Teach17

Jamie Thom’s Slow Teaching challenges the idea that great teaching means constantly doing more, moving faster and filling every minute.
Instead, it encourages teachers to become calmer, more deliberate and more selective about where they put their time and energy.
Here are 17 practical ideas inspired by the book that you can use in your classroom straight away.

1. Plan backwards from what pupils should understand in a few weeks’ time, rather than treating every lesson as a separate event.
2. Remove activities that create busyness but little learning, and give more time to the ideas pupils genuinely need to understand.
3. Start lessons by retrieving important previous knowledge so new learning has something secure to build upon.
4. Slow down difficult explanations and pause after important points to give pupils time to process what they have heard.
5. After asking a challenging question, resist filling the silence and give pupils several seconds to think properly.
6. Ask fewer but better questions, using follow-ups such as “Why?”, “How do you know?” and “Can you develop that?”
7. Allow genuine periods of silence for reading, thinking and writing rather than feeling that the teacher must constantly be talking.
8. When behaviour slips, respond calmly and deliberately rather than allowing frustration to determine your response.
9. Invest in relationships before you need them by noticing pupils, learning about them and taking an interest in their progress.
10. Build predictable classroom routines so less time and energy are wasted on equipment, transitions and repeated instructions.
11. Revisit important ideas over weeks and months because understanding something today does not mean pupils will remember it later.
12. Mix older knowledge into current learning so pupils have to retrieve, connect and apply ideas rather than forgetting each topic once it is finished.
13. Spend more time checking whether pupils have really understood before moving on simply because the lesson plan says you should.
14. Give less feedback but make the feedback you do give precise enough for pupils to know exactly what they need to improve.
15. Give pupils time in lessons to act on feedback by correcting, redrafting or improving their work.
16. Improve your teaching slowly by choosing one habit to work on, practising it repeatedly and reflecting on whether it is making a difference.
17. Before adding another activity, resource or teaching strategy, ask: “Will this improve learning enough to justify the time and energy it will cost?”

The central message of Slow Teaching is not that teachers should simply teach more slowly; it is that better teaching often comes from making calmer, more thoughtful and more deliberate decisions.

Buy Slow Teaching by Jamie Thom on Amazon UK