What’s next?

In April 2024, I made the decision to transition out of teaching, and I finished my roles at my school in July 2024. The main reason for this is the desire to strike a better balance between my work life and my personal life; whilst I didn’t go into teaching expecting an easy ride, knowing that my non-teaching responsibilities are being shared between five different members of staff has reassured me that I had taken on too much!

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about my teaching career has been the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, and discerning appropriate actions based on that data. The scientific literacy series of posts stemmed from qualitative data about student attainment for my own classes, and I relished in building a strategy to address that. You can read these posts here, here and here. Part of this enjoyment of data was encouraging my department to use assessment data to identify which students to target more regularly during lessons for additional support or challenge (and helping with methods to do so, where necessary).

So, I’m hoping to move into a career in the data sector. I like the idea of supporting teachers and the education sector in particular. I am also a UK-USA dual citizen, so plan to make the most of this and spend some time living stateside.

So starting now-ish, I am focusing on my EdD full-time. I’ve struggled to give it the attention it deserves during term-time and have given up chunks of school holidays to work on it, but now am able to really immerse myself in this project. There are a range of posts about my journey here. I’m also planning to brush up on the Python I learned during my undergraduate Theoretical Physics degree to build an understanding of machine learning and modelling, and am soon to continue using R for the statistical analysis for my doctorate.

In the short-term though, three weddings, hopefully no funerals and a bit more time with my family.