10 Teaching Essentials

POSTED BY TOM SHERRINGTON ⋅ OCTOBER 26, 2016 ⋅ 

In writing this, I’ve been thinking about two sets of teachers. Firstly, I’ve been thinking about various very strong teachers I’ve known, including those who taught me, to consider what ‘essentials’ they might have in common.  (Something I’ve done many times before e.g. in this early post: What makes a great teacher?). Secondly, I’ve been thinking about how to support early career teachers to improve and to use their time wisely to support their professional learning.  The purpose of this list, as with any other, is to promote self-reflection: 10 essentials to work on – alongside avoiding the 10 pitfalls!

1. Model expertise

I was going to call this ‘Command Respect’ or ‘Project Authority’ or ‘Give Confidence’ – but I only mean those things in the sense that the teacher knows their subject, their material, their course. They give their students a sense of security that they’re in the hands of someone with the expertise needed to help them succeed.  Modelling this is part and parcel of every lesson: confident answers and conspicuous depth of knowledge of the subject that models the value that is placed on learning it.  Actual expertise matters more than simple enthusiasm.  There is no short-cut here: study the subject continually, know your stuff, get ahead.  Don’t wing it or teach off the cuff, guessing your way through.  Would you get an A Level A* in your subject? Or least 100% in the students’ tests!?

2. Prioritise  Curriculum

Linked closely to Model Expertise, it’s essential to know how your subject is deconstructed  into key concepts, skills and knowledge elements that allow learners to make progress – so-called pedagogical content knowledge.  Do you know how the course curriculum relates to the wider subject knowledge base? Is there an optimal sequence or at least one you could make a good case for?  You should have a sense of a sensible sequence and hierarchy of ideas and be able to see where content areas overlap.  You should have good knowledge of the assessment criteria in general and the specifics of any public exam.  Knowing the types of questions that students should be able to answer is essential in understanding and planning your subject curriculum – the enacted curriculum that students experience in your lessons.

I’d suggest that developing ever deeper knowledge of your subject curriculum (so that you can make it ever more accessible and/or challenging for your students) should take priority over most other CPD elements.  Read exam specs so you really know them – and  keep in touch with how other teachers deliver your subject curriculum; there are always alternatives.

3.Hold Attention 

At a basic level of behaviour management, this is an essential skill.  Can you keep everyone in your class locked in on you or whoever is speaking, listening and engaged, whenever you want them to?  Can you sustain that for as long as is needed? That’s the challenge.  It’s worth deliberately practising this until you’ve nailed it with any class. Give a signal for attention; pause…as long as is needed; make eye contact around the room and insist on full engagement.  Without this, most of the rest won’t be effective.  It always pays to reinforce the routines around attention so that you get it promptly from everyone.

4. Explain well

There’s an art to explaining – it’s about making complex ideas make sense to people who are only just getting to grips with them.  Knowing something isn’t the same as explaining it; it takes time, experience and practice, just like anything else.   This post explores the art of explaining in more detail.  You need to find different ways to explain the same thing – not simply repeat one method over and over.  How to explain ideas ought to be a regular feature of departmental CPD.  It’s often overlooked because people spend so long talking about whatto teach, rather than how to teach it.

5. Question responsively 

Questioning has three components:

Knowing what questions to ask: This links to your curriculum thinking and planning.  Designing good questions is a skill you acquire with experience and research – initially it pays to explore sources of questions rather than make them up.

Planning how to organise questions in a  classroom context: The trick is to involve every student, solicit multiple responses and engineer a collective response that deepens everyone’s understanding – rather than skimming from person to person.

Knowing how to react:  Being responsive to students’ answers is crucial to maximise the learning from the process.  You need to tackle misconceptions and explore errors without making it seem a big deal to get things wrong; you need to probe and challenge for deeper and better answers; you need to involve other students in building on each other’s answers.

6. Feedback effectively 

Building on knowing how to react to student responses, more generally, giving good feedback is an essential teaching skill.  Your goal is to seek improved performance, correct errors and challenge misconceptions but also to affirm and deepen successful learning. Feedback needs to be positive and specific, and be very much geared towards an immediate practice opportunity.  Good AfL training often uses sport-coach examples e.g. to improve an athlete’s discuss throw, telling them to ‘throw further’ or ‘try harder’ isn’t any good.  You need should tell them what they’re doing right; identify a specific aspect of their technique to change and improve and then get them to practise.

7. Reinforce routines

In a good lesson, the routines are well-understood; they are followed and fall into the background without too much fuss, making the learning flow more easily.  This only happens because the teacher reinforces their expectations routinely and addresses issues when routines are not followed.  As with Bus Lanes, if you don’t enforce the rules, they get broken and learning is disrupted.   If you do enforce them, everyone’s a winner.

8. Manage time

Time in lessons, time across a unit of work and time across a whole year: it can all be managed well or managed badly.  You can think you’ve been teaching like a champion for six months and find you’ve only got two months left to cover half the syllabus.  Or you find you’re always rushing at the bell with your class in a shambles and the homework wasn’t explained properly.  It pays to map out the long term, set some time goals and milestones and always give yourself five minutes at the end of a lesson so they end well.

9. Drive standards 

I’m big fan of the concept of ‘drive’. It’s an essential teacher characteristic. It suggests conveying to students that there’s a degree of urgency, that the learning in hand really matters, that there are certain minimum standards you’ll insist on and that there are ambitious goals you want everyone to strive to reach.  Driving standards involves a fair amount of metaphorical whip-cracking but it also requires effusive celebratory recognition of progress, breakthroughs and major accomplishments.

10. Show kindness

I could have used Build Relationships – but increasingly I think that this is too nebulous; relationships are a product of other actions.  I’m suggesting that showing kindness is an essential element to teacher-student relationship-building.  You can be assertive, authoritative and inspire confidence in your expertise but still have difficulties – or cause them – if students don’t connect with your human qualities; if they fear you or resent you.  Kindness means allowing mistakes to be made, extending a degree of parental warmth and acknowledging emotions.  You can be quite formal and disciplined and still be kind.  Crucially, it’s essential to give kindness in order to receive it in return.

10 Teaching Pitfalls

POSTED BY TOM SHERRINGTON ⋅

This is a companion to 10 Teaching Essentials.  

In addition to trying to deliver on the 10 Essentials, I’m suggesting that teachers should seek to avoid these pitfalls.  To some extent, the two lists mirror each other – positive and negative ways of expressing the same ideas – but, not entirely.   Most feedback I give teachers about how to improve their practice includes something from this list:

1. Questioning ineffectively:
Weak questioning might include some or all of the following:

• Only asking one student a question: ‘John, what’s the answer’ – as opposed to asking everyone and then, after some thinking time, ‘Ok, John, what do you think?’
• Asking the whole class a question but extrapolating from this one answer a sense that everyone else also understands and then moving on.
• Taking ‘hands up’ responses from the same few students and never asking the ‘hands down’ majority to contribute.
• Creating ‘blood out of stone’ silences with whole class questions instead of using strategies like think-pair-share to overcome inhibitions and involve everyone.
• Receiving an incorrect answer from a student, moving onto someone else but not returning to that first student to check that they’ve now understood.

2. Accepting  mediocrity

This includes accepting low level verbal answers or half-hearted pieces of writing without challenge. It also means routinely accepting work from students that, whilst arguably ‘complete’, is far below the standard they are personally capable of.   With verbal answers, a quick win is to say something like ‘that’s nearly right but now say it better, in full sentences, linking the ideas together‘.   Sometimes accepting mediocrity is the product of not challenging a weak response; sometimes it’s a product of celebrating completion at the expense of quality.  Routine re-drafting is a good way to set the bar higher for everyone; first efforts can always be improved, Austin style.

3. Rushing practice

This is a common issue in my experience.  It applies to adult training too: you get told all about the fab things the new IT system can do; you are shown but because you don’t go and practise, you quickly forget. It’s true in lessons. Students need lots of practice with feedback alongside; doing the same things over and over again, getting slightly harder. It’s a common error to focus too much on the telling and but not giving enough time for practising the doing.  It’s not enough to rely on homework – although this helps. You need to see your students doing the practice in front of you.

4. Presuming learning

Another common issue is to toss out a plethora of ideas into the room without checking that students have a) understood or b) processed the information such that they have a chance to remember it later.  Checking for understanding and retention systematically is essential.  If you highlight some new or technical words that students should know, they need to say them, use them, and, at a later time, be asked to recall them.  I’ve seen the ‘in one ear, out the other’ phenomenon too often.  Recognising words isn’t the same as knowing them.  Lots of micro-testing is essential and mini whiteboards (or other all-student response systems) are great for checking in on lots of students at once.

5. Lacking assertiveness

With classroom management, an important pitfall to avoid is not being assertive enough; not owning the space or not addressing low level behaviour issues.  Facing a room full of cocky-seeming teenagers, you need to be sure you are the one that owns the space. It’s your room; there are no no-go areas. Standing still and straight, making eye contact, you need to reach everyone with your voice and your gaze, picking up the small stuff.  If you want pens down, you want everyone’s pen down; if you want eyes front, that includes everyone.  Be patient but firm and insistent.

6. Allowing drift

Sometimes in a lesson, even with strong attention-gaining action at the start, things can drift.  This can because the task is too long for the initial instructions,  or it could be that students have diverged with some way ahead of the others; it can be because you talk too long without engaging all the students in thinking and questioning; it can be because you allow low level chat to escalate so pockets of students are way off task. All of these things need to be addressed. At any time, you can re-set, re-explain or re-establish the level of focus and attention you require.

7. Pitching low

This can be difficult to address because teachers rarely deliberately set the level of challenge too low.  This emerges either because of not knowing the curriculum well enough or not knowing the students well enough.  Moderation activities in CPD time are vital for setting standards; you should know what excellence might look like in any setting and be pitching for it, teaching to the top.  Most often, where this pitfall arises, it relates to a sub-group of students in a class.  It should be in everyone’s mind: is there anyone in this room who might need even more stretch? You only find out by pushing them to see what they can do.

8. Mis-matching assessment.

It’s horrible to take a test you’re not prepared for.  ‘Teaching to the test’ has a bad name because it suggests that teachers only teach what will be assessed.  However, it’s a major pitfall if you teach a set of content that does not include what students will be assessed on. This can happen if common assessments are used but teachers don’t study them prior to teaching a unit.  It might also be a question of the difficulty of the assessment: you need to balance challenge with building confidence.  Again, a big feature of CPD should be around designing effective assessments that achieve a good balance.

9. Misjudging tasks.

A relatively common pitfall is confusing learning objectives and tasks. It’s possible to plan a lesson where students will do activities A, B and C and think you’ve got the learning covered.  However, if you are not explicit about the learning objective for each task, it can go wrong: the students are busy, maybe engaged enthusiastically, but they might not be learning what you want them to learn.  Or, it could be that an activity is far too convoluted and time-consuming relative to a bit of simple direct teaching.  You need to think about learning objectives first, tasks second.

See Principles of Effective Teaching and Pedagogy Post Card #2 Learning Objectives vs Tasks

10. Overlooking  individuals

Differentiation is difficult and often problematic.  Here’s a post that puts it in perspective. It is worth remembering that students’ learning needs are usually more similar than they are different.  However, over time, as with tending to the individual specimens in a garden, there’s a risk of neglecting students at the extremes or in the middle with a one-size-fits-all approach. Do the parents of your highest attainers and your EHCP students love you because of the attention their children get? It’s a good place to start.  Have you checked in on your PP students to see if they’re making the same progress? Are you just as likely to call their parents?  These are good prompts and challenges for us all.  The pitfall is to ignore the issue.