How can you facilitate school improvement at scale and across a Multi Academy Trust?

In this webinar, which is also available as a podcast, hosted by Professor Stuart Kime, we hear from a panel of Trust leaders who are:

• Facilitating school improvement across their Trusts
• Growing their Trusts in line with the DFE’s Trust Quality Descriptors
• Identifying strengths and measuring improvement across their Trusts

Thank you to Julie Deville (CEO of Extol Trust), Kirsty McMurdo (Head of Teaching and Learning at Wonder Learning Partnership) and Embrace Multi Academy Trust for joining our panel!

If you would like to discuss how you can facilitate school improvement across your Trust with the Great Teaching Toolkit, please contact us here!

The podcast version of this webinar is available below.

Professors Rob Coe and Stuart Kime, on the 11th of March, discussed the concepts of “routine expertise” and “adaptive expertise” in a webinar. This webinar, which is also available as a podcast, examined the essence of expertise in education and beyond, providing invaluable insights for educators working in any context.

Rob and Stuart discussed:

• Understanding what distinguishes routine expertise from adaptive expertise, and why both are crucial in different contexts.
• The implications of these concepts for professional development and classroom practice.

Professors Coe and Kime have years of research and practical experience between them. This is a rare opportunity to hear them in conversation, and to understand more about the nuances of expertise in teaching, and how to develop more of it!

The podcast version of this webinar is available below.

Kate Jones, Senior Associate for Teaching and Learning, interviews Science teacher, co-founder of Carousel Learn and author Adam Boxer about retrieval practice in the classroom.

Understanding the role of memory in the learning process is essential for all educators. It is important for those planning and designing lessons to be aware of the limitations of working memory and recognise how regular retrieval practice can strengthen long-term memory. Retrieval practice involves recalling already-learned information from long-term memory to make that learned information easier and quicker to retrieve in the future.

In this episode:

• Adam Boxer explains why teachers should carefully consider the language used when discussing retrieval practice in the classroom, providing all learners with retrieval opportunities.
• Kate asks Adam how teachers can provide retrieval opportunities, other than a ‘Do Now’ or quizzing starter task. Adam explores the importance of regular retrieval practice and how retrieval opportunities can be promoted throughout a lesson and for homework.
• Adam talks about how Carousel Learning was developed and explains all the different features and tools the platform can provide for teachers. You can found out more about Carousel Learn here.
• Retrieval practice in the primary classroom is also explored.
• Finally, Kate and Adam explain the importance of explaining effective (and ineffective learning strategies) to students.

To enhance your use of retrieval practice you can access the Science of Learning Programme, as part of the Great Teaching Toolkit and download the eBook Retrieval Practice: Myths, Mutations and Mistakes. All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive, and we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars for you in our Resource Library.

In this episode, Kate Jones, Senior Associate for Teaching and Learning, interviews Jane Miller and Finola Wilson, former teachers and school leaders and now running Impact Wales, about evidence-informed classroom practices and curriculum. This podcast focuses on the importance of schools embracing an evidence-based approach to curriculum design, teaching and learning.

• Jane and Finola provide an overview of their careers in education, including their transition from the classroom to launching Impact Wales to support schools across Wales and further afield.
• Finola discusses how she creates and shares research summaries and sketch notes for teachers.
• The importance of an promoting an evidence-informed culture across a school is discussed to help teachers make better informed decisions.
• We cover the challenges and barriers facing teachers and school leaders engaging with evidence.
• Jane and Finola offer advice for school leaders to consider when thinking about how they can do the best for their children.
• Kate asks about the Curriculum for Wales and the origins behind the curriculum design and reform. This includes discussion of the curriculum framework, pedagogical principles and implementation plan.
• Finally, we chat about their latest collaboration with Bruce Robertson as they are teaming up with Bruce to continue to promote evidence informed teaching and learning approaches.

You can follow Jane and Finola on Twitter here and find out more about their work with Impact Wales here.

 

All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive, and we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars for you in our Resource Library.

The Great Teaching Toolkit offers an evidence-based curriculum for teachers’ professional learning. It provides a common professional language and a shared structure for enabling Great Teaching. The Model for Great Teaching is a summary of the best available research evidence on the things teachers do, know and believe that has the biggest impact on student learning. The review serves to help teachers make better and informed decisions about what they can best do to improve the quality of their teaching. 

Great questioning in the classroom (and beyond) promotes deep thinking, helping students connect and elaborate on ideas.  Great questioning to assess thinking helps teachers plan and adapt their teaching to respond to what assessment tells them.  Teachers ask questions every lesson, every day – so it’s important to make sure that teachers and students are asking the right questions to move learning forward.

Kate Jones, Senior Associate for Teaching and Learning, interviews teacher, senior leader and author Michael Chiles about questioning in the classroom – Dimension 4, Element 4.3 of the Model for Great Teaching.

In this episode:

• Michael explains why questioning hasn’t always received the attention and focus it deserves but why it should be a priority for all teachers and schools.
• Mini white boards and cold calling techniques are explored, as well as discussing the role of ‘hands up’ questioning strategies in the classroom.
• The purpose of questioning is explored.
• Michael offers advice about the design, use and implementation of multiple choice questions and how the data provided can be insightful and helpful for teachers.
• Question design and delivery is discussed, both written and oral.
• Kate asks Michael, how carefully should teachers plan the questions they ask in class.
• Finally, how can teachers support students to encourage reluctant learners to participate and ask questions in the lesson.

 

To enhance your use of questioning, look out for Michael’s book and check out the Great Teaching Toolkit Questioning course.

All of our podcasts, including our previous interview with Michael on feedback, can be found in our podcast archive, and we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars for you in our Resource Library.

Classroom management is a key component of great teaching. Great teachers manage the classroom to maximise opportunity to learn, and no model of great teaching could be complete without classroom management. Managing the behaviour and activities of a class of students is a huge part of what teachers do. 

Classroom management and culture is multifaceted. In this episode of the Evidence Based Education podcast, we explore just a few factors and ideas that can help teachers consider and manage behaviour in their classroom.  

In this episode: 

• Professor Rob Coe talks about the importance of classroom management for ‘maximising opportunity to learn’ – Dimension 3 of the Model for Great Teaching
• Dr Alicia Chodkiewicz suggests we move away from framing behaviour as good or bad
  
• David Didau reflects on social norms as an influencer of behaviour
  
• Tom Bennett on routines as building blocks of the classroom culture and how teachers explicitly teach routines, and the use of scripts to manage potentially disruptive incidents. 

The classroom management ideas and approaches explored in this podcast are a few of the many that feature in the Great Teaching Toolkit courses; the Behaviour and Culture Programme (for middle and senior Leaders) and Maximising Opportunity to Learn (for classroom teachers).  

All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive, and we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars for you in our Resource Library. 

This podcast is the fourth installment in our miniseries on teacher collaboration, in partnership with Dulwich College International. Over what has possibly been the most challenging year ever, we’ve followed the journey of teachers and leaders as they seek to enhance collaboration across their family of schools, against the backdrop of a global pandemic!

We started out in episode one by meeting collaborations leads, the people responsible for coordinating subject and specialist groups.  We talked to them about their aims and explored the idea of problem identification as mechanism to kickstart a collaboration project.

Then, in episode two, John Hattie and Dylan William gave quite different perspectives on the idea of collective teacher efficacy and collaboration more broadly.

In episode three we heard from Dr. Jenni Donohoo and Cat Scutt on the culture and conditions of effective collaboration.

Finally, in this episode, we return to collaboration leads to find out what they got up to. Hear about the challenges, the successes and their advice for building and running a collaboration group.

 

All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive, and we have a host of free eBooks, videos and webinars for you in our Resource Library.

A year ago, we published the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review (GTT:ER). The year since then has been extraordinary in many ways, many of them negative. However, one very positive and exciting thing that has been quietly happening this year here at EBE is the development of the tools and courses that will comprise the first part of the wider Great Teaching Toolkit. The response we have had so far from the schools who are working with us – and the results we are beginning to see – make it hard not to feel the anticipation. In this blog, we explore the developments since the Evidence Review, and what’s next for the Great Teaching Toolkit. You can also find the companion audio interview by scrolling to the bottom of this post, or by searching “The Evidence Based Education Podcast” in your podcast app of choice. 

In the GTT:ER, we summarised the evidence about what makes a difference to students’ outcomes: the things that teachers do, know or believe. The Review identified 17 such ‘Elements’ of Great Teaching, which we grouped into four broad Dimensions. They are all linked by robust evidence showing that, in classrooms where these Elements (the skills, knowledge, beliefs, behaviours and habits of the teacher) are present, students learn more.   

We presented our framework as a curriculum for teacher learning: the set of things that teachers should be trying to get better at. We tried to make it clear that this does not imply that the rich and wonderful complexity of great teaching can be reduced to a list of techniques. But, as with any curriculum that leads to mastery of a complex domain, breaking down the steps is a necessary part of helping people to learn it.  

Nor, just to be clear, is there any suggestion that the status quo represents any kind of deficit. There is Great Teaching happening in pretty much every school in the land, every single day. Our children are truly lucky to have such a dedicated, skilled, professional bunch of teachers as show up every day to make a difference to their lives. That said, education and social justice are such powerful forces for empowerment and life outcomes: with the stakes this high, every teacher owes it to those children to be the best they can possibly be. Related to this, my definition of a Great Teacher is one who is willing to do what it takes to be demonstrably more effective next year than this: it is not about how good you are today, but the journey you are on and the commitment to relentless improvement.  

We made the case that a focus on everyday classroom teaching – great teaching, in every lesson, from every teacher, every day – is our most powerful lever for driving improvement at system-wide level. The top priority for all school leaders and teachers should be to enhance the quality of the teaching and learning interactions that happen in their classrooms every day. In an educational setting, nothing else matters as much as this; nothing else will make as much difference to the outcomes and equity of the children and young people we serve.  

 

What have we done since June 2020?

The Evidence Review provided some hints about the wider Great Teaching Toolkit project and our plans for its development. One year on, what have we done and how has our thinking changed?  

First and foremost, we spent a lot of time researching and talking to teachers about the barriers and opportunities around professional learning, and in promoting and maintaining everyday Great Teaching. Through this process, we identified three key challenges:  

1. What to work on? It is difficult for teachers and school leaders to determine the how to get the biggest return on their investment when it comes to improvement;
2. The challenge of change. Changing everyday teaching practices is actually really, really hard; and
3. Is it working? Reliable feedback and evaluation (knowing whether what you are doing is working) is often absent or misleading (in both classroom teaching and school leadership). 

The Great Teaching Toolkit is now focused on addressing these challenges directly, over time.  

 

What to work on? (And is it working?)

Publishing the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review was, in itself, a response to the first of these challenges. By setting out, in practical and rigorous terms, the Elements of practice that make a difference to student outcomes, we hoped to provide some clarity. However, there is another limitation that applies to any attempt to clarify what Great Teaching is: definitions alone do not define the thing. The same argument applies to defining a curriculum or learning aim for students: describing it in words is necessary – it is a good starting point – but words alone cannot define it well enough to avoid confusion.  

The same level of rigour that is required to define a learning aim for students should be applied to our attempts to define professional learning aims for teachers. We have to specify a process for determining how far the learning has been achieved.   

This is one of the reasons why the main workstream for the GTT this year has been the development of measures of the Elements of Great Teaching. If we want teachers to focus on a specific aspect of their practice and to really understand what success looks like in relation to improving it, we need to give them the tools to operationalise it, to make that element explicit, visible and real. 

Of course, creating high-quality measures of Great Teaching was never going to be easy. Perhaps the most obvious, and most widely used, measures of teaching quality depend on lesson observation. But doing this well (as I wrote in a blog in 2014) is harder than you think.  

To generate new insight, we have been developing student surveys. There is a good body of research that supports the validity of using student surveys as a measure of teaching quality (e.g., Marsh and Roche, 1997; Gates Foundation, 2012; Spooren et al, 2013). We reviewed this work and developed our own surveys, structured around the Elements of the GTT identified in the Evidence Review. We currently have a good selection of teachers and schools whose classes have completed our surveys and are amassing evidence of their validity. We built a prototype platform and have received good feedback from users. We began with versions for secondary age pupils, but are now also working with primary schools; over time, we will extend the range of surveys. 

While developing such reliable and valid measures is no easy task, early indications and analyses are very positive. If these hold firm as we continue the trialling process, teachers using the Great Teaching Toolkit will also be able to address the third of our challenges: is what I have been doing working? After identifying an Element to work on, and implementing a strategy for a period of time, has my practice improved? Are my students benefiting from even greater teaching? 

 

The challenge of change 

Put simply, changing everyday teaching practices is actually really, really hard. This is unlikely to be too controversial. A large body of research and experience establishes that teachers’ practices are determined and constrained by traditions, norms and expectations, teacher values, beliefs and theories, teachers’ skills and knowledge and, of course, habits – routine, automatic behaviours typically below the level of conscious awareness (Hobbiss et al., 2020). 

If we want to help teachers to change these practices then, mostly, it is about teacher learning. Helping teachers to gain new knowledge, to develop insights and understandings of relevant underpinning theory, to build skills and techniques, and to acquire and embed new habits, can all be thought of as a learning process. That means we are squarely in the territory of applying what we know about the conditions that optimise learning (the principles of the Great Teaching framework) to a special case of professional learning.   

This comparison between the ways we routinely help pupils to learn hard ideas or processes and the things we do to support teachers’ professional learning provides a useful check on any strategy for CPD: for any approach to professional development, would the same method work for pupil learning? 

Another useful comparison is with learning practical skills such as golf, tennis, football, piano, guitar, cookery, or cabinet-making. Here typical approaches involve coaching by an expert, often one-to-one or in a small group, with an emphasis on spending a lot of time in ‘deliberate practice’ of the skill (Ericsson and Pool, 2016). If you think you can learn to be a better teacher by reading books and blogs, attending presentations and conferences, reflecting and having intense conversations with colleagues, could you see a similar approach working to improve your skill in darts, yoga or chess? These reflective activities may be useful, but you would likely need to do a few other things as well.  

 

Try and learn

We need to build expertise deliberately and systematically if we want to see the faithful realisation of ‘research-based’ practices. The Great Teaching Toolkit must follow more of an engineering test-and-learn approach than a grand design. Although we certainly start with a strong rationale and design, the success of our project will depend less on the initial ideas than on our responsiveness to what we learn in the process. There are too many cases when the best available research is just not good enough to tell us what we need to know with certainty. The complexities and interdependencies of schools and classrooms are such that our current theories cannot predict how things will play out in practice.  

For me, the most exciting part of the Great Teaching Toolkit is what we hope to learn. Is it possible to create valid measures of the important elements of teaching quality that can be used at scale? Can the feedback from such measures help teachers and school leaders to evaluate how well they are doing, to understand what great practice looks like and to focus their efforts to maximise improvement? Can we provide them with the structures and support to make this learning easy and inevitable? Can we identify, for individual teachers, the high-leverage skills and practices whose development will make the most difference to their students’ outcomes?  

The answer to any of these questions may, of course, be no. But the more work we do on this, the more I believe we really can do it. While there is a chance it could be yes, my colleagues and I will do everything we can to find a way – and to feel excited about the prospect. 

 

References 

Coe, R. (2014, January 9). Classroom observation: It’s harder than you think. CEM Blog. http://www.cem.org/blog/414/   

Ericsson, K. A. & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 

Gates Foundation (2012) Asking Students about Teaching: Student Perception Surveys and Their Implementation. MET Project Policy and Practice Brief. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, September, 2012.  https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED566384   

Hobbiss, M., Sims, S., & Allen, R. (2020). Habit formation limits growth in teacher effectiveness: A review of converging evidence from neuroscience and social science. Review of Education, rev3.3226.  

Marsh, H. W., Roche, L A. (1997). Making students’ evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: The critical issues of validity, bias and utility. American Psychologist, 52, 1187–1197.  

Spooren, P., Brockx, B., & Mortelmans, D. (2013). On the validity of student evaluation of teaching: The state of the art. Review of Educational Research, 83(4), 598-642.  

The research evidence shows us that effective feedback is one of the most powerful tools that a teacher can have in their ‘toolbox’. But it also offers some cautionary notes…

In more than a third of well-designed studies, feedback actively made students’ performance worse. Not all feedback is good feedback! Facial expressions, verbal or written comments, even silence can constitute some form of feedback. It is so integral to communication that it’s happening all the time. Feedback, in its many forms, is a key part of this complex act of teaching and it is worth investing time to reflect on.

In this podcast episode we talk to teacher, senior leader and author, Michael Chiles, about the key concepts in his book, The Feedback Pendulum. We discuss the purpose and power of feedback interactions both in the classroom, with parents and with colleagues.  We discuss:

• The issues and opportunities with feedback
• Investing time to prime feedback
• Whole-class feedback
• The importance of meaningful teacher feedback
• Feedback to parents for a collaborative approach to learning

For more on feedback, you can access our free eBook, A short guide to delivering effective feedback, from our resource library and you can find out more about Michael’s book here.

All of our previous podcast episodes can be found in our podcast archive or by searching ‘The Evidence Based Education Podcast’ in your podcast app.

In June 2020 we published the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review, a credible evidence summary of the elements of great teaching practice.

In this podcast miniseries we’re talking to the team at Falinge Park High School as they use the Evidence Review and the model for great teaching as the focus of their professional development.

Staff at Falinge Park are each selecting an element from the review to work on as the focus of their professional enquiry. In the first Episode we spoke to Headteacher, Janice Allen about professional development culture. In this episode, we speak to Deputy Head, Paula O’Reilly, and Lead Practitioner, Katy Pauz, to find out how they organise and structure staff learning.

We also invited Jade Pearce, Assistant Head of Walton High School, on to the podcast to tell us about her summary of the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review and how her school use it. Jade has kindly shared the link to her summary and you can download a copy here.

You can also download the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review here.

This podcast episode is a Science of Learning feast for anyone mildly obsessed with teaching and learning! EBE’s Director of Education, Dr Stuart Kime, talks to Dr Niki Kaiser and Dr Efrat Furst about the approach the three of them took to the design our Science of Learning Programme. However, this is far more than a conversation about designing teacher CPD. Our teaching trio of Drs discuss: The learning process and the value of teachers knowing about it; The key characteristics of how people learn; Their experiences as teachers encountering new information about how we learn and incorporating it into their practice; Moving from novice to expertise; Making learning meaningful (potatoes and carrots!).   About our guests Dr Niki Kaiser - Niki is a Chemistry teacher and Research Lead at Notre Dame High School, currently seconded to the Education Endowment Foundation as Science Content Specialist. Dr Efrat Furst – Efrat is a teacher with a research background in cognitive-neuroscientific research (human learning and memory). Efrat works to bridge the science of learning with teaching and learning in classrooms - with a focus on understanding the key principles in learning and applying effective strategies in the classroom   All of our podcasts can be found in our podcast archive and our Resource Library. If you like the topic of this podcast, you might also like a previous episode on working memory, available here. If you’d like to know more about the process of how we learn and how it can be used to enhance teaching and learning strategies, take a look at our Science of Learning Programme here.