I attended a highly successful Grammar School in Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland from age 11 to age 18. Looking back, I think I was generally very well taught, but I remember having a trainee teacher of Latin in 4th Year (Year 10) whose sole method of teaching my class consisted in sitting at his desk and reading to us from a book; our job was to copy down verbatim what he was reading. I’m not exaggerating here – that was what we did for the whole lesson…
Fortunately, we only had him one lesson per week for about ten weeks. Looking back now, I ask myself, what had he been taught about how people learn, and how teaching can best bring about learning? Why did he think that reading from a book, and us taking verbatim notes, was a good use of ten lessons of Latin? In short, what was his approach to teaching Latin?
What I mean by a ‘teaching approach’
I mean two things: first, a set of general principles about teaching that have been agreed across the school that apply to all subjects; and second – certainly at secondary level where the curriculum is invariably arranged into discrete subjects – a common approach to the teaching of specific subjects, that includes those school-level principles.
I do not mean minute by minute scripted lesson plans that remove teachers’ characters from their teaching, and I absolutely don’t mean to hamper teachers’ ability to tailor their teaching to the students in front of them. If a teaching approach does that, it’s a bad one or, more likely, it’s being badly used.
Why do many schools not have a ‘Teaching Approach’?
I’m guessing here, but presumably it’s because the senior staff in those schools believe some, or all, of these things:
- Teaching is too complex for anyone to come up with an approach that could apply across the school, and/or they do not feel qualified to lead on it
- Subject experts are best placed to decide how to teach specific subjects
- There can, and should, be accountability for standards, but this doesn’t require ‘dictating’ to teachers how to teach – we already have the Teachers’ Standards!
- Save us all from teaching quality checklists!
- Prescription harms staff morale; it’s just the wrong thing to do
I will address each of these, briefly, and then I’ll offer some positive advantages of having an approach to teaching across the school.
Teaching is too complex for anyone to come up with an approach that could apply across the school, and/or they do not feel qualified to lead on it
Teaching is a complex activity – so is medical surgery; so is flying; so is law; so is scientific research – but in many complex fields there is huge commonality. We expect our GPs to have had very detailed common instruction during their training, to follow that training, and to keep up to date. We don’t expect them to say, well now that my training is done and I’m a professional I’m just going to do it my way. Of course, the quality of teaching isn’t a life and death matter, like surgery can be, but it is extraordinarily important for young people’s life chances. Senior leaders should be, and feel, qualified to lead teaching and learning; after Safeguarding, it is the thing they should be focusing on most in school. If they aren’t experts, they should be striving to be on those things about teaching that are common across subjects, because teaching and learning is what schooling is about.
Subject experts are surely best placed to decide how to teach specific subjects
That’s largely true, of course. Teaching PE is different from teaching Design Technology, and teaching French is different from teaching Maths. There are domain-specific aspects to teaching all school subjects: a teacher of Sociology will not need to know how to use a lathe safely, and a teacher of geography probably doesn’t need the music and drama teachers’ proficiency with coaching students on how to use their voice to best effect. But there is much that is generic to teaching, so the school’s general approach should focus on those generic things, while the subject approach should focus on that is which is domain-specific and how that fits with the school-wide principles.
There can, and should, be accountability for standards, but this doesn’t require ‘dictating’ to teachers how to teach – we already have the Teachers’ Standards!
The Teachers’ Standards are designed to ensure clear accountability for standards across the profession, but they are not designed to do the job that an approach to teaching can do. They don’t provide any help at all with how to use learning intentions and success criteria well, how best to explain key concepts, how to model and scaffold learning activities, how to ask questions effectively, why no hands-up is best, how to provide feedback, how to give praise and so on – in other words, the detail of everyday teaching practice. To improve teaching, and to quality assure it, you need to get into the most important techniques of the craft.
Save us all from teaching quality checklists!
Checklists can be very useful indeed, as an aide-memoire. That aside, of course, slavishly applied, checklists can be a simplistic and blunt tool with which to beat people – that should never happen. For me, it’s a very good thing for a school to have discussed and decided what we mean by great teaching, and for that description of great teaching to be used as both the basis of ongoing teacher training and conversations about teaching and learning, and regular quality assurance. The school having a clear and concise approach to effective teaching is about guiding teachers’ typical practice, but it’s patently obvious that individual lessons can vary from that description and still be great or perfectly adequate. A teaching approach is about saying this-is-how-we-do-things-here, it clarifies the schools’ expectations of typical practice. A teaching approach in the school can also be very helpful for teachers who are new to teaching and/or new to the school.
Prescribing how teachers should teach harms staff morale; it’s just the wrong thing to do
We absolutely do have to be careful with prescription in schools. It is a widely accepted truth that people value a good level of autonomy and they perform best when the balance between accountability and autonomy is just right. That’s an argument for involving teachers in deciding what goes into both the general approach to teaching and the subject-specific approach, and to have a good evidence-base for those decisions – it’s not an argument for having no approach. Schools typically already have common approaches to doing formal assessments, homework, marking and feedback, which are generic things; having a school-wide approach to teaching those things that are generic across subjects, such as asking questions, providing feedback, and having a no hands up policy, is no different. And at subject level, teachers should be collaborating on how best to teach the water cycle and tonal drawing and adding fractions; conversations about teaching are at the heart of great teaching. I see real strength, and clarity, in teachers of specific subjects having a common approach to the key aspects of their teaching. This should be good for morale, not harmful.
The positive case for a teaching approach in school
- More than ever before, there is now a strong research evidence base for agreeing on ‘best bets’ in terms of what works well in teaching in schools
- A teaching approach is the best way to ensure both a high standard of teaching overall in the school, and to reduce within-school variation in teaching quality
- Conversations, and agreement, about best bets focus leaders and all teachers on the most important things in school: how we learn and how we should teach to promote great learning
- Having a clearly defined teaching approach, at both whole-school and subject level, reduces subjectivity in quality assurance and accountability mechanisms, because we have decided in our school how we will typically teach. Without that agreement on what we mean by good teaching in our school, it is impossible to avoid subjectivity in quality assurance and teach-like-me lesson observation feedback from school leaders
- An approach to teaching that is based on robust evidence has the best chance of improving teaching quality in school, and when teaching quality is high, students are much more likely to achieve well
- A teaching approach can improve morale by a) Engaging all teachers in the most important conversations of all in school – how we learn and how we should teach to promote great learning b) Providing clarity for everyone: this-is-how-we-do-things-here and c) Helping everyone to improve their teaching.
Done well, a teaching approach has the power to transform the school and deliver what all students deserve: the best teaching available anywhere. And that’s why at Hinchingbrooke School we have the Hinchingbrooke Approach to Teaching.
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