Featuring teaching
What does David Didau explain by describing different approaches to engaging children?
Over on his wonderful ‘stack The Learning Spy for 15 April 2026, David Didau described models of teaching that have different foci: entertainment versus learning. He masterfully engineered his post so that it took me from entertained to understanding.
Mr. Didau’s post
Mr. Didau—who has been a teacher (secondary content area, I think), educational consultant, writer, and runner—contrasted the way adults engaged children at two different birthday parties:
One, whom he called “Johnny,” had “a repertoire certain to appeal to the unsophisticated palettes of the very young. He ha[d] an impressive array of fart and burp gags and [made] very creative use of the word ‘poo.’”
The other he described as “a sensible older lady called Janet, who patiently showed [the children] how to stitch quilts or some such. Whilst this wasn’t an activity to which I felt naturally drawn, I remember being impressed with the aura of pacific calm she exuded.”
From his rich and readable description, Mr. Didau went on to describe how the contrasting styles of the birthday party leaders also described approaches to teaching.
There’s an obvious parallel with teaching. Some teachers are great at whipping up students into a fever pitch of excitement, others perform Jedi mind tricks. Some teachers crack jokes, wear leather jackets and encourage their students to refer to them by some sort of cool nick name. Others, are focussed on the hard yards of learning things which, while they might not be fun, are important and useful. Some teachers are strict, some are laid back; some are keen to make up engaging games, others hammer away at mastering basic skills and tricky concepts.
Mr. Didau also incorporated observations about his own teaching behavior, reporting how he spent lots of time in the mode of the entertainer early in his career but became more devoted to helping students master content and skills. He concluded with a call to help prepare novice teachers to emulate the latter style, even though it is difficult—hence, the headline for his post: “Easy Things Are Easy; Hard Things Are Hard: On teacher charisma, classroom calm and the difficulty of building the habits of hard work.”
Probably 99% of the Dear Readers of Special Education Today recognize the stereotypes Mr. Didau described. Not only are they apt descriptions of different people’s methods, but most of us have done things ourselves that exemplify both styles—and he noted this in his post.
Reflection
I saw myself in Mr. Didau’s post. I remembered times when I went full Goofy-Ham with a groups of children and other times when I was doggedly serious.
