Six classroom principles to improve your management practice

I spent 25 years as a management writer and consultant until I set out on a new challenge a couple of years ago: learning to teach. Having spent a quarter of a century looking at how leaders strive to achieve measurable results amidst unpredictability, how they keep teams on-task while communicating new information – now I was setting out to inspire lively teenagers to grasp the nuances of the Glorious Revolution instead.

When learning to teach, you soon have to immerse yourself in Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. This seminal 2012 text is now the Bible for effective teaching. Though focusing on learning, it covers everything from successful motivating to effective role-modelling – and, while teaching and management are quite different disciplines, I think it contains nuggets of wisdom that even the most experienced manager could find useful. On World Teachers’ Day, I thought it would be interesting to share a few of them…