“Accelerated Learning!” 

I left a dramatic pause to anticipate the excited rapture of my colleagues.

They looked at me blankly. Some did their best to look interested. Others sighed.

I had been a Deputy Headteacher at the Junior School in a sleepy market town for less than a month and it was my mission to drag the backward Luddites into the 21st century with a mix of the very newest ideas on brainology and computers – lots of computers! I would transform their boring and homely classrooms into temples of modernity. There would be brain gym; there would be mind-maps; there would be VAK!

Brain-based Pedagogy would reign supreme and the school would soar!

That year attainment fell off a cliff.

How not to improve.

Over the years I have tried very hard to improve the life chances of my pupils. The quest to help them become better learners has been constant and I’d like to say that I’ve always chosen approaches wisely and carefully, having weighed up the evidence.

However, that would be a lie. 

Like many teachers and leaders, more than once I have been led down the rabbit hole by a charismatic educationalist, a loud voice in the staff meeting or, sadly, the government of the day! I have made many mistakes which have slowed progress and resulted in children not doing as well as they could have done.

I am not alone in this. Education is constantly evolving and children are getting better at learning because we as teachers are getting better at teaching. The teaching I see in my school today would have blown the mind of my 21 year old NQT self. Teachers today are better trained than at any time in my 22 year career.

However, progress (as we know) is never a straight line and we have, and continue to, happily stroll down many blind alleys in our pursuit of innovation.

So here is a short guide to some of the blind alleys, snake charmers and pedagogical rabbit holes I have happily followed so that you can hopefully watch out for them…

1.  Put ‘lids on kids’.

This is blindingly obvious, but the following phrases will destroy any attempt to  improve children’s learning more effectively than anything else:

1. ‘The thing is, our children just can’t do tests.’
2. ‘Little [John/ Sue/ Abdul/ Sophie] have a tough time at home, we can’t expect them to keep up/ read/ do their homework.’
3. ‘The kids just aren’t interested. They just don’t want to learn.’

I guarantee that if you allow these conversations to grow and take hold in your school then your school will fail its young people.

Now I’m not for one moment saying that life is fair. It isn’t. Some of our children live horrid lives blighted by poverty or abuse. As a Pupil Premium student in the UK, you are statistically more likely to get a fixed term exclusion from your school (10.7%) than you are to pass the EBacc (10.4%). That is not fair and it is not right.

If you teach in an area of high social deprivation then your children will come to school with more challenges in their lives than if you work in a leafy suburb. I get it.

However, the very second we stop trying to achieve the same for the poorest children as the most affluent, then we have failed. We have given up. We have passed a psychological threshold which allows us to downgrade our expectations. We have made it okay for poor children to fail.

In the autumn I visited (and blogged about) the stunning Parklands Primary in Leeds. It has 74% FSM and yet achieved some of the highest maths SAT scores in the country (76% GDS in Maths?!). When I asked about the children’s barriers the staff just looked at me blankly. They knew that their children had to succeed and that they had to help them. What’s more, this was no exam factory. This was one of the happiest and most inclusive schools I’ve seen.

So don’t put lids on kids.

2. Do it yourself.

One of the greatest mistakes that many schools make is to believe that unless you solved the problem all by yourself then you’ve somehow cheated.

Although this has improved massively in the past 10 years, as a profession, we are often tempted to never look beyond our own school, or worst still, our own classroom, when searching for ways to improve teaching and learning.

All too often we agonise about how to improve this or that without looking out and seeing what is working elsewhere. We may stumble across that genius idea ourselves, but that usually comes after many, many false starts.

We need to get better at looking for evidence and then examining proven strategies. Innovate by all means, but do it having looked at the evidence of effective practice nationally (and ideally internationally) and then make it your own.

3. Copy and paste.

This is the opposite of the point above.

I have seen this done hundreds of times, almost always with the same outcome.

A school has had some bad results and needs to improve outcomes quickly. They/ the LA/ Trust panic, and then they grab at the first example of effective practice that they can find and try and copy and paste it into the school with little or no thought as to how or why it might (or might not) work. There is a quick staff meeting where the new idea is roughly outlined (often without the all important detail) and then teachers are told to ‘make it so!’.

The outcome is nearly always the same: confusion, anxiety and then failure. Staff don’t really understand what they are being asked to implement (as often leaders don’t really understand it themselves). This results in a poor copy of the original without the deep thinking and cohesion which made it work in the first place. Finally, nothing improves and staff are left deflated and leaders confused. ‘Why hasn’t it worked here when it worked there?’ is the common refrain.

The reason is that any approach required deep understanding and adaption to meet the needs and circumstances of the individual school. No two schools are the same. Whilst we may be able to steal good ideas from others (my school does it all the time), we must also spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how it will fit into our context.

The best schools steal the best ideas all the time. But then they spend weeks researching their every detail, generating a clear school-specific action plan which is then implemented with masses of staff training and discussion.

They do not try and change a fundamental of teaching practice on the back of a misunderstood idea and hastily arranged staff meeting.

4. Chase the latest fad.

Remember loom-bands? How about Fidget-Spinners? Tamagotchi? Pogs?

You can work out how long a teacher has been in the game by the number of fads they remember.

However, whilst in the staff room we may mock the latest fleeting children’s fad, we are often oblivious to the fads and fashions which make their way into our classrooms and schools, not because they are effective, but because they are new!

Cloze Procedure? Brain Gym? VAK? Knowledge Planners? Whole class feedback? Vocabulary building? I’m not saying that all of these are pointless, only that we often accept them as evidence-based proven practice when they are actually just a fad talked up on twitter.

Try new ideas out by all means. Just don’t assume that they work.

5. Adopt everything – all at once.

Another very common mistake is to take every new idea and try to adopt them all into the school’s practice, all at once.

Again, this can be very tempting, especially if they are all tried and tested ideas which will have a big impact on outcomes for children. However, doing everything all at once will just lead to confusion and burnout.

It is impossible to effectively introduce more than 2-3 new initiatives simultaneously. No matter how pressing the need to improve, prioritise the improvements and master each one before moving on to the next.

6. Believe every ‘educationalist’ on Twitter.

“You see…” pronounced the educational author/ consultant/ ‘provocateur’ dramatically to the room of impressionable young teachers, “What we must do is not value what we assess… but assess what we value.”

There were agreeing murmurs from the young teachers and much scribbling of said quote in note books.

The consultant left a dramatic pause which allowed the adoring crowd to write down his words of wisdom. A little smile played on his lips. I could see his internal monologue: ‘Damn – I’m good!’

Except it was, of course, meaningless tosh.

Whilst social media in general and twitter in particular has led to the sharing of teaching ideas like never before, it comes to us unfiltered. Anyone can give an idea or an opinion (your reading one right now!). However, no matter how many followers the educational guru has, it doesn’t mean that their ideas actually work.

There are a great many ‘Educational Consultants’ who tell us regularly, and with much conviction, that there ideas are the golden bullet which will lead us into a new dawn of pedagogical understanding. Some of these will genuinely improve teaching and outcomes for children – and I spend a good deal of time reading about these new ideas.

But we need to be skeptical. For an idea to hold water it needs to have been proven to actually work. Almost all these consultants will talk about ‘impact’ and ‘science’ but that isn’t a guarantee of sound research methodology.

As Carl Sagan once said “What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe… but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

7. Bang out a new whole-school approach in 45 minutes at the end of school on a Wednesday. 

Schools are under enormous pressure to improve standards. And if your school (like mine once was) is struggling with poor outcomes, then the temptation to rush out ideas (no matter how good) without enough discussion and training is immense. 

A single, sketchy, staff meeting on a Wednesday in October, where the leader presenting doesn’t really understand the new idea themselves, won’t work. Call it a ‘pilot’ if you like. It still won’t work.

All the best schools which I’ve visited, Including the fabulous, Wilmslow Grange, take exactly the same approach to introducing new ideas. They spend literally months doing it. They figure out exactly how they want this approach to work at their school – usually outlining the proposed change to staff early on so that they understand the ‘why’ and have the opportunity to ask questions and input ideas at the planning stage. They then invest huge amounts of time in training staff – not just on the approach itself, but also on the subject knowledge which the teachers need to make it a success.

At a local school, here in South Gloucestershire, staff spent 15 weeks, in Terms 1 and 2, of staff meeting time just improving their mathematical subject knowledge. The result? Some of the best maths teaching I’ve seen. Not only did they understand the approach (which is often the easy bit) but they fully understood the content – and this is the part which is often neglected (or ignored altogether).

8. Over engineer the solution.

For my generation of primary school teachers, all I have to say is: 15, 15, 20, 10 and you will all know exactly what I’m talking about.

For those of you young enough to have avoided this code, it refers to the National Literacy Strategy, introduced into schools in England around 1997. Big boxes were dispatched from the government with detailed instructions of how every part of every English (then re-branded ‘Literacy’) lesson should be taught. The 15, 15, 20, 10 referred to the number of minutes we had to spend on the Reading, Grammar, independent, and plenary parts of the lesson. And whilst it massively improved teachers confidence and subject knowledge, it was also massively over-engineered.

It would be nice to think that such unnecessary complexity were a thing of the past, but I see it around me all the time. And whilst the current government has largely abandoned trying to direct so directly, new orthodoxies have replaced the old, and new specialists have over-complicated the already complex.

I know that teaching is a complex business. However, sat in a high-level strategic LA meeting recently I heard someone explain that it wasn’t the regional training which had failed (having had little or no impact on a large number of schools) but the schools themselves who had failed because they weren’t clever enough to understand the training…

Unless we can break complex approaches and present them in bite-sized chunks which all teachers can digest, then (no matter how good the idea is) it is doomed to failure.

The best schools make complex ideas simple.

9. Believe in simple solutions to complex problems.

This may seem to contradict my last point but stick with me. 

Whilst clear thinking and careful planning can break complex and interconnected problems down into bite-sized chunks which can then be addressed, this does not mean that the problems themselves are simple.

If closing the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers (for example) were simple then the national gap would by now have closed. The fact is that the mixture of disadvantaged children which you have in your school is unlike any other school and therefore the subtleties of your approach will also need to reflect this complexity. Sure, things like the Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit are tremendously useful research summaries and are a great place to start. However, any approach will need careful refinement to reflect the complexity of your particular setting.

10. Believe your own hype.

Doug Lemov, wisely noted: “One of the problems with teaching is that there’s a temptation to evaluate what we do in the classroom based on how clever it aligns with a larger philosophy , or even how gratifying it is to use, not necessarily how effective it is…” 

Sometimes, when we sit surrounded by the ashes of the failed idea which we so enthusiastically, and sometimes dogmatically, introduced to our colleagues, we must consider that part of that failure comes down to our own hubris.

My drive towards an ‘Accelerated Learning Nirvana’ was a terrible idea. But I was young, ambitious and (as the new Deputy)… in charge. I needed to push through this idea to assert my authority. I ignored any evidence which questioned my orthodoxy and plowed on regardless.

Had I just ‘got over myself’ I could have spared myself and the staff from this misguided approach – and the children from constant ‘Brain Gym’ to the strains of ‘bangin’ 90’s house classics’.

Being a reflective teacher means not accepting any idea as gospel. We must learn to challenge new approaches and engage with research to ensure that we can sniff out the bull-shit and better refine our teaching. This does not mean poo-pooing every new idea anyone suggests – our job is constantly about reinvention. It means reflecting, evaluating and adapting based on the best evidence available.

I believe that, despite all the blind alleys, teaching is much better than at any time in the past 20 years. However, if we are to ensure that our young people have the skills to thrive in our complex and uncertain world, then we must get better at getting better.

Now, whose for some brain gym..?