Teacherhead

When I run our Big Classroom training, it’s interesting to see which elements find resonance with different teachers. In many ways I’m spelling out the obvious. There is nothing massively sophisticated about these ideas but still they are not deeply embedded features of lots of teachers’ practice – not by a long way. They are partly fixes to bad habits and in some cases they are useful developments of other core practices.

The left in general – needs to embrace and strengthen the current curriculum, behaviour, instruction agenda. These are our best bets by far. But ideological dogma stands in the way. I’m no expert on PISA but the response to it has been fascinating as well as frustrating. I think we can all understand that measures like this are complex and flawed; they are just one indicator and there’s a big margin of error. We can also agree that claims of cause and effect are problematic.

Just in case you didn’t know these exist, here’s a link to my youtube channel where I’ve recorded the Kitchen Pedagogy Series over the last few years. The videos are 6-10 minutes long covering a range of common issues. Click the images for the playlists on youtube. Here’s the first one I did.. over 14k view for this! The most recent 4th series is underway with three videos so far. Series 3 has 17 videos! Series 2. 7 videos Series 1 has 5 videos.

As readers of this blog will know, I’m a passionate advocate for developing teaching techniques with precision; I believe in strong routines and clear boundaries for assertive behaviour management; I’m committed to the idea of setting high expectations of students, making them work really hard and being generally extremely demanding! I also think strong collective action across a team and a school is way more powerful for raising standards than each teacher going off doing their own thing.

There’s a lot of important and interesting debate about the ‘forgotten third’ and grading. Various bits of wrong-headedness permeate the discussion including the delusional quest for ‘criterion referenced’ assessment (just reading the below should show how absurdly unwieldy that would be, if you understand anything about assessment) and the silly conspiracy talk about quotas on exam grades.

It’s an interesting social dynamic that, in any group, there are people who tend to dominate and others who sit back. You see this in friendship groups and social settings; you see it in staff and team meetings; you most certainly see it lessons. Some people, very naturally seek to air their opinions in a group – they demand to be heard; they assert themselves in the unspoken contest for a share of the public air time. Others do not.

Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. This is weird! A podcast made by AI for my recent post. Hmmm Pip: Teacherhead is back with the kind of post that makes you realize professional development season has arrived, whether you packed for it or not. Mara: Tom Sherrington has been visiting schools and lessons at scale, and what he keeps finding points to three connected areas of teaching practice — inclusion, responsiveness, and oracy. That’s the territory we’re covering today.

Based on what I observe from my travels, visiting hundreds of lessons and meeting hundreds of teachers, I find I keep coming back to these three big areas to work on in most settings: Inclusive Teaching – the need to teach all learners all the time. Responsive Teaching – the need for formative action in real time. Teaching through talk – the need to develop deeper oracy culture and routines. I’ve written about each of these multiple times before so I’ll share some of those posts here.

I’ve been interacting with ChatGPT to help create something assimilates some of the key ideas about learning that I find particularly helpful. I’ve written about most of these separately before and they all feature in my training sessions at some point or other. I was interested to see how well they all intersect and was conscious that it’s hard to condense without losing meaning and to balance simplicity with detail.

I asked ChatGPT to make this image with the prompt: Can you produce an illustration suggesting process moving from being weak or done well only in small pockets, then a mass implementation phase where things improve but nuance and subtlety are lost and then a final phase where complexity is restored but more people are doing things much better. I then asked to make it about teachers.