S1E21: Adam Boxer and Tom Sherrington on ‘bad trad and groovy prog’

Welcome to this special, shorter than usual episode of the Rethinking Education podcast featuring my recent conversation with two previous guests - Tom Sherrington and Adam Boxer. As with so many things these days, this episode came about because of a Twitter exchange I was involved in, in which Adam wrote: “as you know, I accept that there are many "prog" methods that can be excellent. the discussion though is about how easy it is to implement those, and whilst I have seen trad done bad, that's the vanishing minority of trad lessons that I've seen (and I've seen quite a few now). compare that to prog ones, there's a vanishing minority of ones that I've seen where I've thought "yeah that was ace.” This made me think of a blog that Tom Sherrington once wrote, entitled ‘The groovy prog isn’t the issue; it’s the bad trad”, in which he observes that in the majority of lessons where he has seen a teacher struggling, it’s not because they’re doing progressive stuff that’s ineffective, but because they’re finding it difficult to do the trad stuff - explaining and questioning and providing feedback and whatnot - well. Which isn’t quite the opposite of what Adam said, but it struck me that at the very least, there’s a conversation to be had here to explore this further. I responded “I’d love to have you and Tom on the podcast sometime to see if we can get to the bottom of this”. To my delight - and slightly to my surprise - they both agreed to take time out of their busy schedules to humour me, and well, here we are. LINKS: The Rethinking Education podcast on iTunes - please give us a 5 star review and leave a comment! - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rethinking-education/id1546512828 Rethinking Education Campfire Conversations (video playlist): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ6mCUmebHJNC-qrWX9gMBCQJtHxoGNh2 Tom’s blog - ‘The groovy prog isn’t the issue: it’s the bad trad’ https://teacherhead.com/2019/11/25/the-groovy-prog-isnt-the-issue-its-the-bad-trad/ The Rethinking Education podcast is hosted and produced by Dr James Mannion. You can contact him at rethinking-ed.org/contact, or via @RethinkingJames on Twitter. You can join the Rethinking Education Mighty Network here: rethinking-education.mn.co