There’s something wonderful about the way teachers and schools can be connected now online via websites like Tes.com or social media networks. Connecting with other teachers all over the country has changed my practice over the years and has definitely made me a better teacher.

But there are downsides - especially in these days of snippets of information. Now, the latest trend for classroom practice can be shared around the country before you have a chance to say: “Here’s how it should work.” And so we end up with great practice being interpreted in a multitude of different ways.

The problem is made worse when the misinterpretation is passed down from school leaders to classroom teachers as the new requirements for school policy. We’ve seen it before with the bizarre insistence that pupils must never tackle content from another year group’s maths curriculum. A misunderstanding of the national curriculum guidance which is clearly ridiculous when taken to its extreme. Are teachers really saying that Year 3 pupils must never be allowed to work with 4-digit numbers?

The latest example of this misguided application is the emergence of whole class feedback approaches - and particularly of the tracking sheets that accompany it. It’s a few years now since Ofsted stepped back from its focus on written marking and feedback, so it’s no surprise to me to see changes in how schools work. But the appearance of forms to accompany the change always worries me.

Having shared my reservations, there are plenty who are enthusiastic about the replacement of marking books with recording notes on a single sheet to feedback to the whole class. But there are also too many examples of practices that suggest school leaders have rather missed the point.

There are teachers who are being coached to ensure that they fill in enough detail on their marking sheets, and schools which insist on a marking sheet being filled in for every lesson, regardless of the content taught or the other feedback already given.

Once again, we have school leaders who don’t seem confident to trust their teachers to deliver things in the manner which best suits the context of their class and the content of their lessons; instead, we see the insistence on standardised templates and scrutiny of the resulting pages of paperwork. Not everywhere, of course, but it’s too often what happens: good ideas seen in some schools become required practices in others, and end up being a tool for critiquing and criticising in others.

Of course, if you’re in a school that replaces a draconian marking policy with a heavy-handed whole-class feedback policy, then maybe it feels like a good thing. And in many ways perhaps it is. Unless it leads to perfectly good teachers being forced to write notes which are of no use to them or their pupils merely to satisfy the scrutineers.

What strikes me as all the more strange is the willingness with which schools will insist on policies on matters such as marking, book presentation and even the layout of tables in classrooms, and yet seem more reluctant to pronounce on the actual content of lessons. There are plenty of dubious practices which are commonplace in our schools (I’m looking at you, teachers who use crocodiles to represent the inequality symbols!), and yet it seems that to question such things - the actual decisions about what and how to teach - isn’t the done thing.

I find it hard to believe that the best way to improve the quality of the teaching and learning in our classrooms is to focus on anything that the teacher is doing away from the children.