Hi, teacher.

The real danger of experience is not ignorance. It is certainty.

A teacher said to me the other day, “At this point, I don’t really need to think about my lessons anymore.” She has been teaching for 17 years.

I used to believe that too. Experience felt like safety, and routines felt efficient. I could walk into class and teach almost on autopilot. The lesson would run, the timing would work, and nobody would complain. From the outside, everything looked fine.

Then I started observing more lessons, and something slightly uncomfortable became clear. The more experienced the teacher, the more likely they were to repeat the same moves without noticing what had changed in front of them. The learners were different. The classroom dynamics were different. The pressures were different. But the teaching often stayed exactly the same.

Experience gives us speed and confidence, but it can also make us stop asking questions. We stop wondering why something works. We stop paying attention to small signals from learners. We rely on routines that once helped us succeed, even when they no longer fit the moment.

This is not a problem of effort or motivation. It is what happens when success turns into habit. When something works for years, your brain decides it is safe and stops checking it closely.

What keeps experienced teachers learning is attention. Not more techniques. Not more courses. Attention to what learners actually say, do, and struggle with in real time.

A few small habits make a noticeable difference:

• Notice what learners actually say, not what you planned them to say.

• Question familiar routines instead of defending them automatically.

• Talk with other teachers about moments that did not go as expected, not only about what went well.

• Ask yourself after class what surprised you.

• Change one small thing in a lesson you have taught many times and see what happens.

Experience becomes powerful when it stays flexible. When it hardens into routine, it becomes comfortable but stops being educational.

The teachers who continue to grow after many years are not the ones with the strongest routines. They are the ones who still allow their classrooms to interrupt their assumptions. They notice when learners respond differently. They notice when tasks land in unexpected ways. They notice when something unplanned works better than what they designed.

That is what keeps teaching alive after year 10 and year 20. Not mastery, but attention.

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P.S. 1 As I mentioned last week, I’m starting a placement with Cambridge University Press and I’m ridiculously happy about it. I’ll probably share bits of that experience on Instagram as I go, so if you like behind-the-scenes teacher development life, you can follow along there.

P.S. 3 If you’ve ever thought, “This lesson looked fine on paper, so why did it feel flat?”, my free webinar How to Analyse Lesson Flow (Feb 14th 16:00 UK) will help you see what actually happened in the classroom and why it mattered. We’ll take 1 real teaching moment and unpack the plan, the learner talk, and the small decisions that changed the direction of the lesson, so you leave with sharper awareness and better judgment about what really holds a lesson together. You can register here. You don't want to miss it!