Ed Blog / Why Write At All

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.

There is a second reason, quieter and slower to arrive. A written record is a form of memory that does not decay in the way ordinary memory does. Two years from now you will have a vague sense that you once tried something with a difficult group and that it went reasonably well, and you will have no idea what you actually did. If you wrote it down, you do. Not the sanitised version your memory would have built by then, but the real one, with the hesitation still in it and the bit where you nearly abandoned the whole thing. That record is worth more to you than to anybody else, and it costs an hour.

The contribution to other people is modest, and it is best to be honest about the size of it. You are not going to reform anything. What you can do is describe, accurately, something you tried, in enough detail that a person in a comparable position can decide whether it is worth their own attempt. That is a small service and it is genuinely useful, because most of what circulates about teaching is either abstract principle or polished success, and very little of it is a plain account of one person's Tuesday. The plain account is the rare thing.

Getting started is mostly a matter of lowering the bar until you can step over it. The instinct is to wait until you have something significant to say. You will wait a long time. Write about the small adjustment, the resource that half worked, the question you asked that landed differently than expected. Significance is not something you decide in advance; it is something a reader occasionally supplies, and often does not, and that is fine. The writing was still worth doing.

What follows in this issue is not a method. It is a set of disciplines, mostly about restraint: how to write about your teaching without writing about the people in the room, how to resist the pull toward the flattering version, and what it means to write as a professional in a space where anything you publish stays findable. Obligations and institutional policies exist in this area, they differ between employers and jurisdictions, and they are worth checking before you publish rather than after.