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A Perspective from Wales – Rob Davies, Oct 2020
It was in the autumn of 2014, and I was working for Estyn when Sutton Trust released its What Makes Great Teaching report. After reading the report, I remember thinking that the messages were a vital dose of common sense to a system that, in my view, was losing the plot, somewhat.
At the time, education in Wales was suffering from the twin pressures of over-the-top accountability and a desire to see independent or active learning in almost every lesson. On inspection, I frequently saw teaching approaches, which, I thought, promoted style over substance. I believe this is now referred to as performance over learning.
One such style-over-substance lesson had a teacher deploying a market-style activity. It involved groups of pupils moving around the classroom and explaining different aspects of the work to each other. After about 25 minutes of busy activity, the teacher questioned the class to see how much the pupils had learnt. Despite the preceding hive of activity and much to the teacher’s frustration, the pupils appeared to have learnt little. Increasingly exasperated, the teacher asked the pupils to stand in different areas of the classroom to express their opinions on the topic at hand. After a few minutes, the bemused pupils, unsure where to stand, nearly all, huddled together in one corner of the room. The, by now, distraught teacher, tried to convince the pupils to spread out across the classroom to represent a range of opinions. However, even under duress, the pupils resisted moving. The lesson concluded with the teacher asking each pupil to justify why they had chosen to stand where they were. As most pupils were in the same corner of the room, nearly every pupil reiterated a similar response to the one before. Needless to say, the responses were lacking in substance, and the dismissal was painfully slow!
Circa 2004, when teaching in Neath, I remember an INSET day that focussed on active learning. One of the professional-learning activities involved around eight members of staff interlocking their arms to form a circle that would represent an egg in a Fallopian tube. Three other members of staff were asked to take the role of sperms. Their specific job was the enzymatic penetration of the egg's arm-locked membrane to fertilize the egg. As you can imagine, a great deal of hilarity ensued! Afterwards, I was left puzzling whether this approach could work with a class of self-conscious teenagers.
With a range of similar experiences etched into my mind over nearly twenty-five years’ worth of working in education, it was with great relief to read the Sutton Trust’s What Makes Great Teaching report. It succinctly identified the factors that had the greatest impact of improving pupils’ outcomes. These factors were the strength of teachers’ subject knowledge, the quality of their instruction and classroom and resource management. The report also noted that ensuring pupils were “always active” had no empirical basis. At last, I thought, some common sense – no need for pupils, or teachers for that matter, to pretend to be sperms and eggs!
In 2017, I left Estyn and took up a new role with Swansea Council. I was determined to promote evidence-informed approaches, such as those highlighted in What Makes Great Teaching and, also, The Deans for Impact, The Science of Learning – which provides a helpful summary of the findings from cognitive science. With the backing of Swansea’s Director of Education, I was tasked with leading this area of the Council’s work.
I had been impressed with the work of Evidenced Based Education, and I had noticed that Professor Rob Coe, the lead author of What Makes Great Teaching, was part of their team. I contacted Professor Stuart Kime, EBE’s Director of Education. Stuart, along with CJ Rauch, agreed to deliver Science of Learning sessions to our headteachers and secondary senior leaders; both sessions were extremely well received and have provided a platform to drive evidence-based approaches through our networks and general work with schools.
Stuart also noted that the Evidence Based Education team were working on a follow-up report to What Makes Great Teaching, which would be called The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review. He invited me to comment on a draft. How could I refuse – being asked was a privilege, personally, and, indeed, for Swansea Council.
On reading the draft report, I could see the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review would be another step up on What Makes Great Teaching. The underlying research had been updated, and, importantly, the evidence review was more teacher-friendly and readable than its forerunner. It also provided greater detail on evidenced-based teaching and learning strategies, and the related underpinning research.
The published report succinctly condenses a wide array of research into four priorities that are intended to help teachers to maximise pupils’ learning.
These are:
Understand the content they are teaching and how it is learnt
Create a supportive environment for learning
Manage the classroom to maximise the opportunity to learn
Present content, activities and interactions that activate their students’ thinking
The four priorities are broken down into 17 elements, which can be thought of as the “best bets” for teachers to focus on to improve teaching and learning.
The 17 elements are:
Understand the content they are teaching and how it is learnt
Having deep and fluent knowledge and flexible understanding of the content you are teaching
Knowledge of the requirements of curriculum sequencing and dependencies in relation to the content and ideas you are teaching
Knowledge of relevant curriculum tasks, assessments and activities, their diagnostic and didactic potential; being able to generate varied explanations and multiple representations/analogies/ examples for the ideas you are teaching
Knowledge of common student strategies, misconceptions, and sticking points in relation to the content you are teaching
Create a supportive environment for learning
Promoting interactions and relationships with all students that are based on mutual respect, care, empathy and warmth; avoiding negative emotions in interactions with students; being sensitive to the individual needs, emotions, culture and beliefs of students
Promoting a positive climate of student-student relationships, characterised by respect, trust, cooperation and care
Promoting learner motivation through feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness
Creating a climate of high expectations, with high challenge and high trust, so learners feel it is okay to have a go; encouraging learners to attribute their success or failure to things they can change
Manage the classroom to maximise the opportunity to learn
Managing time and resources efficiently in the classroom to maximise productivity and minimise wasted time (e.g., starts, transitions); giving clear instructions so students understand what they should be doing; using (and explicitly teaching) routines to make transitions smooth
Ensuring that rules, expectations and consequences for behaviour are explicit, clear and consistently applied
Preventing, anticipating & responding to potentially disruptive incidents; reinforcing positive student behaviours; signalling awareness of what is happening in the classroom and responding appropriately
Present content, activities and interactions that activate their students’ thinking
Structuring: giving students an appropriate sequence of learning tasks; signalling learning objectives, rationale, overview, key ideas and stages of progress; matching tasks to learners’ needs and readiness; scaffolding and supporting to make tasks accessible to all, but gradually removed so that all students succeed at the required level
Explaining: presenting and communicating new ideas clearly, with concise, appropriate, engaging explanations; connecting new ideas to what has previously been learnt (and re-activating/checking that prior knowledge); using examples (and non-examples) appropriately to help learners understand and build connections; modelling/ demonstrating new skills or procedures with appropriate scaffolding and challenge; using worked/part-worked examples
Questioning: using questions and dialogue to promote elaboration and connected, flexible thinking among learners (e.g., ‘Why?’, ‘Compare’, etc.); using questions to elicit student thinking; getting responses from all students; using high-quality assessment to evidence learning; interpreting, communicating and responding to assessment evidence appropriately
Interacting: responding appropriately to feedback from students about their thinking/ knowledge/understanding; giving students actionable feedback to guide their learning
Embedding: giving students tasks that embed and reinforce learning; requiring them to practise until learning is fluent and secure; ensuring that once-learnt material is reviewed/revisited to prevent forgetting
Activating: helping students to plan, regulate and monitor their own learning; progressing appropriately from structured to more independent learning as students develop knowledge and expertise
The publication of the evidence review could not be timelier for Wales as we endeavour to support the Welsh Government’s educational reform agenda. The review’s guiding “best bets” provide schools with a strong platform for improving teaching and learning and assisting with curriculum reform, as well as helping schools to develop as learning organisations.
As I look forward to a fourth decade in teaching, it is easy to look back and laugh at all the silly fads and gimmicks that have permeated, entertained, and muddled the education landscape. However, despite the hilarity and inherent nonsense of approaches such as brain gym, VAK, thinking hats and lollipop sticks, too often we have let pupils down; particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
And that is no laughing matter.
It is time to stop the nonsense.
We need to take advantage of the best research evidence, develop robust approaches to teaching and learning and curriculum design, and ensure we provide pupils across Wales with the education they deserve.
With that in mind, the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review is a great place to start.
References
The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review, Evidenced Based Education, June 2020
The Science of Learning, Deans for Impact, Austin, TX: Deans for Impact, 2015
What makes great teaching?, Rob Coe et al, Oct 2014
