World Class

Tackling the Ten Biggest Challenges Facing Schools Today

David James, Ian Warwick, David James, Ian Warwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317307716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every school is different, but all schools face very similar challenges. Drawing on their combined teaching experience of over fifty years in both independent and state schools, educationalists David James and Ian Warwick have chosen ten questions that tackle the most difficult challenges that face schools today, and invited leading education experts to address them in stimulating and accessible essays, which are each under a thousand words.

With contributions from John Hattie, David Blunkett, Doug Lemov, Anthony Seldon, Sandy Speicher, Tim Hawkes and many more, this insightful and engaging book features exclusive essays with some of the world's most well-known and well-respected thinkers and speakers in education, business and politics, accompanied by thought-provoking introductions.

The contributors provide new perspectives on some of the issues that occupy educationalists today; they challenge conventional wisdom and, above all, put forward practical, workable, evidence-based solutions that can transform teaching and learning.

World Class is a powerful manifesto for change that nobody interested in education today can ignore.

Chapter 1

How can we improve teaching?

Introduction

There is a widely held belief amongst many in the wider population that teachers are in the profession for only noble vocational reasons. They tend to believe that we are motivated by the opportunity to transform a child’s life, thus ensuring background disadvantage does not determine destiny. Therefore, it is a given that all teachers want to improve, to keep learning and developing the core practice of teaching and learning to make a greater difference. But Ramya Venkataraman’s opening argument is that in many school systems there is limited tangible incentive for individual teachers to want to improve their own competencies. Essentially, she wonders, what’s in it for them? She argues that tangible rewards such as ‘career opportunities, financial rewards and public recognition’ are significant and it is only then that teaching will become a self-regulated ecosystem that inspires excellence.

It is, however, true that many professionals do seek something more from teaching than just a job to keep getting better at. Patrick Derham sets a different scene and highlights that what matters for many teachers is the moral purpose that the Andrew Motion poem, referred to by Derham, suggests, before he moves on to how we can keep raising ‘the professional bar’. As a profession, he argues that we ‘need to take risks’ and have ‘the freedom to appoint people from non-teaching backgrounds who have a desire to give back and who want to help equip young people to have the freedom to be authors of their own life-stories’. But he also notes that ‘teaching has sadly lost its lustre’ and needs to be freed from ‘the shackles of bureaucracy’. He argues that we ‘cannot tolerate those who are not reflective practitioners’ and that ‘the best teachers are not complacent’.

If we want to keep that professional bar high, what will make the biggest difference? Brett Wigdorz quite simply argues that ‘improving teaching starts with teachers … it’s not simply great teachers that make a difference, it’s great teaching’. His concern is the how, and his organisation (Teach First) focuses on delivering high-quality initial teacher training, continuing to support all teachers to develop as professionals and creating environments where teachers can realise and share this improvement. It is this last one that has perhaps been more neglected that most. He states that ‘teachers learn mostly from their peers’ and therefore it is vital to give teachers ‘the time and space to try out and practice the theory and techniques they have learnt’, reflecting and being supported to constantly improve. These peer networks are designed to enable developing teachers to ‘draw on one another’s support, guidance and expertise across regional boundaries’. In turn he argues that ‘this act of vision setting motivates teachers and focuses efforts on what will make the most difference’.

The enormous complexity and contextual nature of the myriad challenges to improve teacher effectiveness is what Kevin Mattingly chooses to explore. Like Wigdorz he believes that the best way to increase teacher effectiveness is through practice and that ‘one-size-fits-all professional development programs’ are largely ineffective. He cites decades of research about how expertise develops and highlights ‘individual deliberate practice, a special form of practice consisting of certain characteristics specifically designed and intended to improve measurable performance’ as the core element. He argues that this should be ‘at the heart of a school’s formative teacher evaluation programme’, which teachers themselves would develop and lead, setting their own ‘goals for growth’.

What the ideal conditions might be that enable teaching to become more effective is the starting point for Haley Vlatch and Robert Bjork to explore the time-honoured distinction between learning (long-term retention and transfer) and performance (a student’s speed or accuracy of responding during the learning process), and the impossibility of really knowing what learning has taken place. Performance can be a misleading guide to whether learning has taken place as the cues that are present in the classroom will not be available later. As a result, they state that a central goal of teaching must be ‘to foster learning that is both durable and flexible. We want knowledge and skills to remain accessible over time and to transfer to the variety of situations outside the classroom where they are relevant’. To achieve that goal may require that ‘teachers introduce conditions of learning that create certain types of difficulties for students, conditions that differ from standard educational practices and may go against a teacher’s own intuitions’. In particular, they focus on what they call ‘an optimal level of challenge or difficulty’ which in the domain of motor skills, is referred to as ‘the challenge point’. Their argument is that unless these ‘desirable difficulties’ are in place then the proper ‘conditions of learning created in terms of challenge’ may be absent.

Patrick Derham

We can all remember a teacher who changed our lives. The former poet laureate Andrew Motion wrote a moving poem about the impact an English teacher had on him when he heard the news of his death earlier this year. The poem begins:

My teacher, who reached down inside my head

and turned the first lights on.¹

We need more teachers who believe in transforming lives, who want to make a difference, as this English teacher did. We need more teachers who recognise that inspiration, hunger and kindness are the key qualities. We need more teachers who encourage those they teach to be curious, to develop a thirst for discovery and knowledge, and whose passion for their subject enthuse the young they teach. We need more teachers who like Alexander the Great have (according to Plutarch) a copy of Homer’s Iliad under their pillow. Why? For the very simple reason that in the Iliad, a tutor comes to Achilles whose task is to teach the young man two vital things: ‘to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’. That is what all great teachers aspire to do.

These lofty sentiments are all well and good but the reality is that these are challenging times for the teaching profession. In the last twelve months the press has been full of stories of teacher shortages and horror stories of numbers wanting to leave the profession. At its simplest, too many are leaving and not enough are joining. Teaching is facing a crisis. I am quite sure that teacher shortages are the biggest threat we face in education today. The challenge here, as across the world, is not just the quantity of teachers but the quality. This matters because the only thing educationalists can agree on is that it is the quality of teaching that is at the heart of a successful educational system that has at its core the raising of standards and aspirations of all young people.

Teaching, like so many professions, has sadly lost its lustre. To teach is the noblest profession and we have to get back to a situation whereby the most talented want to take up the challenge. Money isn’t everything, but it is a factor. Affordability of housing is another, and this is particularly true in London. Administrative overload is another; teaching needs to be freed from the shackles of bureaucracy so that skilled and reflective practitioners can concentrate on the core practice of teaching and learning.

Above all though, we as a profession need to take risks and have the freedom to appoint people from non-teaching backgrounds who have a desire to give back and who want to help equip young people to have the freedom to be authors of their own life-stories. Independent schools have been doing this for some time and I can think of countless examples of people I have appointed who have come to teaching late and whose experience, passion and commitment have made them first-rate teachers. All schools should have this freedom. There is cause to be optimistic because the recent White Paper proposes to replace the current arrangements for awarding Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) with a new system of teacher accreditation. This has huge potential to raise the quality and status of the profession. The best Heads at the best schools will be in charge of accrediting new entrants, and schools will have the freedom to bring in ‘experts from other fields’. Allowing schools to take the lead in recruiting and training the teachers they need is a welcome step forward.

Quality is the key though and Heads must not accept second-best in terms of teaching. We have to continue to raise the professional bar and we cannot tolerate those who are not reflective practitioners. Teachers need to keep learning and developing. The best teachers are not complacent. The best teachers care about those they teach. The best teachers inspire and challenge in equal measure. This is what all young people deserve: skilled and demanding professionals who embody the very best that education has to offer.

The challenge is clear. Brave and bold solutions are needed to solve the recruitment crisis and to raise standards in the profession. If we can do that, and ensure that teaching really does attract the brightest and best, then we have a chance to really make a difference to the young people in this country. They deserve nothing less.

Andrew Motion wrote movingly about his English teacher that ‘in certain ways he gave me my life’. Is it unrealistic to wish that all schoolchildren could say that about one of their teachers?

Kevin Mattingly

Teachers make a difference in the learning of their students, and some more than others. This is an obvious but important distinction about learning in our schools. We all have witnessed teachers who inspire and stimulate learning, almost no matter who the children are before them or the challenges of their teaching environments.

Why is this the case? What are the reasons some of us are more effective than others in causing learning, even with many years of experience mutually under our belts? What can we do to close the gap between these expert teachers and other hard-working and caring practitioners who are less effective? What follows are a few observations and suggestions, acknowledging the enormous complexity and contextual nature of the myriad challenges to improve teacher effectiveness.

One reason a gap frequently persists between expert teachers and others is that most of us don’t improve much after our inaugural years of teaching. This is largely due to school cultures and norms that don’t expect continuous professional growth linked fundamentally to student learning. The ongoing formative side of teacher evaluation in a ‘reflective practitioner’ way is too often neglected and, to amplify the problem, research has clearly demonstrated that our one-size-fits-all professional development programs are largely ineffective.

Another reason teachers vary so much in influencing student learning is that we don’t always know what effective teaching looks like. Yet, there’s now an abundance of research that identifies the qualities and practices characterizing expert teachers. For example, we know that effective teachers:

•provide timely feedback that must be used by students to improve;

•have students continually ‘thinking to learn’ to meaningfully link new information to prior knowledge, thereby creating enduring and retrievable memories;

•encourage students to make mistakes and embrace struggle, even confusion, as part of deep learning;

•create learning environments with high expectations and standards but supported by teacher assurances that all students belong and can succeed through effective effort with ‘learning to learn’ as a central focus;

•manage class time with clear goals in ways that maximize cognitive engagement and reflection, while still allowing time for playfulness and inquiry.

And the list goes on. The current educational research base reveals an array of best-practice learning designs appropriate for diverse learners and different school contexts.

A third and related reason for our sometimes-limited growth as teachers is that most of us don’t know much about the ‘science of learning’, an unfortunate circumstance given how informative this research base now is for day-to-day teaching. Cognitive science research about how children learn was largely inaccessible to most classroom teachers for years but this is no longer the case. It now offers a rich treasure trove of practical insights and teaching strategies, some counterintuitive, that will enrich and improve the learning designs of all teachers regardless of experience level. What has been most heartening in recent years is that cognitive scientists and others have been making significant efforts to make this research available to teachers in practical forms.

Finally, the gap between our most expert teachers and those of us striving to be so, can be more realistically closed by applying the insights provided by research about the making of experts in different domains. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in their book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,² summarize decades of research in a wide variety of conte...