You’ve probably heard this week that the CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, has said he will charge all X users “a small monthly payment”, he claims is needed to combat “vast armies of bots”. This business-model-killing ploy may never come to pass, remember “block is going to be deleted as a feature“? But this latest desperate attempt to shore up a failing company (Musk himself has admitted Twitter has lost around 50% of its ad revenue since he took over, which itself was over 90% of the company’s revenue), might just be the nail in its coffin. Here’s why I hope it is. And even if it’s not, here’s why you should leave and build your following somewhere else (possibly Meta’s Threads?) for your own safety and wellbeing, and before X collapses completely.

The issues

Through our presence on the platform, we are supporting the company and thus tacitly, the values it represents, and those of its owner. Musk has repeatedly shown himself to be an alt-right Trump and Putin supporter, even attending the World Cup Final with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the Superbowl with the right-wing media-owning Murdoch family. Musk has allowed literal Nazis back onto Twitter including Andrew Anglin, editor of white-supremacist website The Daily Stormer. Anglin had been banned from Twitter back in 2017 after calling for death to “enemies of the white race” at the rally where an anti-Nazi protestor was murdered by a self-confessed neo-Nazi. Meanwhile, Musk was quick to ban five left-wing journalists including respected Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, for daring to draw attention to his frequent private jet travels.

Earlier this month, Musk boosted the hashtag #BanTheADL, a campaign against the internationally respected charity fighting antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League. In a series of tweets such as this one, Musk amplified attacks on not just the ADL but on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), organisations that exist to fight discrimination and inequality. He has threatened a defamation lawsuit against the ADL and bizarrely blamed them for X’s fall in advertising revenue. Recently Musk has given a platform to America’s chief insurrection supporter and election-denier, alt-right darling Tucker Carlson, after Carlson was fired by Fox for lying about the 2020 election (and being chosen as the fall guy). Carlson and others’ constant lying about the 2020 result contributed to the January 6th 2021 violent attack on the Capitol which resulted in seven deaths, and Carlson continues to lie, in his X-hosted content, about the terrible events of January 6th.

Musk has also gone after the LGBTQ+ community, posting without evidence that the horrific hammer attack on the husband of then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi might have been a “gay lovers’ quarrel”, and in this single tweet both mocked trans people and boosted anti-scientific medical disinformation:

My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci

Elon Musk on Twitter, 12 Dec 2022

He has spoken repeatedly about the “woke mind virus“, a common trope in the alt-right community that suggests that “being woke” is a socially contagious disease, rather than just, as Kathy Burke suggested, “not being racist, not being homophobic and just calling out bad things”.

In April 2023 Twitter removed a section of T&Cs that specifically protected trans people from “targeted misgendering or deadnaming”, leaving it as the only major platform without specific transphobic abuse protections. And Musk’s release of former Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth’s internal communications, in a document dump Musk named “The Twitter Files”, followed up with deliberate targeted misinformation, has caused Roth to take his family into hiding with police protection, after a barrage of death threats and accusations of “grooming” from homophobic and antisemitic followers of Musk.

Roth was sacked along with almost the entire safety team. Musk has in total fired around 80% of Twitter’s workforce, most of them just before Christmas 2022. The layoffs disproportionately impacted women, Black employees, and employees aged 50 and older. Hard working people with families to feed were given little notice and the legal minimum severance pay (and some not even that). Musk also ordered people working at home to return to the office, a move which discriminates against disabled employees and those with caring responsibilities, not to mention adding an environmental cost. Indeed, Musk tweeted baseless criticism of one particular disabled employee with muscular dystrophy in a tweet exchange that makes for painful reading.

And let’s not forget the rise in misogynistic content, with Musk welcoming back to the platform misogynists-in-chief Donald Trump and Andrew Tate. Musk recently joined Tate and the roster of right-wing outlet GB News in rallying to the defence of Russell Brand who stands accused of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault, although Brand denies the allegations. Violent rhetoric against women has escalated since Musk took over Twitter, with misogynistic accounts rising 69%.

All social media platforms have a duty of care to their users. We must feel reasonably safe interacting on the platform, including from scams, inappropriate content, threats of violence and hate speech. Twitter has sacked almost everyone responsible for this service, causing a rise in all problematic content. And Musk’s decision to change “blue tick” verification to a paid service available to everyone has removed a key safety feature: the ability to detect impersonation, and this change has caused a spike in phishing scams on the platform.

Some changes appear deliberate, perhaps to increase engagement at the cost of safety, and some accidental amid rapidly changing priorities. December 2022 saw the removal of the safety feature known as #ThereIsHelp, which promotes suicide prevention hotlines. We saw above how the T&Cs now no longer protect trans people, and we know about the blue tick fiasco. But a recent BBC investigation goes further and depicts a company “on fire” and “no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation.”

Academics are leaving the platform, unable to talk meaningfully about the climate crisis, politics, race or gender without inviting a litany of abuse. And recent changes to the privacy policy might actually make you unsafe in the real world, as the company plans to collect “biometric and employment data”, yet is known to release sensitive personal data to authoritarian regimes.

This blog cannot begin to capture the many, many problematic actions taken by the X CEO before and after his purchase of Twitter, but Vanity Fair made an attempt to document Musk’s problematic behaviour back in April 2022. Musk is possibly the worst person to trust with our personal details, online safety and everyday thoughts, and his chaotic “management” of the social media platform makes us all unsafe every day.

The implications

When I use social media (SM) in a personal capacity, that’s my own decision and barely affects anyone else. However we sometimes operate SM accounts on behalf of organisations, and as such we are aligning that organisation, to some extent, with the values of the SM platform. We are driving traffic to the platform, and hence doing two things:

• Adding value to the platform: as users we are the product and our views are being re-sold to advertisers and thus we make money for the company to spend on further problematic activity.
• Driving users to the platform: a platform where we know they are now unsafe, in the absence of a working safety team and the presence of a vast army of white supremacists, transphobes and misogynists, which is unethical.

I don’t want any part in supporting this man’s alt-right agenda, and I don’t wish to be responsible for exposing users to the risk of hateful abuse. So for that reason, X, I’m out.

I’m on Threads, Mastodon and LinkedIn, but mostly active on Threads. I’m well aware that all platforms have their ethical questions, and Threads being a Meta (formerly Facebook) product might raise an eyebrow. I get that, but at least Meta has a working moderation team and is not openly aligning itself to enemy tyrants, attacking people with protected characteristics and deliberately amplifying hate. I hope you will join me on Threads, it’s nice over there. See you soon.

Update 2025: I’m on BlueSky now at @httcs.online

“… and off you go, you have 5 minutes.”

Within 10 seconds the whispers start. “What are we doing?”, “What page are we on?” “Are we copying down from the board”. “I can’t be bothered, want to play noughts and crosses?”

“Right, stop and listen, I’ve just told you about the impact of Robotics on employment, you need to list three industries and explain how they have changed because of robotics. All clear? Good.”

“Sir, do we use the textbooks?”

“No, just from memory and the stimulus on the board (indicates some pictures of robots in factories, agriculture etc.”

“Can we use the internet for research?”

“No, just the stimulus and your memory of what I just told you.”

“Can you tell us again, Sir?”

Sigh. “OK robots are used extensively in car manufacturing……”

This was me about five years ago, before I discovered Teach Like a Champion, and other sources of material about deliberate practice, defined here as…

‘Deliberate practice […] is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further’

Ericsson et al. 1993 quoted in “What is Deliberate Practice” by the Ambition Institute

Teaching a class is an unnatural activity, and novice teachers are often unaware of the highly-specialised skill needed to do it effectively. When I started I was supremely unaware of the importance of routines, cues and systems. I held a misconception that all failures to follow instruction were down to poor student choices: in effect I blamed the students for my lessons falling apart. I failed to recognise the importance of my practice in ensuring the correct choices were easier than the poor ones.

Specifically, in the lesson above, I had failed to do several things:

1. Ensure everyone is paying attention to the instructions (and throughout the explanation, keep looking and be seen looking and correct any inattention in the least invasive way possible)
2. Clearly articulate the means of participation, that they are to write in their books, using the stimulus on the board only, no internet.
3. Check for understanding of the task, perhaps by asking a student to report back what the task is, ensuring the class’s attention is on the conversation between me and the student speaking.
4. Signal the start of the task and remain looking, using non-directed correction and moving towards directed e.g. “That’s most of you working now, just 3 more to start… OK 1 left now, please get started… OK Robert can you get started please…. Great stuff, you have 5 minutes working in silence.”
5. Walk the room, checking for misconceptions and misunderstandings as they work.

I do all of the above now, and my transitions are far more effective, the students make more progress and the lessons are calmer and more purposeful.

How did this come about, my improved effectiveness as a teacher? CPD and self-study of deliberate practice techniques. I read blogs and books, and eventually stumbled onto Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) almost by accident, but by 2020 my school had started to promote the book among other sources for teachers to self-study, and by 2021 had incorporated parts of it into our usual staff CPD. Once a fortnight the training would be called “Deliberate Practice CPD” and we would discuss a TLAC technique and take it back to our departments. This training was positively received by most staff who recognised that “sweating the small stuff” usually paid off in the form of more productive lessons. The bulleted list above is from “Brighten Lines”, a TLAC technique described here in full by Lee Donaghy. It’s fair to say that this technique alone improved my practice so much that it was worth the cover price of the book on its own.

If you’re reading this thinking “all of that’s obvious, though, I do all of that anyway”, then you are suffering the “curse of knowledge”, which I talked about here, and described as the failure to see a domain as a novice does, and to thus understand their needs. There is a parallel here with driving: we can probably all learn to drive without an instructor, just by repeatedly practicing. We would probably crash a lot, but eventually we would get there. Likewise, teachers have traditionally discovered what works in various unstructured and accidental ways, but many experienced teachers forget how hard teaching was in their early days. A good professional development curriculum is therefore a good thing, and books, blogs and videos can be part of that.

Critics of TLAC I’ve read online recently have made some interesting assertions, some of which I want to address now…

SLANT IS OPPRESSIVE, EVEN FASCIST

The recent Twitter conversation around SLANT and the discussion between Tom Rogers and Phil Beadle was fascinating. Much has been said about this by more articulate people than me, and I don’t want to re-ignite the arguments. But what struck me most was this response from TLAC author Doug Lemov, clarifying what he actually believes, regarding the best way to direct students’ attention where it is needed. He explains that he re-named the technique formerly known as SLANT to “Habits of Attention”, and the acronym to STAR:

• Sit up to look interested and stay engaged.
• Track the speaker to show other people their ideas matter.
• Appreciate your classmates’ ideas by nodding, smiling, and so on when they speak.
• Rephrase the words of the person who spoke before you so they know you were listening.

What seemed to me, to be missing from the debate around SLANT was that “Track the speaker” meant track whoever is speaking, including the student contributing to the class discussion. Note also the following two bullet points which clarify the rather strange “Nod” direction in the previous version: the point of SLANT/STAR was always to encourage listeners, both teacher and student, to appreciate and value everyone’s contribution in the classroom. This is a far cry from the recent mischaracterisations of SLANT as a form of oppressive teacher control.

While we’re on SLANT, I note that “S” for “Sit up” does not say “Sit bolt upright” as Phil Beadle claims in the interview above, nor is that implied anywhere in TLAC or in any CPD I have attended. I simply get “eyes on me” and deal with any students turning away as non-invasively as possible, but I’ve seen no evidence to support schools that use TLAC insisting on “bolt upright” posture. Indeed, here is Doug Lemov clarifying just that in his recent blog:

An additional challenge can be that managing attention behaviors can prove successful enough that it can lead to a spread in managing behaviors less clearly tied to attention: hands folded on the desk; back flat against the chair, and so forth. To be clear, these behaviors are not something I’ve discussed in Teach Like a Champion (my emphasis), but I have certainly seen classrooms where they are reinforced in a counterproductive way and sometimes in the belief that this book endorses them.  Reminding students who are at risk of becoming distracted—or who are sending unsupportive messages to peers—to Track or SLANT can be useful; telling students to keep their feet flat on the floor or interrupting them when they are productively engaged in a discussion to tell them to fold their hands on the desk is not. What if they want to take notes?

TRACKING IN CLASSROOMS: WHAT I REALLY THINK (AND WROTE) – Doug Lemov 4th
May 2023

Lemov could hardly have made it more clear that “bolt upright” is not suggested by any of the TLAC techniques.

“Habits of Attention” (the technique formerly known as SLANT/STAR), “Brightening Lines” and the other 47 techniques are a goldmine of ideas for improving classroom practice, and if implemented thoughtfully can help transform a classroom from a disorganised place of unrest and confusion to a thoughtful community of learning.

“Habits of Attention” signal that our words (of both teacher and student) are important because they convey our ideas, and everyone’s ideas are worthy of our attention.

“Brighten Lines” ensures that everyone understands what is expected of them, reduces confusion and increases the opportunities for learning and making good progress.

TLAC is “all or nothing”, you’re not doing TLAC if you do SLANT without the N, for example.

This is an odd criticism. TLAC is described on the publisher’s website thus: “Teach Like a Champion provides educators with a set of techniques, a shared vocabulary, and a framework for practice”. Nowhere does the author suggest that it’s “all or nothing”. In that same Lemov blog mentioned above, he says this:

In this acronym [STAR] you can see I’ve added details about purpose. Nodding is included in the “appreciate” step to emphasize the importance of appreciating your classmates. That said, you might replace the “Appreciate” A with an A called “Active listening” (to help you focus and show that you value your classmates). “Sit up” includes a purpose as well, so you look interested and engaged. You’ll also notice that I’ve brought in an idea from the Habits of Discussion technique, “rephrasing,” but you could drop it if you wanted, perhaps replacing it with something else. Again, I am describing options here because the behaviors described in any acronym (and the expectations) should be carefully thought through at the school or classroom level. My version of STAR may be helpful, but the adaptations you make to it will make it even better.

TRACKING IN CLASSROOMS: WHAT I REALLY THINK (AND WROTE) – Doug Lemov 4th
May 2023

So from the author’s pen: TLAC is a helpful guide to what works elsewhere, to be implemented and adapted by thoughtful, experienced practitioners and novices with expert guidance in their own settings. The “TLAC is all or nothing” criticism is just a “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

TRACK THE SPEAKER AND COLD CALLING ARE CHALLENGING FOR VULNERABLE STUDENTS

I have taught a great number of vulnerable students in my time. Oliver (not his real name) was in my form a few years ago. Oliver was autistic and found eye-contact hard, so I didn’t insist on it, just that he wasn’t paying attention to anything else such as a book or computer. He also found answering in class challenging, and responding well to cold-calling near-impossible, so I worked with him on how to make a reasonable adjustment. I would go up to him discreetly during a task and say “if I ask a question about this topic in 2 minutes can you get an answer ready?” If he was willing then I would ask and he would answer, and over time his confidence grew. Oliver’s gratitude-filled, handmade good luck card to me when I left that school remains one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.

Daniel has ADHD and shouts out or makes other involuntary noises. I am understanding about this, so if I ask a “hands-up” question and he shouts out without putting his hand up, or I cold-call someone else and he answers, or simply interrupts someone else with an outburst, I’ll accept this in good grace, and the class naturally understands that I’m making a reasonable adjustment for Daniel. I use TLAC to maximise learning, but crucially, I’m not a monster!

GOOD TEACHERS ALREADY DO EVERYTHING IN TLAC

Great! I’m glad for you, but if this is your position then please recognise you got here through a long and painful journey of learning what works and what doesn’t. You will have taken a few steps back at times, and eventually arrived at a practice that works well for you. Not everyone is there yet, so I welcome the opportunity that TLAC presents to novice and improving teachers: the chance to try techniques that many others have had great success with, well-explained with helped videos and lots of valuable background including the research that is behind it.

A related claim that pops up often, including recently on Twitter, is that TLAC is claiming “credit for inventing pedagogy”. This is also a strawman, as Lemov points out that TLAC is a collection of good practice, not brand new ideas. Here’s Lemov in his own words again…

How do you answer staff who claim TLaC is just common sense? “I know how to pass out books!” is a quote I have heard.

The comment doesn’t bother me.  Honestly, if it is “common sense” to a lot of teachers that the ideas in the book are effective and can help you make your classroom work, then I am happy.  If I have merely collected a lot of things that teachers know work and if teachers have a place to go where they can find lots those solutions, well I’m really happy with that.  If you know some of the ideas already, great.  Other people may not.  There may be others that can help you.  Or studying what you already do a bit of could help you be even sharper. I guess for some people “useful” is faint praise.  They want to be brilliant or innovative or original.  In the end I am more interested in what’s effective than what’s new or “innovative” or makes me look like I thought all this stuff up.  I didn’t. that’s what makes it valuable.   

Stephen Tierney interviewing Doug Lemov in his Leading Learner blog, 2016.

COLD-CALLING IS JUST “NO HANDS UP QUESTIONING”, WHY THE AWKWARD NAME?

Perhaps you do the techniques but hate the acronyms and “jargon-y” names for the techniques? Teaching practice is a domain of specialist knowledge just like the domains we teach (Computing in my case, or maths, or history). We usually call it pedagogy, but whatever you call it: learning to teach, discussing what works and what doesn’t work; communicating this knowledge to others is difficult without shared names for things.

“Cold-calling” is a memorable, 3-syllable name for a specific technique described in TLAC. At it’s heart is asking a question and then choosing students to respond by name, rather than asking for raised hands and asking someone who has their hand up. (The reason is ratio, read more here, but I don’t have time to discuss that today.)

TLAC techniques all have short, memorable names such that practitioners can discuss techniques easily and build CPD around them, and everyone knows what is being discussed, and can look in the book or online for further information by searching the term. If you don’t like the term, use another one. If you must (as one critic recently said on Twitter) you can call it “asking kids who haven’t got their hand up” if that is more palatable to you. But I leave as an exercise for the reader, which phrase is clearer, easier to communicate, and more memorable.

Complex concepts in every domain of knowledge must be named. Jargon is just another word for technical terminology, and teaching is already rife with jargon, which is not inherently a bad thing, it speeds up conversations between experts. Here are some teaching jargon phrases off the top of my head: working memory, restorative justice, fixed-term exclusion, MFL, DBS, walking-talking mock, SpLD, Safeguarding, inquiry learning, time-out pass, reduced timetable, think-pair-share…

If you don’t like the terms, don’t use them, but don’t expect others to immediately know what you mean if you’re using an imprecise phrase instead of a well-established “jargon” phrase.

Finally, on the name of the book… I myself wrote a book recently, on teaching computing, you may have heard of it, I called it “How to Teach Computer Science“. It wasn’t always going to be called that, working titles were “Computer Science Teaching Handbook” and “Computer Science Teaching: The Fine Manual” (because I wanted to tell people to RTFM). I settled on HTTCS after a conversation with my copy-editor, who liked the idea of a “How To..” title. Is it a bit arrogant? Definitely, but I would like to sell a few copies, so a snappy, positive title is a good idea. One of the oddest criticisms of TLAC I hear is the “title is arrogant” or similar, and “Lemov just has a product to sell”. Yes, it’s designed to sell. As an author I’d like to get paid for my work, I’m sure Lemov feels the same. If you disagree with TLAC, why not broaden the debate with a book of your own, rather than arguing against the author’s right to get paid for his work?

TLAC helped me become a better teacher. It wasn’t the only way this could have happened, but I’m glad TLAC exists because without it I might not have made as much progress quite as quickly. The techniques help me achieve and maintain a warm, purposeful atmosphere and maximise attention and thought on that which is important: the learning. But as Lemov didn’t quite say (but probably would): you do you.

120 years ago, a stage illusionist decided to take a famous scientist down a peg or two, and in the process became arguably the first white-hat hacker. This story is taken from my books How to Teach Computer Science (for computing teachers) and How to Learn Computer Science (for computing students) available here.

Royal Institution Lecture Theatre, London, June 1903

An expectant audience watches the physicist John Ambrose Fleming tinkering with arcane apparatus. They are waiting for a demonstration of long-range wireless messaging developed by Fleming’s employer, Guglielmo Marconi (now recognised as the inventor of radio). Marconi is 300 miles away, preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall. Yet, a few minutes before the official demonstration begins, the apparatus starts tapping out a message. And it’s
clearly not from Marconi.

RATS RATS RATS RATS…

…types the Morse code printer, set up to decode the messages arriving from Cornwall. And then, even worse, the printer begins to tap out a rude rhyme about Marconi:

THERE WAS A YOUNG FELLOW OF ITALY, WHO DIDDLED THE PUBLIC QUITE PRETTILY…

The magician Nevil Maskelyne has hacked the demonstration; he has been
hired as a spy by the Eastern Telegraph Company, a wired telegraph provider that fears the Marconi Company will push it out of business. “I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages”, Marconi had boasted just a few months earlier, and Maskelyne’s job today is to disprove that claim.

Eastern had no trouble recruiting Maskelyne for the hack. The magician had previously used Morse code in “mind-reading” magic tricks to communicate with a stooge. After experimenting with wireless technology, Maskelyne had hoped to make further use of it, but he was frustrated by Marconi’s broad patents.

Marconi doesn’t respond to the hack, but a furious Fleming writes a letter to The Times, asking for assistance in finding the culprit. Maskelyne happily identifies himself, saying his prank was for the good of the public, since it revealed holes in the “secure” transmission. Maskelyne has arguably become the first “white hat” hacker in history.

HTTCS and htLEARNcs

My two books are available from the publisher John Catt Ed and from Amazon, see here for the links. Each chapter covers a typical GCSE Computer Science topic with stories (like the above), pedagogy, research and teaching and learning ideas. I am humbled to have worked on the LEARN book with Craig’n’Dave who wrote this lovely tribute in the foreword:

We are delighted to have helped with this fascinating book because Alan shares our passion for computer science and striving for the very best from our students. This shines brightly through an easily digestible exploration of the history of the subject and some of its trailblazers. Each chapter concisely describing the background to a topic you will be studying and how things came to be. In addition, the book provides thought provoking questions for you to consider, or even to challenge your teacher! It signposts excellent resources and the very best advice to help you achieve highly in the subject.

From the Foreword to htLEARNcs, written by Craig Sargent and Dave Hillyard, aka Craig’n’Dave.

Speak to me about bulk discounts for trusts, classes and more! Or just show your appreciation for this blog, it’s all good…