10 million views. It's a milestone in the life of teacherhead.com that I couldn't have imagined reaching when I started out back in May 2012 with my first rather ridiculous post: Kitchen Blackboard!
That's all it was! Me in the kitchen. I had no idea.
After that, it took off and I've managed to find a style and an audience that seems to appreciate my observations from the sidelines of school life and the challenges and rewards of great teaching. I'm enormously grateful to anyone stopping to read one my posts and for all the interactions via twitter, linkedIn and the comments over the years. It's often said that blogging has declined, replaced in part by threads on social media, but I've found I get a reasonably steady level of engagement day to day, averaging over 3000 views per day most days, with occasional peaks and lulls around that.
For each of the last five calendar years, there have been over a million views.
I think there are a few factors that have kept the numbers ticking up over the last 12 years.:
- Volume of output. The stats say I"ve written 834 posts which is an average of about 6 posts a month. More recently this has reduced to about one per week - but with a big total, there's a lot of material continually accumulating to browse through. Most days I get views for over 100 different posts.
- Repeated views for several key older posts - some are embedded in a range of resources that teachers are given by schools and ITT providers etc. Recently my post on Wiliam's formative assessment is the most-read post in most months.
- Email and WordPress followers: about 6000 people in total subscribe to the blog and get my posts on their readers or in their inboxes. They don't always open them... but it's great to have a strong cohort of interested readers.
- The visual layout: I think the wordpress blog theme I use helps a lot -you can visually see a lot of posts at once both in date order and those that are currently popular reads. (I find some other blogs can obscure previous writing and you have to work too hard to find things.)
- Providing some good stuff for free- my Rosenshine masterclass videos, our Five Ways booklet for example.
- Getting a nice boost from TeacherTapp. Every so often one of my posts is use for their tip of the day... and boy does that give the post some rocket fuel. I also get an occasional mention in the excellent Class Teaching Weekly Roundup from Durrington High School. Always grateful for that!
- A reasonably high level of blog sharing on twitter for new and old posts. Call it self-promotion if you will… but that's how people often see the links. I've always felt that unless you share your own work repeatedly, most people won't ever know it is there. And why write at all unless you want readers.?
It's no surprise that my most-read posts are exploring the ideas of three key thinkers: Bill Rogers, Dylan Wiliam and Barak Rosenshine. I'm happy to have been able to play a role sharing their great wisdom. The Bill Rogers post has a life force of its own with over 400K views! Amazing really.
The posts with over 100K views are here - I'm quite proud of each of them, although the one on assemblies is rather out of date now.
After that, there are 14 posts between 50-100K views:
After that there are about 200 posts with 10-50 k views. Then there's all the rest.
I often dive into past years and months to see what I was saying at the time. My ideas have definitely evolved over time, following my journey from KEGS to Highbury Grove and then into my consultancy. There are posts from the first five years that I wouldn't still promote because I've changed my thinking too much. Generally they also track my books - Learning Rainforest, Rosenshine In Action and the Walkthrus. The most consistent elements are the focus on the details of classroom practice: questioning, feedback, modelling, behaviour. Also there's been a strong focus on professional development reflecting the nature of my work. You have to write about what you know. From time to time I'm about to write a post and then realise that I've already written more or less the same thing a year or so again.. the same issues do come around time and time again. Teaching is teaching after all.
From time to time I've written very personal posts - about my Dad, about my Daughter leaving home for uni, about the books I've read and about my personal and professional ups and downs. It's always been helpful to me to have an outlet for writing what I want to write. I've also written a few major rants - like this one and this one! Sometimes you need to give both barrels!
The thing that gives me the most satisfaction is that teachers across all phases and subjects, new and old, have told me that they've found the blogs useful to them. I get cited a lot in CPD sessions, job interviews and PGCE assignments (so I'm told) and that to me is just great. When you're writing you really have no idea if anyone out there is interested so to know other people find them useful and interesting is always heartening. Sometimes you get a big flood of hits- and other carefully crafted gems get a trickle. The only sure thing is that blogs about music will get tumbleweed.. nobody really cares! I still try... you might enjoy this for example!
I was going to use this milestone as a bit of a threshold to consider whether to keep it up to the same level in the next year or so. I'm still unsure of that. I think I'll avoid making a commitment either way and just blog when I feel like it. For sure, i'm going to take the pressure off myself to maintain output. I have another book project to focus on now.
All in all it does feel like something of an achievement. I'm proud of what I've made here. I've nurtured it, curated it, protected it - no adverts, sponsors or guest posts - and promoted it. I care about it! Here I am at 6am in a hotel room in Seoul waiting for the counter to hit the big number! Yes, I'm that person!
And here it is. Whoop whoop!!
Hopefully it will continue to be a useful resource for people long into the future even if my rate of output drops off now. You can be sure I'll be checking in on the stats whatever happens.
Thanks once again to anyone reading. It means a lot to me and I'm extremely grateful.
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