>A teacher who makes their children feel bad will struggle to teach them anything. But the job of a teacher is to push students beyond what they think they can do. As Deborah Ball and Francesca Forzani have argued, to teach effectively we may have to suppress our instinctive reactions, and our preferences. This may mean teaching books we dislike, welcoming parents we find tricky – and probing where students are uncertain (2009, p.499). The goal was retrieval: trainees would have done better if they had pushed harder for retrieval.

This is hard. But pushing students to do things they may not feel ready or able to do unlocks the door to what Colin Burrow recently described as the main pleasure of teaching: “gently persuading someone else to recognise in themselves what you can see in them.” (https://improvingteaching.co.uk/2023/04/23/questioning-for-retrieval-five-mistakes-to-avoid/)