Teach Like Nobody's Watching

The essential guide to effective and efficient teaching

Mark Enser

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781785833991
• eBook ISBN: 9781785834547
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Teach Like Nobody's Watching: The essential guide to effective and efficient teaching, Mark Enser sets out a time-efficient approach to teaching that will reduce teachers' workload and enhance their pupils' levels of engagement and attainment.

At a time when schools are crying out for more autonomy and trust, teacher and bestselling author Mark Enser asks educators the critical question How would you teach if nobody were watching? and empowers them with the tools and confidence to do just that.

Mark argues that a quality education is rooted in simplicity. In this book he convincingly strips away the layers of contradictory pedagogical advice that teachers have received over the years and lends weight to the three key pillars that underpin effective, efficient teaching: the lesson, the curriculum and the school's support structure.

Teach Like Nobody's Watching explores these three core elements in detail, and presents teachers with a range of practical, time-efficient approaches to help them reclaim their professional agency and ensure that their pupils get the excellent education they deserve.

Part I considers the individual lesson and explores how lessons can be built around four simple elements: recap, input, application and feedback. Each chapter considers one aspect of the lesson in turn and discusses its importance with a particular focus on how educational research can be applied to it in the classroom, how it might look in different subjects, and the potential pitfalls to avoid.

Part II recognises that lessons don't happen in isolation but as part of a wider curriculum. This section tackles: the creation of a programme of study that takes pupils on a journey through your subject; the super-curriculum of what happens outside the classroom; the principles of assessment design; and how time in departments can be used to reduce workload and support a culture of excellence.

Finally, Part III looks at the role of the wider school in supporting teachers to teach like nobody's watching and how leaders can help to set them free from some of the more burdensome pressures. In this section, Mark draws on the experience of school leaders in a range of different contexts to illustrate what they have done to support effective and efficient teaching in their schools.

Suitable for all teachers in both primary and secondary schools.

PART I

THE LESSON

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

In most schools, it is in the lesson where the individual teacher has the most control, or at least it should be. Unfortunately, many schools have weighed teachers down with long lists of non-negotiables that they are expected to demonstrate in their classrooms. These demands are loaded with various myths about learning that have lingered from teacher training or from years of poor continuing professional development (CPD). The problem has also been driven by fear and a culture of high-stakes accountability. This has led to pedagogy in the classroom being shaped around an idea of what Ofsted are looking for.1 This, as we shall discuss throughout this book, distorts our practice by asking us to teach for outside observers and not for our pupils.

Part I takes a look at the lesson and asks, “What would the lesson look like if teachers took back control of their own classrooms?” To answer this question, we will have to take a good hard look at a number of sacred cows in teaching – for example:

Testing is neutral and doesn’t lead to learning.

Pupils benefit from written comments on their work.

We should plan engaging activities.

Noisy classrooms are a sign of learning.

Teachers should limit how much they talk.

Pupils need to discover knowledge for themselves.

There is one point that we need to discuss before we get started:

Teachers need to plan lessons.

As with many myths in education, this seems too self-evident to be challenged, but challenge it we must. For as long as I can remember, the hour-long lesson has been king. When we train to teach, we are required to complete plans for each of the hour-long lessons we will deliver, with clearly defined objectives that will be met at the end of this unit of time. In many schools, the requirement to create lesson plans for each hour is still there, especially for observed lessons. This hour-long lesson should invariably involve some sort of starter, then a task or series of tasks, and then a plenary to demonstrate what has been learnt. Even if we aren’t writing out individual lesson plans, this way of thinking about a lesson is still engrained from our training. But it is wrong.

Whatever made us think that every objective can be met in exactly one hour? Or, magically, in 50 minutes if that is how long the lesson is? Some things must take more time to learn than others and yet we still think of learning as having to fit into neat blocks of time that begin when pupils enter the classroom and end when they leave.

Before we can do anything else, we need to stop planning lessons as hour-long blocks of time and start thinking about planning learning. When I talk about a lesson comprising of four elements – recap, input, application and feedback – I don’t mean to suggest that these should be worked through in the hour. Rather, whilst meeting an objective, over however long, all four elements should be present. This might involve recap at various points, a mix of input and application, and time for feedback throughout. It might take ten minutes to meet an objective or five hours.

1 See, for example, Daisy Christodoulou, Seven Myths About Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

CHAPTER 1

RECAP

FROM THE CHALKFACE

When I started teaching, we had hour-long lessons, in theory. In practice we had 40-minute lessons because the start and end were devoted to starters and plenaries. We were explicitly told that the start of the lesson need not have anything to do with the topic of the rest of the lesson, and should be used to “engage the class” and get them excited. Apparently, the idea that the lesson itself could be engaging didn’t cross anyone’s mind. This led to hours of work as I tried to devise exciting and engaging little starters. Pupils would roam the classroom looking for clues about today’s objective, come in to the sounds of tropical rainforests and imagine what it would be like to sail down a river, or be given cards which each revealed one piece of information and have to search for someone with a card that related to it. It took ages, no one learnt anything, and it would take them time to settle down again afterwards.

Now I usually start with a quiz.

WHY DO WE START THE LESSON WITH A RECAP?

I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to see a lot of teachers teach. I wander in and out of classrooms in my own school and sometimes get invited to do the same in other schools. Wherever I am, and whatever subject I am observing, I almost always hear the same words towards the start of a lesson: “Last lesson we …” “Last lesson we …” is the teacher equivalent of “Once upon a time” or “In a galaxy far, far away”. It indicates that the lesson is underway, that we have begun. And it isn’t only in the classroom that we find this. When I was learning to drive, I remember each lesson beginning with a quick reminder of the basics learnt last time. When learning to bake I made an apple crumble, and that lesson started with a reminder that rubbing in the fat and flour was the same method we’d used with the scones we’d made the week before. When we are teaching something, we naturally start with a recap of what went before.

To recap is to “recapitulate” – to go through and summarise the main points of a previous meeting or document. It is literally a step backwards. So why does learning start in this way? Shouldn’t we be starting our lesson by rushing headlong into a new learning objective? Isn’t going back over something you have already done a bit boring?

Let us look at each of those concerns in turn.

Why does learning start with recap?

I would suggest that there is a reason why so many lessons, in and out of the classroom, start with the magic words “Last lesson we …” It is because it works. Humans are natural teachers and intuitively know how to pass on what they know to the next generation. In Making Kids Cleverer, David Didau cites research from psychologists who looked at young children who were teaching each other to play board games and deployed the same kind of strategies as trained teachers. This leads to him concluding:

this is somewhat alarming as it suggests that much of what teacher training and professional development consists of are competencies possessed by the average 5-year-old!1

As we shall see, learning doesn’t just occur from the study of new material, but from the constant recollection of material we have studied before. If we don’t revisit something, we struggle to remember it. The adage “use it or lose it” seems to apply here. Teachers, and possibly 5-year-olds, instinctively understand this.

Shouldn’t we start by moving straight on to the next objective?

This is certainly how I was encouraged to start a lesson when I began teaching. We were told that a lesson should begin with something to excite the pupils about what they were going to learn, which would engage them in the lesson. Whilst this is well intentioned, it runs the risk of each (albeit very exciting) lesson appearing to be a distinct silo of information. This doesn’t allow complex schemas to develop (as we will explore shortly).

Isn’t going back over something you have already done boring?

Short answer: no.

Having the chance to use what you have learnt is far from boring. It gives pupils a feeling of progress and a way of actually seeing what they have learnt. We also need to keep in mind that our perspective of the school day is very different to that of our pupils. When they leave our classroom, they don’t exist in a vacuum. They will have learnt new things in half a dozen or so other subjects, and will have done various other things outside of school as well. Spending a few minutes to pause and reflect on what they have already learnt can be an impo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The lesson
• Part II: The curriculum
• Part III: The wider school
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright