Becoming an Outstanding Primary School Teacher

A journey, not a destination

Russell Grigg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367686413
• eBook ISBN: 9781000590371
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully updated third edition of Becoming an Outstanding Primary School Teacher includes new material on blended learning, pedagogical leadership and teaching entrepreneurial skills. It offers comprehensive coverage of all the key topics that engage primary teachers, including planning, meeting curriculum demands, promoting positive behaviour, assessment, engaging with parents, research, and professional development. Throughout, Russell Grigg draws on theory, research, and case studies of classroom practice to discuss what it takes to become an outstanding primary teacher, making this essential reading for raising pupils' standards of achievement through high quality teaching.

How do primary teachers who excel in their work approach topics such as planning and assessment? What strategies do they use to inspire pupils when teaching English, Mathematics, Science, and other subjects? How do they keep on top of everything in managing workload and still get the best from pupils? These are the kinds of questions that this revised third edition addresses. It includes:

• more than sixty ground-breaking infographics to convey key points in a highly accessible way

• discussion of recent curriculum changes in the UK and the implications for high quality teaching

• tried-and-tested classroom strategies, points for reflection and further research to bridge theory and practice

• key concepts and international views on topics such as creativity, teachers' well-being, and assessment

• reflections on the lessons from the recent pandemic such as the need for a robust digital pedagogy

• extensive references for further research.

Becoming an Outstanding Primary School Teacher has been updated to reflect significant changes in the context within which primary teachers operate both in the educational system and broader society. Providing a complete guide to the notion and practices of outstanding teaching, this a vital reference for trainee teachers, NQTs, and more experienced practitioners who aspire to excellence in their teaching.

CHAPTER 1Defining and evaluating outstanding teaching

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138396-2

Essentially, a school is only as good or as great as its teachers.

Department of Education (Northern Ireland) (2015: 6)

There are around 265,000 teachers in the UK’s public sector primary schools (BESA, 2021). Each of these teachers has the potential to make a significant impact on the life prospects of the primary children in their care. The evidence is clear. American research, which tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, shows that children are more likely to attend college, earn more, live in comfortable surroundings, and save more for retirement if they are taught by great teachers (Chetty et al., 2012). One study showed that if two 8-year-olds are taught by different teachers – one a high performer (from the top 20 per cent) and one a low performer (from the bottom 20 per cent) – their performance diverged by 53 percentile points within three years (McKinsey, 2007). In secondary schools, the difference in a pupil’s achievement between a high-performing teacher and a low-performing one could be more than three GCSE grades (Slater et al., 2009).

Imagine the impact if a child has a series of good or poor teachers. If an individual pupil was taught for three consecutive years by a teacher in the top 10 per cent of performance, researchers estimated that the difference could amount to as much as two years more progress when compared to a pupil taught for the same period by a teacher in the bottom 10 per cent (Sanders and Rivers, 1996). When children are taught by a series of mediocre or poor teachers, then the difficulties are compounded, and it may not be possible for children to catch up.

The focus of this book is on teachers and teaching, although often discussion inevitably turns to learners and learning. This is because the main purpose of teaching is to help others learn. The word ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to follow or find a track’, with the Old English læst literally meaning ‘sole of the foot’. Learning was thus conceived as a process of following the way set out by someone, as in the medieval expression ‘He learned me (how) to read’. Young children sometimes say: ‘you have to learn me that’ (instead of ‘teach’). The strong link between teaching and learning is illustrated in several languages that uses the same word for both, such as Welsh (dysgu), Serbian (učiti), and Greek (matheno, which also is the root word for mathematics). Teaching and learning have a complex relationship; it is possible for one to be good and not the other. Consider a scenario where a teacher very carefully plans a lesson and provides a range of stimulating resources and activities only to see an unexpected event (a child being sick, snowfall, or a power cut) derail the lesson. Occasionally pupils can make good strides in learning despite less than good teaching – perhaps they bring enthusiasm for a subject motivated by technologies or learn from each other.

In recent decades, the discourse on education has seen a strong move away from teaching to learning. But this book concurs with the view that this has gone a little too far (Biesta, 2021). This is not about negating the importance of listening to pupils, the value of active learning strategies, or developing pupils’ independent learning. Neither is it a veiled return to a conception of ‘teaching by telling’. Rather, it is to advocate the artistry and complexities of teaching, which demand specialist knowledge, skills, and values. It also credits the notion that teachers can be good at what they do in different ways. There is no single track to outstanding teaching.

Teachers can exert a powerful influence on the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Sutton Trust (2011) suggests that over the course of a school year, disadvantaged pupils gain 1.5 years’ worth of learning with good teachers, compared with 0.5 years with underperforming teachers. In other words, for these pupils the difference between a good and a poor teacher is the equivalent of a whole year’s learning. High-quality teaching matters because it is recognised as the most important school-based factor in increasing students’ achievement (Darling-Hammond, 2000).

Given the global financial problems of recent years, purely from an economic viewpoint, teachers are important. They can exert a powerful long-term influence on pupils’ performance, which ‘in turn leads to better outcomes in further education, pay, well-being, and for society at large’ (House of Commons Education Committee, 2012: paragraph 41). Good teachers increase the likelihood of pupils leaving school well qualified and ready to take up relevant employment or further education. Moreover, educational standards determine the wealth of nations. Economic growth is rooted in what happens in the classrooms around the UK. One leading academic controversially argued that huge economic savings could be made if school authorities were bold enough to sack poor teachers and reward those who perform well (Hanushek, 2010; OECD, 2011).

Of course, teachers are not superhuman. There are limits to what they can do. Some commentators suggest that around two-thirds of what explains student achievement falls beyond the control of teachers and schools, such as students’ individual characteristics, peer influence, and parents’ education and support (Sahlberg, 2015). In general, children do better at school if they come from homes where education is valued, they have a place to study and access to books and reference materials, and their parents are well educated, well paid, and take an interest in their children’s schooling. Sociologist Basil Bernstein (1970: 344) famously argued that ‘education cannot compensate for society’. He maintained that social classes used different language ‘codes’, with working-class children’s ‘restricted’ code of reduced semantic and syntactic range clashing with the more formal, complex, ‘elaborated’ language of the educational system and middle-class teachers. While access to education has since become more open, there are groups of learners (e.g., white working-class boys, and those from Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities) who underachieve and remain underrepresented in higher education, as discussed further in Chapter 10. More than half of the universities in England accept less than 5 per cent of students from working-class backgrounds (Atherton and Mazhari, 2019). Despite laudable efforts by some colleges and universities to widen student participation and access, the underperformance of working-class children persists. They have been described by the House of Commons Education Committee (2021) as ‘the forgotten’ class, who have experienced decades of disadvantage. A former head of Ofsted, England’s school inspection service, described the state of education as a tale of two nations: ‘Children from similar backgrounds with similar abilities, but who happen to be born in different regions and attend different schools and colleges, can end up with widely different prospects because of the variable quality of their education’ (cited by Adams, 2013).

Teachers and schools certainly have a key role to play in contributing to a just and tolerant society. Outstanding teachers continually work towards social justice by creating equal opportunities for pupils from all backgrounds. They recognise that their social obligation is to support all pupils in achieving their aspirations, rather than assuming disadvantaged pupils do not expect much of themselves (Menzies, 2013). Above all, such teachers are driven by a moral purpose to make a positive difference in children’s lives. It is widely agreed that interventions in the formative early years that focus on building social and communication skills, along with early literacy and numeracy, are particularly impactful (Education Endowment Foundation, 2018a). This includes effective communication between school and home, well-conceived parenting education and support programmes, high-quality training for childcare workers, and a curriculum focus on pre-reading, non-verbal reasoning, and early number concepts.

The demands on schools and the role of the teacher have changed significantly over time. This can present challenges to the profession, with schools cast as the cure-all for problems such as child obesity, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy (Lipsett, 2008). The Department for Education (DfE) acknowledged the need for specialist input to address complex social problems when it launched a project where social workers were placed in schools to work alongside teachers to support children at risk and reduce the number of referrals to social services (Westlake et al., 2020). Such close liaison with different professionals, parents, and the wider community is critical to tackling disadvantage and fostering productive dialogue. As teachers participating in another project noted:

Where we’ve taken parents on trips with us, some of the parents have gone into churches for the first time ever. And they’re amazed at how lovely they are, and how peaceful. And that a church can be such a calm, religious place. Because they’ve never been in, they didn’t know anything about it. And they just love it and will then come back and talk about it and spread their awareness.

Rowe et al. (2011: 18)

This illustrates the important role teachers play as cultural gatekeepers. They can literally open doors for pupils to enjoy their local and national heritage, for instance through visits to museums, galleries, and libraries. Michael Gove, the former education secretary, said that teachers have a duty through the national curriculum to ‘introduce pupils to the best that has been thought and said’ (DfE, 2013b: 5). Here, Gove was invoking the words of Matthew Arnold, the nineteenth-century writer and school inspector, who wanted schools to provide ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold, 1869: viii). This global perspective is important. Outstanding teachers recognise that in an increasingly diverse society, it is essential for pupils to understand how people are interconnected through trade, communication, and cultural and sporting events such as the Olympic Games.

Schools in England are expected to promote the cultural capital that pupils need to succeed in life (Ofsted, 2019a). This reflects the influence of writers such as Eric Hirsch (1988), a professor of English, who found that American children from disadvantaged backgrounds lacked the ‘cultural literacy’ (general knowledge and skills) to thrive in the modern age. Hirsch (2002) went as far as drawing up a list of 5000 items of knowledge that all American children should learn so that they could engage as full citizens in society. These included dates (e.g., 1776), historical figures (e.g., Columbus), ideas (e.g., abolitionism), scientific terms (e.g., DNA), and phrases (e.g., ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’). Inevitably, the list was criticised – children were expected to know about the International Monetary Fund and what an interrogative sentence meant, but nothing about the internet. As discussed in Chapter 5, selecting what knowledge is of most worth, what children should learn, and how they should be taught are controversial questions, especially in a culture of accountability.

Defining high-quality teaching

The word ‘teaching’ comes from the ninth-century English tacen, meaning to ‘show or point out’, and only later was it associated with instruction. While there is widespread agreement over the importance of teaching, how to describe the highest quality is less clear. Researchers propose a range of measures to indicate quality, such as student learning outcomes, teacher qualifications, and classroom performance (Strong, 2011). Historically, terms such as ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ have moral connotations, while ‘effective’ is rooted in the school effectiveness movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Berliner (1987) points out that teachers may be considered good if they demonstrate certain behaviours and values, such as starting the class on time, irrespective of whether the pupils learn anything. Effective teaching, on the other hand, focuses on the impact of teacher behaviours and what pupils learn. A review of the literature on teaching effectiveness highlights several challenges around definitions, perspectives, and measurement. The authors point out that ‘beliefs about what constitutes “good” or “high” quality practice in teaching can vary markedly for different age groups of students, at different times and in different contexts’ (Ko and Sammons, 2013: 5).

Alternative terms at the right end of the spectrum include ‘quality teaching’ (Stones, 1992), ‘expert teaching’ (Turner-Bisset, 2001), ‘master teachers’ (Mayo, 2002), ‘distinguished teachers’ (Danielson, 2013), ‘high quality teachers’ (McLaughlin and Burnaford, 2007), and ‘veteran teachers’ (Shulman, 1987). Excellent and outstanding are often used as synonymous terms to describe teaching of the highest order (McBer, 2000). Outstanding teachers are exemplary role models, demonstrating the very best practice that is around or what Zemelman et al. (2005) refer to as ‘serious, thoughtful, informed, responsible state-of-the-art teaching’ (Box 1.1).

BOX 1.1 KEY CONCEPT – OUTSTANDING TEACHING

Outstanding teaching is the very best practice in the profession. It is at the cutting edge and instantly memorable, which inspires others. Outstanding teachers demonstrate consistent high-quality teaching. Their professional insight and repertoire of skills adds confidence to their teaching, which is purposeful and engaging. Learners are at ease, motivated to learn and achieve high standards. While there is a strong focus on evaluating the quality of teaching based on what pupils learn, to do so wholly on this basis is to ignore what pupils bring or do not bring to the interaction.

A group of trainee teachers were asked for their views on what makes an outstanding teacher (Box 1.2). Their responses highlight the importance of a teacher’s caring disposition and personality. This takes precedence over such functional skills as planning and assessment, which are perhaps less memorable than the dynamic, and sometimes unconventional, qualities displayed by those held aloft as outstanding teac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Introduction
• 1 Defining and evaluating outstanding teaching
• 2 Know thyself
• 3 Professional values in action
• 4 Developing pupils’ creative and critical thinking
• 5 Professional knowledge and understanding
• 6 Challenges and best practices in English, mathematics, and science
• 7 Developing a robust digital pedagogy
• 8 Inspirational teaching across a broad and balanced curriculum
• 9 Planning and preparation
• 10 Promoting inclusive schools
• 11 Language, literacy, and communication skills
• 12 Promoting good behaviour
• 13 The art of juggling: monitoring and assessment
• 14 Continually learning
• Websites
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index