Mark Frohnsdorff

Why activity labels hide thinking This series began with a lesson that should have worked. The plan was careful. The activity was familiar. The learning outcome was clear. Within minutes, however, the task stalled. Learners hesitated. Clarifications multiplied. What was meant to be learner-led quietly became teacher-dependent. At first, I did what most experienced teachers do: I adjusted in the moment and moved on. But the question stayed with me. Not because the lesson failed; lessons fail all the time, but because it failed despite making sense on paper. That question became the starting point for this series. In March’s MET edition,...

Vocabulary that learners seem to know can suddenly stop working; difficulty often comes from narrowing meaning rather than adding complexity. Is familiar vocabulary as familiar as we think? Most teachers recognise the moment. You are halfway through a lesson, working on something new, when a familiar word appears and the reaction is almost automatic: they should know this. That reaction is not unreasonable. Learners recognise the word. Some can offer a definition. Others have encountered it repeatedly across subjects. On the surface, there is little to suggest a problem. The difficulty is that this sense of familiarity can mask a more fragile...

Why lessons that look good on paper often collapse in practice; how sequencing, not student ability, is usually the missing piece. The familiar classroom moment Have you ever planned a task that you hoped would give learners more agency, only to find five minutes in that it had become heavily teacher dependent? You intervene once, then again. A clarification here, a prompt there. Before long, you are doing most of the thinking yourself. The task hasn’t ‘failed’ exactly, but it isn’t doing the learning work you expected either. Whatever autonomy you had hoped for has quietly collapsed. Most teachers will recognise this...