If you’ve landed here, you’re in the right place.
This is the home of the WAGOLL Teaching Primary Playbook: a growing, classroom-ready collection of routines and teaching moves you can access online through your Substack subscription.
The idea is simple: most of us do not need more ideas. We need fewer ideas, written clearly, that actually work on a wet Wednesday when the glue sticks have vanished, and someone is crying over a missing whiteboard pen.
That’s what the Playbook is for.
🧠 What the Playbook is
Think of the Playbook as an online, always-updating guide you can actually use. Each page focuses on one routine and answers the questions teachers genuinely care about:
What is it? Why does it work? When should I use it? What does it look like in the room?
It’s not trying to be “everything about teaching”. It’s trying to be useful.
📚 What you’ll find inside
Rather than long chapters, each page zooms in on a single routine and makes it usable.
You’ll find pages that cover lesson routines like Do Now retrieval, introducing Learning Outcomes in a meaningful way, clarifying To Knows, and using I Do, We Do, You Do to support novice learners without dragging the pace to a halt.
You’ll also find sharp “checking and response” tools like Hinge Questions, Show Me, Cold Calling, Turn and Talk, and Exit Tickets, plus sustainable feedback habits like Live Marking.
🛠️ A Live Document!
This isn’t a one-off resource you download and forget about. The Playbook lives online, and it keeps growing.
Each month I add new pages, shaped by a blend of research, cognitive science, and best practice from primary classrooms. The aim is that you slowly build a bank of routines that reduce decision fatigue, tighten instruction, and make classrooms feel calmer and more purposeful.
🔎 Next step
If you’re a WAGOLL+ member, the Playbook access link is just below, along with a quick nudge on where to start and what’s been added most recently.
(And if you’re not a member yet, you’ll see the option to join from here.)