Josh Round: How to 'gain a strength' in teaching?

Editor's Notes

• #3: We’ll look at some big-picture questions and then zone in on the steps you can follow to prepare your teaching team to shine on the big day, in that moment when the inspector calls
• #4: Start with a big question. What is great teaching, and how do we know? Sutton Trust report, Coe et al, 2014 – evidence from research into mainstream education (primary & secondary); freely available online, has been downloaded over 100,000 times. Outline 6 signature elements of teaching that has the most impact on student outcomes
• #5: Our teachers come off the back of a 4 week training course. How much focus or support do we give to developing subject knowledge? Have our teachers been language learners? Link here to advantages found in NNESTs
• #6: We should be doing this in ELT
• #7: Strong teacher-learner relationships. Challenge – demand high.
• #8: Can still have ineffective teaching but good classroom management
• #9: Eg – belief in methods and approaches can have an impact - Guided discovery vs explicit instruction; keeping learning intention a secret; learning is linear; capacity of learners to learn
• #11: Also important to note what doesn’t work, and we know that ELT is fond of jumping on popular approaches like learning styles even when there is no evidence to support their effectiveness
• #12: How do we create the conditions for Great Teaching?
• #13: Look for subject knowledge; understanding of effective teaching (Quality instruction); teacher beliefs; commitment to own development; & key behaviours to help build a positive culture
• #14: Culture:  Organisational culture is the number one predictor of development outcomes and improved classroom effectiveness, according to Matthew A. Kraft in his 2014 paper with John Papay entitled ‘Can professional environments in schools promote teacher development?’ Champion learning in your LTO – cf the Action Research scheme participation Also – research into schools with ‘weak trust reports’ = virtually no chance of showing improvement
• #15: Again more available research. Important message – teacher learning and dev does have an impact on student outcomes. Here, focus on leadership activities…
• #16: Which kind of CPD is most effective
• #17: CPD programme – Walter Briggs guided our approach at St Giles (PDGs) Latest research via the TDT 2015 Silvana & Gabriel D-M April 2018 (CUP)
• #18: Interesting to see how the multiple attempts to intervene and improve learning; what has the most impact? Can keep this in mind when planning CPD
• #19: Perf mgmt needs to be supportive (importance of feedback) Back to culture – ongoing teacher learning has an impact
• #20: Using Accreditation UK Yes…importance of all aspects…academic profile / course design / learner management… Focus here is on: Classroom Observations (on the big day); how can we, as academic managers, have an impact on what happens in the drop-in observations. Planning – tip – ask for specific Obs windows (to reduce excessive planning demand)
• #21: The evidence shows that when untrained observers are asked to judge the quality of a lesson, there is likely to be only modest agreement among them. Worse still, even if they do agree that what they see is good practice, it often actually isn’t. if two raters watch the same lesson. Using Ofsted’s categories, if a lesson is judged ‘Outstanding’ by one observer, the probability that a second observer would give a different judgement is between 51% and 78%. [reliability] Strong et al. (2011) used value-added scores to identify ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’ teachers, showed videos of them teaching to observers and asked them to say which teachers were in which group. In both the experiments where the observers were not trained in observation, the proportion correctly identified by experienced teachers and head teachers was below the 50% that would be expected by pure chance. At this level of accuracy, fewer than 1% of those judged to be ‘Inadequate’ are genuinely inadequate; of those rated ‘Outstanding’, only 4% actually produce outstanding learning gains; overall, 63% of judgements will be wrong. [validity] Other issues: Learning is invisible We believe that if we can do it, we can spot it We don’t believe that observation can miss so much - youtube clip
• #22: Have to trust our inspectors. *Be proactive in correspondence and try to narrow down the observation windows to reduce the planning burden on teachers
• #23: 2 areas to keep in mind for our preparation
• #24: TASK: what steps would you take to prepare your teachers?
• #25: Team of 2 or 3. Teachers get the experience in advance of someone coming in. You get a snapshot with patterns emerging
• #28: Geoff Petty in Evidence-based Teaching (OUP): it is useful to refer to learning intentions at important points during the lesson, when you can link key learning points to specific outcomes (or simply as a segue between activities – SIGNPOSTING. Can be done retrospectively or prospectively; could also be Negotiated signposting. A clear link here as well to John Hattie’s Visible Learning – meta-analysis that shows providing a clear structure improves learning.
• #29: Geoff Petty in Evidence-based Teaching (OUP): it is useful to refer to learning intentions at important points during the lesson, when you can link key learning points to specific outcomes (or simply as a segue between activities – SIGNPOSTING. Can be done retrospectively or prospectively; could also be Negotiated signposting