“It’s not good Simon. Not Good at all!”

She fired the words out like a Gatling gun; her eyes making no attempt to hide a mixture of disappointment and contempt.

I had been a new Head at my struggling school for about ten months and this was the LA’s second ‘Teaching and Learning Review’ – which involved their top brass descending on the school and seeing whether we’d improved teaching enough to be no longer considered ‘a risk’. The first review was equally bad, but then I could simply trot out the ‘it was like this when I got here’ mantra.

This time it was my responsibility/ fault.

We’d worked hard over he past 10 months. We’d completely gutted and refurbished half of the school, injecting much needed optimism (not to mention tidiness!). Behaviour had turned a corner and staff were back in control of once lawless classrooms. And we thought we’d made real progress on improving teaching (which the LA judged inadequate during their first visit).

But here we were again. Most of the teaching inadequate and a growing sense of panic.

“You see the thing is Simon,” announced the Gatling gun LA enforcer, “we expect the first review to be bad – that’s normal – but the second…?” Her voice trailed away to leave a dramatic pause.

She looked out of the window.

Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

“A poor second review and.. well… we begin to wonder whether you can do the job.”

10 tips for improving Teaching.

I’m not going to suggest for one minute that I have even a fraction of the answers to the central question which we must all ask as school leaders, namely, ‘how do we improve teaching?’. There are a great many fine headteachers and academics, consultants and writers, who can offer far more eloquent answers to this question than I. 

However, over the past 11 years as a headteacher (who has often spent time supporting schools where this is the central issue) I have learnt a few things which have worked for my schools and the schools I’ve worked with. Most (if not all) are blindingly obvious and you will have worked out already. But they’ve worked for me so there’s no harm it re-stating these basics.

So here are my 10 top tips on how to improve teaching…

1. Look round schools where teaching is excellent.

You may have worked in a school where teaching is excellent and, let’s face it, you wouldn’t be a headteacher without knowing what good teaching looks like (the clue’s in the title!). However, the first thing I did as a new headteachers trying to improve teaching was look round as many truly high-performing schools as possible: first on my own, mining the Headteacher for tips on how they got teaching there; then with my staff, looking for common themes.

We devoted a whole INSET day to travelling the length and breadth of the region, looking at what made these schools work so well, taking photos and hoarding as many policies, processes and procedures as we could get our hands on.

We then spent a number of staff meetings pouring over what we’d seen, dissecting it and figuring out each constituent part.

This was a revelation to most of the staff who had gotten used to lazy ‘our children are just different to theirs’ or (worse still) ‘our children just can’t do tests’ thinking. At every school they found the same thing: it wasn’t that the schools were doing anything radically new, it was just that they were doing the basics really well, having defined clearly the expectation for themselves and the children. These schools then constantly reflected on and refined their practice until it was razor sharp – with eye-watering results as a result.

These visits showed our staff that these schools were excellent by design – not magic.

2. Make long-term friends with schools that are better than yours.

Although it kills me to say it (as I’m massively competitive), my current school owes a lot of its current success to having spent the last 4 years hanging out with schools which were better than ours. 

Within our Learning Partnership (a group of schools which works together on school improvement) there are 3 Outstanding schools which get some of the best results in the county (and in one case, country). The other schools 5 schools in the group are equally ambitious and I need to bring my ‘A Game’ to every Headteachers’ meeting so as to keep up!

We only benchmark ourselves as a school against the highest achieving of these schools and it’s written into our 4 Year Strategic Plan to be one of the top 2 performing schools in the group by 2020. This immediately shifts our mindset and re-calibrates our expectations. We spend time in these schools, learning what they’ve done which is so successful and then we work out how to take their teaching approaches into our setting. We frequently buy in their teachers either formally through secondments or informally to lead CPD and training.

The result? Our KS2 results were towards the top of the LA league table (from being 3rd from bottom in 2011). We also had the best results in the group in 2017 (although my Outstanding school colleagues assure me that they won’t be letting this happen in 2018!).

Make friends with schools who are better than you – it feels awkward to begin with, but changes your expectations for ever.

3. Get the precursors for learning right first.

As I’ve written in previous blogs,  you can’t begin to get teaching right until the culture, learning behaviour and ethos of the school is right. 

When I first become a Headteacher, I asked the amazing Simon Rowe (then Head of an extraordinary school in  Bristol) what the secret was. “Sort behaviour, sort environment and then sort teaching.” was his unhesitating response.

I won’t be going into culture, learning behaviour and ethos here – it’s a book in itself! However, don’t underestimate these, as without them your efforts to improve teaching are doomed to failure.

4. Improve Teacher Subject Knowledge.

The last 20 years of teacher CPD has been dominated by Pedagogical knowledge and Knowledge of how students learn. There is nothing wrong with this of itself, except that it seems to have taken place at the expense of improving teacher subject knowledge. I have sat in innumerable staff meetings on questioning techniques, learning styles etc etc, but very few on how to teach maths. If you consider that the average PGCE student has probably spent only a couple of hours in their training on maths subject knowledge then you can see where the problem lies.

There have been recent efforts to address this subject knowledge gap – through the network of Maths Hubs (and the English Hubs which are due to follow). However, if we want great teaching in our schools then we must be sure that the teachers really understand the content they are teaching. A few years ago our staff spent a series of staff meetings unpicking grammar rules for KS1 and KS2. What was apparent from the start was the huge variation in these teachers’ own understanding of grammar rules. It wasn’t their fault – they (like me) were educated in a era when grammar wasn’t really taught. But it really does matter, as we discovered that in many cases we had simply been teaching a rule incorrectly – leading to confusion when linked rules were taught in following years.

5. Systemise teaching

“What is it with teachers in this country? Why do they think that they have to re-invent the wheel – when they are not experts in curriculum design?”

This comment from a maths trainer from Singapore, together with a similar comment from a Spanish educationalist who seemed utterly perplexed by my teachers making all their own resources, has led me to question some of the received wisdom on planning curriculum delivery.

I, like many teachers, was trained to believe that (provided I was given the curriculum statements) I should be able to create a comprehensive and coherent scheme of work from scratch, and to an extent I could. However, as the trainer went on to explain “What makes you think that you are able to create a systematic maths program better than a maths specialist?”.

A key aspect of great teaching is, as Big Maths author Ben Harding puts it, “Working out all the steps in learning which a child needs to master and then teaching each one of those steps sequentially and effectively”.

We must therefore ensure that ALL our teachers are able to break the curriculum up into ‘masterable’ chunks, taught in the right order, which are repeated and reinforced often enough to be transferred to long-term memory. This means creating highly effective teaching sequences.

Now I’m not saying that teachers can’t do this themselves – clearly they can (and at my school do in all subjects apart from Maths). However, this requires deep subject knowledge not just of individual units or concepts, but a clear understanding of the interdependence of these concepts and the sequence in which they must be learnt.

At my school, like all the effective schools which we have visited, a lot of time and energy is put into getting this right. In English, we have used specialist consultants and our own knowledge of ‘what works’ to create our own 3 week planning cycle which maps clearly the steps that every child must take to master the whole. In maths we use Big Maths for the stuff which children ‘just need to know’: counting, tables & number bonds, number connections, place value and the four rules. The rest of the session follows the ‘Maths? No Problem!’ (Singapore Maths) scheme of work which tells the teacher exactly what to teach in every lesson of the year. This is the sort of prescriptive scheme which I and many others used to scoff at. However, it is used by the most successful teachers of maths in the world – and gets stunning results.

Getting the learning steps right to ensure great teaching is blindingly obvious – but often overlooked.

6. Make sure you choose the right approaches 

The fabulous Doug Lemov, author of ‘Teach like a Champion’ rightly observed that: “One of the problems with teaching is that there’s a temptation to evaluate what we do in the classroom based on how cleverly it aligns with a larger philosophy , or even how gratifying it is to use; not necessarily how effective it is…”

Remember ‘Brain Gym’ and ‘VAK’? The myth that if you simply gave every child a laptop they’d all become Shakespeare through ‘self-directed learning’? I have seen over the course of my 22 years in education fads come think and fast, each promising to revolutionise how children learn and each claiming to be based on ‘research’ – although never citing sources of said research.

I am neither what twitter would describe as a ‘Trad’ (a traditionalist) or a ‘Prog’ (a progressive). I am a pragmatist who does what works.

There are a great many ways to improve teaching through a diverse range of approaches. And we need those trail-blazers to find new ways of working. However, as a profession we have got to get better at looking at the evidence of any new approach to be sure that it actually works – not just get carried along with the tweets of a charismatic ‘educational gurus’, smart packaging or (worst of all) something which is just  trendy right now.

Before adopting any new approach  I will want to see the research for myself. If it’s a published scheme which my school is paying for, I will want a full list of all the schools nationally using it and then will ring half a dozen at random and press them on outcomes – including data.

There are many approaches which work –  but many that simply don’t. Make sure you invest in evidence-backed teaching – not snake oil.

7. Write down your expectations

In all the great schools I’ve visited and learnt from, a common  factor is that everyone knows what to do and how it should be done. They know that, whilst approaches will be tweaked and refined, once something is agreed it is compulsory – not optional.

Once we have settled on a new approach to adopt, and have trialed it, tweaked it, trained all the staff and agreed exactly how we will use it, we create a single page memo which details exactly what we have agreed, which is distributed and added to the school’s digital Staff Handbook which contains all other such memos.

The road to excellence is indeed paved with good intentions. If it’s written down then when people stray from what has been agreed (or just forget – we’re all really busy!) then we can all check what we agreed and get back on track.

Very OCD – but very effective.

8. Observe teaching regularly – but don’t judge.

I doubt I’ll make many friends here, but I think it is essential that leaders regularly look at the quality of teaching within classes by actually watching it. 

I know that some very charismatic educationalists (many on twitter) say that lesson observations are the work of the devil (or OFSTED… or both) but I think, if done well, it can improve teaching a great deal.

The first step in having effective lesson observation is to remove any grade or judgement – they completely change the emphasis to one of accountability which paralyses development potential.

The next, in my view most powerful tip (one of many stolen from the Outstanding Mangotsfield Primary School) is to have shorter, more frequent lesson observations which are tightly focused around what the school and individual is working to improve. We no longer have 3 hour long observations per year (the traditional performance management format) but instead have three 20 minute observations spread over three weeks. After each observation there is an open and positively-framed developmental discussion about what happened in the lesson. We look at what worked well – and why (as it is important for teachers to know this so that they can do more of it). We look at what didn’t work so well – but again, are very specific (which learners, when during the lessons etcc) noting down interactions as objectively and precisely as possible. We then discuss what one small thing could improve that area to develop and set a very clear action for the following week’s observation.

And by very clear action we don’t say daft things like ‘ensure your pupil premium children make better progress’. This is both vague and impossible for a teacher to act upon. We include actions such as ‘ensure that your pupil premium children understand the task and concept by quickly checking in with them after the main input before they start working independently’. This is a concrete action which no teacher can fail at.

The impact of this? Teachers still get nervous of observation – it’s unavoidable. But they’ve stopped seeing them as these cliff-edge, high stakes performances and now see them for what they are – a professional discussion about what tweaks improve teaching.

Better still, make sure teachers observe one another (preferably teaching the same lesson) as this generates a wealth of conversations about improving ‘hit rate’.

And as we know, excellent teachers do nothing magical – they just hit the right spot in learning more often with more children each lesson. If we all improve our ‘hit rate’ we all get better.

9. Don’t wait for teachers to struggle – help them!

Angela Duckworth quite rightly points out that, whilst we’re getting quite good at identifying a growth mindset in ourselves, we very often view others as having a fixed mindset, being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ teachers who will never change. This is of course dangerous nonsense. 

Some teachers will struggle to understand a new approach and need extra help. One of the best things we have done over the last couple of years at my school is to build in release time for teachers to support other teachers.

This might be a single session or it might be a whole term’s worth of support. It will involve working alongside them, without judgement, to improve subject knowledge, structure learning sequences and look at improving their learning hit rate in lessons.

From time to time it may involve an informal action plan – we are all accountable for our outcomes and there is a process for managing capability which needs to be occasionally used. However, mostly it will be teachers helping teachers get better at teaching.

Or common sense as it’s otherwise known.

10. Change takes time. Make sure you embed before moving on.

If you are improving teaching in a Good school with secure results, then you have the freedom to introduce new initiatives and approaches in a measured and unhurried fashion. If you are trying to improve teaching in a school in difficulty, you will be acutely aware of the ticking of the clock, counting down the hours until your next LA or OFSTED visit. 

If you  find yourself trying to improve teaching in a hurry, which if your school is failing you will be, my only piece of advice is to not try and do everything all at once.

Be ‘pacey’ by all means. Work out which new initiatives will have the biggest impact most quickly and do those first. Look for quick wins – sometimes a little, painless tweak will increase the learning hit rate in a stroke.

But try not to do everything all at once (even if you know exactly what needs to be done). This will only lead to confusion as staff struggle to assimilate the raft of new approaches which they have yet to develop a deep understanding of.

I would like to say that this was an epiphany which dawned on me as I sat across the table from that angry looking County enforcer the day of the fateful Teaching and Learning review. In truth it took hours of soul-searching and discussion with my ‘new to headteachering’ mentor to arrive at this conclusion.

It was not that my teachers during that review were doing the wrong things, it was that they simply couldn’t assimilate all the new ideas all at once so ended up confused and stressed – trying to tick off a mental checklist of what ‘good teaching looks like’.

It takes time to internalise new learning (whether your a child or a teacher).

So we focused on one think at a time. Learnt the new skill. Mastered and refined it. And only then moved on.

Within a year OFSTED had judged the school ‘Good’ and the Leadership of Teaching and Learning ‘Outstanding’.

The following day the LA enforcer called.

“We always had every faith in you.” she said cheerily.