Starting with an example……
I worked with a teacher, I’ll call her Helen, at an 11-18 comprehensive school**. She was in her third year of teaching, but was seriously thinking of leaving the profession because, in a school review, she had managed to garner two grade 4s for quality of teaching. Inadequate; not once, but twice; in two days. Whether the school should be grading lessons is a different matter, but that’s a different story; my views here.
Helen was and is, an excellent learner. She’s keen to learn and willing to apply what she’d learned, but she felt that if she didn’t apply all that she had learned, she wouldn’t be able to produce excellent teaching. What she was doing was trying to incorporate almost everything she’d ever learned into a short period of teaching which she knew would be on display. It failed miserably. She ended up explaining for far too long and the pupils were left trying to assimilate too much information. They became increasingly bored and confused and some weren’t learning anything – hence the school giving her Grade 4s. Relationships in the lesson were fractious and behaviour was poor, as a result.
It was an educational car crash and Helen felt it acutely. She felt it was her fault, she was inadequate herself and she was letting down both the school and her pupils. Planning for a week’s teaching was taking her an inordinate amount of time which was taking her away from her young family and putting pressure on her relationship. The tears were awful and uncomfortable and Helen was off school ill in the weeks following. Her questioning of whether the profession was for her was deep and profound.
Working with Helen on planning and achieving a change.
As part of a support programme for several staff – teaching in the school overall was found to be of far poorer quality than the previous HT had said it was(!), but a new broom had brought in a very different and supportive regime – I was fortunate to be asked to work with Helen, helping her to re-organise her planning.
Helen couldn’t continue with the teacher-led methods she’d always employed, as they plainly weren’t effective. Instead, we worked around a different principle. Tell the pupils what they need to learn and plan to support them to be able to learn, rather than teaching them what you know they must know.
It sounds ever so simple, but it involves an enormous switch in thinking. Helen, as I’ve said, was keen to learn and was able to do that. The experiment produced immediate results, with good progress from pupils. I’ve returned to the same school several times over the last 2 years since first meeting Helen. Her last few formal observations have been mainly grade 1. Extraordinary in many ways. Helen spends far less time planning than she used to, enjoys terrific relationships with pupils and is a changed person as a result. She has now moved on from simply using outcomes, though all her lessons have a clear sense of where they are going. She often uses questions to drive the learning, rather than an outcome, involving the pupils in participating via the use of SOLO taxonomy to get them to aim for meta-understanding, rather than simply learning what Helen used to want them to learn.
How can the use of clear outcomes help?
Changing to a teaching approach, which used clear outcomes, worked spectacularly well for one individual. It’s never going to do this for everyone, but it can help anyone to improve their teaching and save time in planning. I see stages in the use of outcomes and letting pupils into what you do is a crucial part of this, though learners being learners, they may well fly at a rate far quicker than the artifices of moving between stages!
All the time, explain why you are doing all this outcome-based learning. Give them a goal – effectively a meta-outcome; to become better learners who can transfer skills away from your classroom to other areas of subject need. Get them to measure how this happens through cross-curricular learning journals, to be completed in DIRT time. Get them to identify where they have incorporated an idea from another subject through a margin note. Get them to express their present level of learning confidence through a ladder/numerical score. Ask other teachers when they have seen particular pupils apply techniques from your lesson in that subject, then feed this back to the pupils.
All ideas, but the creation of meta-learners who can achieve that extra 5th EBacc GCSE is not something a school can ignore in a data-driven environment. If the kids do achieve, it keeps the Dfe and Ofsted happy, off your back and you can concentrate on what really matters – developing confident young people who will be able to learn skills they don’t yet know they will need, so they can run the country effectively when you are in your dotage and pay your pension!!
Stage 1. A clear outcome allows a pupil to feel safe, as they know where they are going. It’s not the be-all and end-all of learning at this stage, but as a step towards involving learners more in their learning, it can be used effectively to include pupils and builds confidence that they can achieve an outcome at a level/grade above what they were achieving before. Marginal gains and showing pupils how important small, incremental successes can be are very important here.
Stage 2. Outcome-based learning puts pupils squarely at the heart of the learning. Preparation is done to scaffold and support learning and not to teach well. Indeed, the teacher becomes less of a teacher and more of a facilitator and the pupils are encouraged to recognise that. The handing over of the learning process becomes more natural and the teacher intervenes at apposite times, bringing the class together for group sessions to explore how the classes collective intelligence can be used more effectively to benefit all. Group structures become more fluid, with pupils beginning to make decisions about what is best for them to achieve. The flipped classroom can really help here. so more pulls come equipped with knowledge, which can then be shared, sidestepping the teacher having to teach from a blank canvas.
3. Outcome-based learning eventually hands the learning over to the pupils, allowing them to generalise and transform their learning, as they have ownership. Pupils decide collectively, or individually, the styles of learning that suit them best and the teacher helps individuals and the class, to explore those paths, guiding and explaining why a particular method may not be best for them. Pupils become confident with experimenting and bring different styles of learning, gleaned from other classes and experiences, to the teacher, changing the learning dynamic further and adding to the learning of others. Pupils can hypothesise how a particular method of learning might help them elsewhere, experiment with it in another situation and bring it back to the group. Social media and the Internet help pupils to go further than the teacher might expect and the teacher facilitates directions. Pupils know when and why things have to happen and can thus plan their learning timetable in that subject, accordingly.
When you see classrooms where this happens, it is extraordinary. Back to Helen.
As part of a recent Talk for Teaching session, 5 of us reflected on Helen’s (the “spark”) teaching, in her lesson. The 5th person in the reflection group was actually Helen, as it should be. She joined the discussions whenever she could and with whomsoever she wanted (often and easily, as you’ll see), explaining why she’d set the lesson up and planned it that way and talking about anything that became important. The way the mixed class of Year 10s approached that lesson was nothing short of amazing. They’d researched movement and form, pre-lesson, to bring in elements of dance which actually astonished Helen herself! Because they were so confident in their skills, they decided to re-organise the groups (well, actually, one group of 3 effectively re-organised the other 15 pupils, with help from Helen!) to cross-fertilise their different ideas.
Running underneath this, Helen provided clear direction and knowledge about exam technique, BTec criteria gradings and what particular dance elements were likely to score the highest grades She also provided a range of visual and printed resources for the class to use. The smiles and laughter in the class were infectious and it’s impossible to forget the spontaneous applause from all five reflectors and the pupils, as the lesson drew to a close with the best group (selected by the class, without Helen intervening) giving a “masterclass” of how to achieve highly in the coming dance assessments. An utter joy to watch and one of the best things i have ever seen on offer to pupils in a class. Helen said she’d prepared most of that lesson, immediately after talking with her pupils about what they next wanted, at break following the previous lesson. It took her next to no time to prepare and she ran the ideas past a couple of others in her new department(!) before delivery to spread ideas further.
Reflections
Helen’s story exposes the idea of how some CPD can actually mislead staff. Staff had effectively and with good intentions, been given a smorgasbord of ideas from visiting speakers and countless T&L INSET days. What they hadn’t had was the freedom to learn for themselves what *they* needed to learn. Sometimes it is easier to sit and learn from others. It becomes complicit. CPD is offered, staff try it out because they know it will be looked for in PM and an idea permeates that this is good teaching. But it’s not. A culture of expectation and dependency develops and not freedoms. Staff may be expected to open up their teaching and pass ownership to their learners, without actually having ownership of their own learning. The expectation/dependency culture can mean that the provision of CPD continues to be provided by SLT/HT and staff access almost only what is on offer. The cycle continues.
It helped Helen so much that the meta-outcome she was given was to improve by seeing others teach; by being able to reflect in their classes and with them, at the point of delivery. The only expense was for someone like me to help in setting protocols and showing a different way. Cover was managed internally and Helen and others were are of class regularly, but only for t15 minutes at a time; then straight back into their own class. The mechanics of her own teaching changes were then all hers. Overall, teaching in the school is now excellent in lesson after lesson. It’s because teachers have had opportunities to see others’ teaching on a regular basis, supplemented by being able to talk, occasionally, with some very knowledgeable people, in classrooms, or in seminars, as a part of the process. CPD has been turned on its head and it has become PPD. It has become personalised professional development – a mirror of what has happened in the school’s classrooms – through the use of outcomes and planning (often collaborative) to provide structures in which pupils and staff can find their individual ways to achieve.
Stephen Tierney @LeadingLearner writes eloquently about teachers needing to be architects, rather than builders in their lesson planning. That’s what Helen did. Teachers are wonderfully creative people with very special skills. They don’t all need to have structures for improvement (though some will feel they can benefit). What they really need is the freedom to be able to use what’s out there to improve their own teaching skills – and a leadership team who have the vision to accommodate that freedom.
**”Helen” is a fictitious name, as the school and even the subject is an artifice – the original situation is too awkward to risk identification – but what happened isn’t!!