Is that doing it to judge its quality for an individual teacher is problematic for a number of reasons – this common scenario should exemplify the problem.
I am a senior leader and as part of the senior team, I walk around the school, going into lessons, to get ‘a feel’ for what is going on. I also do ‘drop-ins’ on some of my colleagues, which involves dropping in on one or more of their lessons and staying for around ten minutes to observe the quality of their teaching. Finally, again for some of my colleagues I observe a whole lesson that they teach, perhaps twice per year, and I take a view on the quality of what I see as part of what schools call ‘Performance Management’. These are all normal activities that happen up and down the land – leaders should be walking around the school on a regular basis, they should be dropping in on lessons, and they should be observing teaching for longer periods of time (such as whole lessons). But if I’m doing that to judge the quality of an individual teacher’s teaching, it raises some important questions, including:
- Upon what am I basing my judgement of the quality of their teaching?
- Can I reasonably make any judgement at all about the quality of a teacher’s teaching based on walking around the school and looking into the odd lesson that that teacher is teaching?
- Same question for drop-ins: in a 25-period week, Teacher X may teach 21 lessons; over a 15-week term, this means they will teach about 315 lessons – what conclusions can I reasonably draw about the quality of their teaching from one drop-in or even two, which means about 20 minutes (for two) out of up to 18,900 minutes of teaching (315 lessons x 60 minutes)?
- Same question for whole-lesson observations: almost all teachers are formally observed twice per year, or for Teacher X, 120 minutes out of around 49,000 – what judgement can I reasonably come to, based on 120 minutes out of 49,000?
Returning to the question in the first bullet-point above: upon what am I basing my judgement of the quality of teaching? This question is of course much broader than the question of an individual teacher’s quality of teaching – school leadership teams are duty-bound to take a view on the overall quality of teaching in the school as part of their quality-assurance processes and their drive to improve the school, through Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for their teachers. We can’t look to Ofsted for our answer to the upon what question, because the Ofsted Inspection Handbook – the closest thing schools have to Here’s-how-you-should-do-it guide – explicitly says that they DO NOT grade or otherwise assess the quality of individual lessons that they observe during school inspections – they provide no checklist or form to use. And how about the Teachers Standards? Again, they were not designed for observing individual lessons; they say things like ‘Teachers (should) set high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils’ and ‘(Teachers should) promote good progress and outcomes by pupils’ – these are broad, holistic areas for consideration as part of a system of Performance Management; they don’t help with assessing the quality of teaching of individual lessons.
In some schools, key to their assessment of the performance of teachers (their Performance Management process) are the results achieved by those teachers’ examination classes. In this model, if I happen to be teaching two Year 11 French classes this year, a key part of the assessment of my performance at the end of the year will therefore be how well the students in my class achieve in GCSE French. That sounds fair, on the face of it – Teachers Standard 2 again: ‘Promote good progress and outcomes by pupils’. But here’s the rub:
- Students’ prior attainment is the single biggest factor determining their future attainment. So, can I please have ‘top sets’ only? Students with high prior attainment at the end of Year 6 not only attain better on average at the end of Year 11 than students with low prior attainment, but they also make more progress during the secondary phase
- And, okay, I have taught those two classes in Year 11, but Year 11 is the shortest school year (because the examination period starts in May) and by the way I didn’t teach any of those students French when they were in Year 7, Year 8, Year 9 or Year 10. Am I really, fairly ‘accountable’ for the results they achieve in French at the end of Year 11? At my last school, one Head of subject routinely reset all her teaching groups following the Year 11 Mocks, and she took all of the lowest-performing students on the Mocks into her class from the January of Year 11. When the final results came out in August, how was I reasonably judging her performance with that Year 11 class?
- And, of course, how well a student performs in end-of-Year 11 examinations relates to a host of factors, some of which are outside the teacher’s control, or only partially impacted by the teacher: the students’ level of motivation and interest in a subject; how hard they work, over time; their home situation and in particular the quality of support they get from their parents; (as already stated) their prior attainment in the subject. This is not to say that the quality of teaching doesn’t matter – it absolutely does – but it one factor among many that come together to produce performance and outcomes from students.
This issue – how to accurately determine the quality of teaching in the school – is of course well-known to school leaders; we wrestle with it. The most defensible system I can think of for assessing the quality of teaching in a school is by deciding in advance what we want to see in typical teaching in our school. In a sense, what we are then doing is agreeing on what quality looks like. If we have agreed on what quality looks like, then someone observing can reasonably look for those already-agreed indicators of quality, whether that be through learning walks, drop-ins or longer, formal observations. To give one example of that: if we have agreed that when a teacher does whole-class questioning, they will not accept hands up from students but instead they will ask the question of everyone and then pause for a second before choosing the student to answer, then when we observe teaching we can reasonably look for questioning to be done that way as good teaching in our school.
I am talking, of course, about having an approach to teaching. We have one at Hinchingbrooke, which is our way of saying This-is-what-good-typical-teaching-looks like – this gives us something tangible against which to assess the quality of teaching that we see. And even better, at Hinchingbrooke, subject experts have taken the school’s general teaching approach and adapted it to the context of their subject, so that we have the Hinchingbrooke Approach to Teaching PE, and Drama, and Psychology, and Maths etc… Which gives me a good chance, as a school leader, of judging the quality of teaching both in individual lessons and across the school.
If you can think of a better way of doing it, a fairer way of doing it, please let me know.
