It’s 7.01am. I look out of the window next to the laminator as I await my 12 new “table-talkers”, which are exiting the mouth of the machine. The A3 sheets are emblazoned with headings like “Self manager: location and place”. I’ve used a cool, popular-culture font, courtesy of a text generator.

I am feeling smug. If I’m honest, I’m also feeling quite drained. I have spent so long creating these geography-based personal learning and thinking (PLT) skills table-talkers that I’ve cognitively overloaded myself.

Unfortunately, the cognitive load that my pupils have coming to them is even bigger. There is so much going on - and very little of it is of any use for budding geographers.

I have created six PLTs for students to work on - with titles such as “self-manager” or “creative thinker” - and the guides for these are crammed on to an A3 sheet packed with relevant geography-based examples that pupils are supposed to refer to at various points during the lesson task.

They will then refer to a tracker in the front of their books to mark how confident they are feeling about using their “self-manager” or “creative thinker” skills.

“This will be super-easy and useful!” I’d thought to myself, as I spent hours creating sheets and trackers. “It’s a value-driven effort that will affect my pupils in the long term, both in and outside of school!”

But underneath, like a berg broken from the Larsen B shelf (cracking geography reference, that), I am already starting to doubt how helpful this will actually be for my pupils. And it turns out that I am right.

Education adviser and author Mary Myatt recommends creating a high-challenge, low-threat environment for teaching and learning to flourish.

But in my lesson, I quickly realise that the only challenge I have created for my pupils is an administrative one, requiring them to put all their effort into managing my PLT tracking system rather than truly reflecting on their skills. My desire to create a tracking system that they can own has overtaken the reason behind the method.

As a profession, we are encouraged to track and monitor pupils’ skills to within an inch of their lives, but it’s important to ask: to what end? We need to know where our students are, of course, but not at the expense of actually getting them somewhere useful or wonderful. And that means we have to ask ourselves “why am I obsessing over creating a RAG tracker for every moment of the curriculum journey for my pupils (especially when there are 30 of them in each of my Year 9 classes)?”

If this strange, fragmented year has shown us anything, it’s the importance of supporting our pupils to discover the beauty of our subjects for themselves, rather than drilling them with endless assessment and tracking.

Not all of my class marked themselves as “green effective participators” on their PLT trackers, but they all know that Erta Ale is an example of a lava lake. That’s enough for me.

David McGrath is deputy headteacher at Oakfield Academy in Somerset

This article originally appeared in the 19 February 2021 issue under the headline “The silence of the laminators”