I have been a teacher for 25 years, a Headteacher for 10 years and, at the age of 49, this much I know about developing a Dweck-inspired Growth Mindset culture.

What follows is much of what I said at #TLT13 on 19 October 2013. There may well be a video of my talk available soon.

How did you find out that the only way to be good at something is to work hard at it? I didn’t need to read Gladwell or Syed, for me it was Jack Nicklaus and Joe Strummer.

The blisters on my hands and my permanently misaligned shoulders were/are testimony to my determination as a youth to be the best golfer in the world. Conversely, my complete failure to play guitar like Joe Strummer is down to my lack of Strummer-like effort – if I put in my 10,000 hours even I, with my incredibly…

Beyond the very general notion that we should teach as well as we possibly can, are there approaches we can use that help to secure the highest grades at GCSE? I don’t want to suggest that there are any simple tricks or quick wins or that it is possible or wise for us to expect ever more A* grades. However, getting A*s is something we often discuss at KEGS.

Perhaps it is better to think of it differently, working on the assumption that only a certain proportion of students will be awarded A*s across a national exam cohort. The question then becomes: how can we prepare our students so that they have the best chance of being in that number? This leads us to the brutally simple answer: They need to get as close to full marks as possible – which isn’t as obvious as it sounds.

From conversations with…