Whole School Progress the LAZY Way

Follow me, I'm Right Behind You

Jim Smith, Ian Gilbert

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781781350065
• eBook ISBN: 9781781350195
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Following on from the acclaimed The Lazy Teacher's Handbook, Jim Smith applies his lazy philosophy to flip the task of 'leading learning' to 'letting learning lead'. Covering all aspects of learning, including the planning of outstanding lessons, lesson observation, passing performance management targets and creating inspiring learning environments the book poses the question 'what would happen if you let learning lead?'. You might just find you enjoy your job more than ever as well as see a big improvement in the quality of learning and progress for your pupils.Based on Jim Smith's leadership work to improve learning (in a lazy way of course) this book is packed with highly practical solutions and suggestions that are proven to help you improve the quality of learning and progress but in a lazy way both in your classroom and across the school.

Chapter 1

Progress and the Lazy Inspector

Statisticians would have us believe that it took me thirty minutes to decide what colour to paint the hall. Of course, the decision was obviously my wife’s so they got that wrong, but the length of time was about right. Thirty minutes to make a decision you have to live with for quite a while. So, that’s about ten minutes more than the Ofsted Framework for School Inspection from January 2012 says is the minimum amount of time an inspector can sit in your lesson and decide if it’s any good or not. If you’re any good or not. And by extension your school. Twenty minutes to make an impression. Twenty minutes to sink or swim. Twenty minutes to show learners making progress. And doing it under their own steam.

Of course, you may end up with them in there for a little longer. In many ways it depends which of the two new Ofsted processes you are being put through, either Ofsted Rapide (a quick but standard two days) or Ofsted Lite (a remote look at your data, a nod, a wink and use of the outstanding logo for another five years).*

Inspectors, used to indulging in the whole – or at least the majority – of a lesson, are now looking for instant evidence with which to make an instant assessment of the learning and progress in your lesson. They consider the progress taking place in the lesson today, as well as indicators as to what has gone on in the past. And it is this instant assessment in your classroom that helps form part of a much longer-lasting judgement about your school.

To do this they will have, although they won’t call it this, their own ‘evidence of progress wish list’ which they will use for judging your lesson within that critical twenty-minute window. The wish list will include:

All students demonstrating new learning (preferably independently) and their ability to apply it. This helps Inspector Rapide or Inspector Lite explore the level of challenge for different groups in the class.

Conversations between the inspector and the students about their learning and their progress. Simple but deadly questions such as, ‘Did you know this before the lesson today?’ which of course is laden with inference about pace, challenge and progress.

A quick flick through some books to look at levels of work, formative and summative assessment and adherence to school policies, which will help them make a judgement on the leadership of learning as well as progress over time.

Evidence not so much of what you do but what you don’t do. After all, it is about the learning not the teaching. This means they play right into the Lazy teacher’s hands.

The lesson observation routine will consist of evidence-gathering in these areas, a ticking of the odd box and deciding on a grade, before dashing off to the other side of the school to catch the second half of an Art/Science cross-curricular fusion lesson where rumour has it there is too much emphasis on reflective thinking, student well-being and other such ‘tosh’.

And that, in a lazy nutshell, will be it. Possibly years of angst and worry all over in a matter of minutes. Well, twenty minutes in fact. But this book isn’t simply designed to make your lessons perfect for when the inspectors arrive (there are other books out there doing that). Like dogs and Christmas or tattoos and stag nights, Lazy Progress isn’t just for inspections. It’s for every lesson.

A focus on making progress – something that until recently would simply have been referred to as having ‘multi-plenaries’ – brings with it the all-important principle of checking progress, and this is something that oozes through Lazy Teaching. Being part of the new Ofsted framework just means that you can finally get the credit you deserve. It’s not about you checking their progress as it was in the old days. It’s about them checking their progress and, in the process, embedding the learning further still. Which is what it’s all for.

And, done the Lazy Way, an inspected lesson is not about you. It’s about them.

What does progress look like?

The progress judgement for your lesson covers a number of areas, notably:

Skills

Knowledge

Levels of resilience

The ability to work independently

The ability of your learners to articulate their learning

You are judged by the learners’ ability to achieve higher levels than their current starting point, something that is assessed both in your lesson and via the data the school holds for a particular key stage. Or, as it was once described to me by someone despairing of my failure to grasp the concept: ‘How do I know if it’s worth students who want to be better hanging out in your classroom?’

Progress looks and sounds different for each individual you teach. That’s why attempting to capture it en masse can at best be clumsy and at worst a disaster – taking over the whole lesson and, ironically, in the process, eliminating the very thing you are trying to measure. Far better to get the students to show progress whilst you demonstrate just how effective being lazy can be. Hence, as with all things done the Lazy Way, your task is to shift the checking of progress from a teacher-led activity to a student-led activity.

It should also be said that routine progress checking is not something that has to be overtly measured and introduced with a musical fanfare heralding a walk-on parade of dancers who didn’t quite make the Rio Carnival clutching the golden envelope in which is contained the activity to check progress. Although imagine the approved attendance for SATs or GCSEs if this was adopted for some of the more formal progress checks. It might make choosing an exam board much more entertaining.

It is far better to see progress checking as a process which is blended into the lesson. Indeed, if you were to map assessing progress against the thoughts running through the inspector’s head, the current framework and what we know to be effective (i.e. lazy) learning you would have four different categories:

1. Unsatisfactory progress checking – this is characterised by the old three-part lesson whereby the progress check (aka the plenary) came at the end of the lesson and with one minute to go it became apparent to the teacher that nothing had been learnt and they were now yet another lesson nearer to being able to declare the year a write-off. No attempts were made to ascertain what learning had taken place in the lesson and, as a conse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Progress the Lazy Way – a Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Progress and the Lazy Inspector
• Chapter 2: Creating Progress In Your Lessons – The Lazy Way
• Chapter 3: Capturing Progress – The Lazy Way
• Chapter 4: Lazy Observations of Learning
• Chapter 5: Institutionalising Progress – In a Lazy Way
• Progress the Lazy Way – an Epilogue
• Recommended On-line Resources
• Bibliography
• Copyright
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