from the inside, and it is worth locating deliberately.

Practice writing is about what you did. Workplace commentary is about the institution around you: its decisions, its leadership, its constraints, its colleagues. The two blur easily because your practice happens inside those constraints and describing it honestly sometimes requires mentioning them. There is a difference, though, between saying that timetabling limited the sequence to four weeks and writing a post whose real subject is what you think of the people who set the timetable.

A workable habit is to keep constraints factual and unattributed. Name the limit, not the decision-maker or the argument behind it. This keeps the post useful, since a reader needs to know the constraint to judge transferability, without turning it into a grievance in public. If a draft has drifted so that the constraint has become the subject, that is a signal: you may have a legitimate concern, and a public post about your own teaching is not where it belongs.

Never write about a colleague in an identifiable way. In most workplaces the pool of possible referents is small and colleagues recognise themselves easily, and a person written about in public without a say has no proportionate reply available. The same restraint that governs writing about students applies here, for the same reason. If you would not show the passage to the colleague, it does not go out.