Professional development, coaching, and consultancy

The Compass

  • What Schools Get Wrong About Digital Strategy And How To Put It Right

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Photo by Jakub Zerdzicki

    Too often, schools treat technology and teaching as parallel tracks. But digital strategy isn’t about devices, it’s about designing the conditions in which great teaching thrives.

    Earlier this week, I ran a webinar titled Beyond the Device: Building a Digital Strategy That Puts Learning First. This got me thinking about how schools still approach technology: often with great enthusiasm, but not always with great coherence.

    We can talk a lot about devices, platforms, and systems but less about purpose. And purpose, I’m increasingly convinced, is where the real work begins.

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  • From Dots to Thinking: How Knowledge Shapes Critical Thought

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Photo by Gerbert Voortman

    Leading a recent CPD session on retrieval practice, I found myself comparing learning to a dot-to-dot puzzle. With only a handful of dots, the picture is faint and open to guesswork. Add more, and the image begins to sharpen. The metaphor resonated among those present, perhaps because it captured a reality we can overlook: students can’t think critically about ideas they don’t yet understand.

    The way we teach can be described as a three-part process: gathering the dots, revealing the picture, and challenging the picture. Each stage builds the foundation for the next.

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  • Thinking Buddy: Can AI Can Help Us Think, Not Stop Us Thinking?

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Photo by Karola G

    When new technologies arrive, we often meet them with caution. That instinct has served us well in education, fending off many (not all) of the educational fads and technological gimmicks that periodically come our way. Beyond education, every major shift in how we record, communicate, or process ideas usually brings anxiety about change and what might be lost.

    However, despite Socrates’s fears that writing would weaken memory, or many teachers’ worries that calculators would make their students stupid, science, progress and development have continued to thrive. In fact, the correlation between technology adoption and anything from levels of literacy to infant mortality, from life expectancy to scientific discovery, couldn’t be stronger.

    Today similar questions arise about artificial intelligence. If AI can plan, summarise, or even write, does that risk weakening our ability to think for ourselves?

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  • From CPD to Collective Growth: Leading Professional Learning at Scale

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Photo by Visual Tag Mx

    These are my notes and reflections from an early morning webinar hosted by the Chartered College of Teaching on Leading Professional Learning at Scale. It was one of those sessions where coffee had to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the insights more than repaid the early start.

    Professional learning remains one of the most powerful levers for improving teaching quality and pupil outcomes. Yet, as host Dr Lisa-Maria Müller of the Chartered College reminded us, too often professional development focuses on the individual teacher in isolation, overlooking the cultural and structural conditions required for professional development to take root.

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  • Rethinking Pedagogy First?

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

    The phrase “pedagogy first” has long been a go-to in discussions about technology in the classroom. It reminds us that the real engine of learning lies not in the devices we use, but in the processes of teaching and learning themselves. Yet recently this notion has come under criticism.

    Too often, detractors present a narrow caricature of pedagogy, as if it were simply concerned with the mechanisms involved in the transmission of knowledge, and then dismiss the whole concept as rigid, outdated, and inattentive to the needs of either teachers or students. This position lacks nuance.

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