Inside Teaching

How to Make a Difference for Every Learner and Teacher

John Blanchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351778534
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book distils key research and evidence about what effective teaching means in practice. Covering all aspects of teaching, it encourages the reader to reflect on their pupils, their planning, teaching and assessing and their continual professional development.

Inside Teaching has an emphasis throughout on encouraging dialogue with pupils about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how they can evaluate and develop what they do. Including questions for reflection and summaries of key ideas, the book provides practical support to help teachers ensure that they make a real difference to their pupils' chances of success. Chapters include:

• Pupils with different backgrounds and levels of support
• Working with your pupils' parents and carers
• Planning to frame your pupils' thinking
• Developing effective feedback for your pupils
• Making meetings useful
• Observing lessons and being observed.

This practical book will be an essential resource for both trainee and practising teachers who want to help their pupils to fulfil their physical, emotional and intellectual potential.

Part I

Your pupils

CHAPTER 1

Pupils with different backgrounds and levels of support

This chapter looks at how the circumstances of your pupils’ lives can affect their school experience. How pupils are regarded and treated by people around them has a determining effect on how well they learn and how well they do. Teaching can provide pupils with essential, differentiated encouragement, support, guidance and feedback. We will consider how you can make a difference to your pupils’ learning in school.

What difference do your pupils’ backgrounds make to their school experience and performance?

Your pupils have different socio-economic backgrounds. You cannot change your pupils’ backgrounds, but you can make a difference to how they are treated during their time at school.

Teaching is an experiment. You cannot be sure what the response will be to your intentions, plans and actions. Your work does not start or finish neatly, and outcomes are ongoing, not always evident and open to a range of interpretations.

Independent variables – things you cannot control or influence – include pupils’ being young or old in their year group; their position in their family; their medical history; and their parents’ recollections of their school experience. Dependent variables – things you can set out to control or influence – include how you work with colleagues, pupils, parents and others in planning, carrying out and evaluating your teaching; the kinds of activities your pupils engage in; and how your pupils’ achievements are recorded and reported.

A key outcome might be expressed as how your pupils come to feel about learning. The more confidently they see themselves as learners, capable of finding things out and achieving things, the more they are likely to enjoy and succeed in school. Another outcome might be the results your pupils gain in national tests and qualifications. The better you enable them to take their next steps in life, the more they will appreciate their time with you.

You can try to find out which dependent variables affect your pupils’ ­learning. Will it be home learning activities or group work in class, self-directed projects, the feedback they get or …? This is far from straightforward, not least because there are so many overlapping and interconnected variables, making it difficult to measure the effects of changing any one or cluster of them. In essence though, that is the task you face: finding ways to make the best possible difference to your pupils’ learning.

Pupils’ low attainment at school is associated with low socio-economic status and high attainment with high socio-economic status. These are correlations. Low socio-economic status is not an inevitable cause of pupils’ not achieving well at school, and high socio-economic status does not guarantee academic attainment.

Against the odds, a minority of pupils who do not have obvious social and material advantages does well at school. And another minority of pupils whose upbringing gives them considerable social and material advantages falls short of what they are expected to achieve.

What can explain those apparent anomalies? Research by Iram Siraj-Blatchford et al. (2011) indicated that encouragement, support and affirmation, shown through conversation and shared activities, are crucial. How your pupils are regarded and treated by people around them has a determining effect on their school performance. The people who make a difference to pupils’ chances of success show they are on their side: they express interest in the pupils’ well-being and prospects; they celebrate progress and share triumphs and disappointments; and they help the pupils plan next steps and new ventures.

The research shows that successful pupils, whatever their background, are helped by people around them who nurture their confidence and resilience. Pupils who are relatively unsuccessful at school, from high as well as low socio-economic-status families, have little protection against the risks and obstacles they encounter. Deprived of encouragement and support, they do not adjust well to school and they do not do well.

Four groups can be identified. Groups 2 and 4 perform according to expectations; groups 1 and 3 produce unexpected results:

•Group 1 are pupils whose academic attainments are higher than their low socio-economic status would predict.

•Group 2 are pupils whose academic attainments are as
low as their low socio-economic status would predict.

•Group 3 are pupils whose academic attainments are lower than their high socio-economic status would predict.

•Group 4 are pupils whose academic attainments are as high as their high socio-economic status would predict.

Pupils who are deprived of encouragement and support mostly have low school attainments. Pupils who are encouraged and supported by significant figures in their lives mostly achieve well at school.

	Successful school experience	Unsuccessful school experience
	Group 1 (better than expected results)	Group 2 (poor results, as expected)
Low socioeconomic status	they have people in their lives who help them develop their interests and do things together; feel they can control aspects of their lives; cope with mistakes and setbacks; appreciate teachers who explain things well and are enthusiastic and approachable; adjust well to school and feel encouraged there; may benefit from additional or special provision; and view peers positively and learn from them.	they have little enjoyment at home and little continuity of support for learning; are left to their own devices; have a negative self-image; feel some people are born able to do things and others are born without those abilities; do not adjust well to life at school but feel it to be alien, confusing and unsatisfactory; are at best ambivalent about help that is offered and may be indifferent to it; and feel hindered by peers.
	Group 4 (very good results, as expected)	Group 3 (worse than expected results)
High socioeconomic status	they have experiences that cultivate their sensibilities and give them a sense of entitlement; benefit from educational opportunities; and feel confident about their relationships with their peers.	they perform inconsistently; use ineffective learning strategies; make use of help when it is offered; are seen, and see themselves, as unable to learn easily; have little motivation to learn at school; lack emotional and practical support at home; say lessons and school do not work for them; and have uneasy and unproductive relationships with their peers.

Sugata Mitra (‘Build a school in the cloud’; 2013) highlighted ways in which ­children benefit from the company of grown-ups who are not necessarily knowledgeable but who are appreciative and inquisitive. Mitra showed how ‘admiration rather than discipline drives the learning spiral’. He called it ‘the method of the grandmother’. Learners benefit from moral support and role models, someone to egg them on, someone to say, ‘Wow! How did you do that?’

How can you make a difference to your pupils’ chances of success?

Mitra’s ‘The hole in the wall’ project (2007) showed that, given stimuli and ­resources, children can create self-organised learning environments (SOLEs). In the first of his experiments, carried out in a slum at Kalkaji, Delhi, India, children discovered a computer in a kiosk in a wall, which they could use as...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Your pupils
• Part 2 Planning, teaching and assessing
• Part 3 Job satisfaction and continuing to learn about teaching
• Useful websites
• Index 1: People and organisations
• Index 2: Themes and topics