Book David Didau for training and speaking
David offers keynote talks, conference sessions, INSET, twilight training, consultancy and bespoke professional development for schools, trusts and organisations.
His work focuses on curriculum, teaching, assessment and school improvement, with a particular interest in helping schools create the conditions in which teachers can thrive and students can succeed.
Popular training topics
Intelligent Accountability
Creating the conditions for teachers to thrive by building systems that support better professional judgement, reduce counterproductive workload and improve the quality of teaching.
What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology
An overview of the most useful findings from cognitive and social psychology, with a focus on what they mean for classroom practice and how schools can implement them successfully.
Effective Retrieval Practice
Why recall tasks are so often squandered, and how to use retrieval practice in ways that genuinely strengthen learning rather than simply generate performance.
Leading Literary
How to ensure reading, writing and oracy are aligned within an academically ambitious English curriculum.
Getting Feedback and Assessment Right
A clear-eyed look at the implications of common approaches to feedback and assessment, alongside a model more closely aligned with what cognitive science suggests about learning.
How to Design a Curriculum
Lessons drawn from two decades of curriculum design in schools, across trusts and at national level.
C25K Writing training
I also offer training on C25K Writing, a structured approach to teaching writing that treats it as something to be taught, practised and mastered rather than vaguely ‘developed’.
Why Writing Instruction Fails
An exploration of why so many attempts to teach writing are ineffective, and why some students manage to succeed despite poor instruction. This session sets out the core problem C25K Writing is designed to solve.
Live Model Lesson
A taught C25K Writing lesson, observed live. The focus is on how attention is secured, meaning is constructed and mastery is developed. The lesson can also be filmed for later use. Teachers observe using a simple C25K pro forma.
Debrief and Discussion
A focused reflection on the lesson, including:
- speech, thought and writing: the sentence as the unit of thought
- the principles of gapless instruction
- how C25K Writing aligns with cognitive science and explicit instruction
Core C25K Writing Resources
An introduction to the key tools and routines, including:
- the Deconstructed Essay
- Slow Writing
- the Creative Sentence Structure Sequence
Curriculum Integration
How to embed C25K Writing routines into any English curriculum, regardless of the texts being studied.
Mastery Assessment
How to tell whether writing instruction is genuinely effective, and how to distinguish performance from learning.
Booking and enquiries
To enquire about availability, fees or bespoke training, please get in touch via the contact form.
You can also use the form to ask about keynote speaking, conference sessions, consultancy, curriculum projects or school improvement support.