Category Archives: Curriculum

Reasons to love Engelmann

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Superb headteacher and sensible Tweeter Nat Nabarro tweeted this over the Christmas holidays:

So, obviously, I went and bought my own copy.

Clear Teaching is great. It’s a pithy synopsis of Direct Instruction: the main ideas, the controversies, and why Engelmann himself is a master teacher. Reading it made me want to revisit the ideas in more depth, so I went back to my copy of Engelmann’s Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System and found myself all fired up again. There are so many reasons to love the late Engelmann; here are mine.

1. He believes every child can learn

For Engelmann, there is no such thing as a child who cannot be taught. This sounds obvious, but how many times are children written off or excluded from the system? I remember being told when given a bottom set exam class in my early years of teaching: “just make sure they behave – they’re not expected to get a C.” I’ve had teachers and sometimes SENCOs tell me of certain children that “they need to be in a special school.” It is wonderfully refreshing to hear someone who affirms the belief that all children can learn, and it is awe-inspiring to hear this from someone who actually wrote the programmes which proved in study after study that all those supposedly “needy” children could learn and catch up with their peers. Engelmann himself wrote in Theory of Instruction: “We begin with the obvious fact that the children we work with are perfectly capable of learning anything that we have to teach… We know that the intellectual crippling of children is caused overwhelmingly by faulty instruction—not by faulty children.” In Clear Teaching Engelmann is quoted as saying: “the problem was not that the children had dyslexia, but that the teacher had some form of dysteachia. Most of the schools we worked in were concerned with the children’s ‘readiness’ but not with providing instruction that would make them ready.”

2. He believes that the children furthest behind can learn the same curriculum

…They just need to go faster. This is refreshing, as even in the very best schools I’ve worked in which did great things for children despite low starting points, there was an acceptance that those children needed to only study part of the curriculum to be able to succeed, be that narrowing their subject options or reducing the content of the curriculum studied. The Engelmann way is to intensively use his programmes early on to ensure those children catch up, and again he put his money where his mouth was and created and tested these programmes to show what was possible for those furthest behind. Clear Teaching tells the story of one preschool he ran: “The Bereiter-Engelmann preschool, as it came to be called, was the first to show that the academic achievement gap between rich and poor could be closed, and that early intervention with an hour or two of well-designed instruction per day was the key to closing it… Open half-days and serving poor families, the preschool resembled others in that children were encouraged to play, sing songs, listen to stories and get along with each other. What made it unique was that for twenty to thirty minutes two or three times a day, they were taught skills in language, reading and math whose mastery Engelmann understood to be critical to their future academic success.”

3. He believes in teachers

But says they need a curriculum – you wouldn’t expect a pilot to construct the engine of his plane. Unlike many of his critics who allege he thinks teachers are too stupid to be trusted to work out how to teach, Engelmann repeatedly speaks warmly of all the teachers he trains in his methods, praises the gains their classes make, and asserts that absolutely anyone – with the right materials and the right training – can make all children learn. In Clear Teaching Barbash writes: “He found that, contrary to popular belief, kids enjoyed learning hard things from adults, and gained confidence as they gained skills. Most important, he found that the results did not depend on him or a few gifted colleagues: he could write programs that allowed most people to use his methods after some training.” This is important: particularly in a time of challenge in teacher recruitment, we certainly cannot rely on a magic pipeline of genius teachers to change the futures of all the children in this country. We need something at scale which works to support all teachers to have impact – Engelmann believes all teachers can do it, with the right programme.

4. He gets kids

It is rare to find an academic who so understands the human and emotional side of the classroom, but books on and by Engelmann clearly demonstrate his skills with children. One tried and tested adage is that we must catch children being good – easier said than done for the new teacher – and Engelmann provides a solid way to do this: “DI programs make it easier because they generate such high rates of correct responses. Off-task behaviour diminishes because children are kept busy with tasks they can succeed at, and because in the end, what kids really cling to is not the behaviour itself—good or bad—but the teacher’s attention and affection.” In Teaching Needy Kids Engelmann writes: “When we trained new teachers, we stressed the importance of their responses. If they treat something as if it’s very important, that’s the way children will respond to it.” Finally, his emphasis on the choral response reveals both his understanding of how young people learn and the way to a controlled but joyful classroom: Barbash writes: “The most visible efficiency features of DI programs are concise teacher scripts and choral student responses. The scripts eliminate extraneous teacher talk, which often unintentionally confuses students. The choral response maximizes the number of times individual children respond, per minute, per period.”

5. He made programmes which work, and which have been measured a thousand times and proved to work

Not only do children taught by Direct Instruction do well, they enjoy learning. Why? Because success motivates. Direct Instruction programmes are meticulously designed to “identify key skills and teach them first… [They] build mastery through practice and intervene early to prevent bad habits.” The longest chapter in Clear Teaching consists of the references to all the multiplicity of studies which show just how effective Direct Instruction is. The challenge remains for UK curriculum makers to adopt the lessons learned in all these many trials and meta-analyses and forge curriculums which have the same impact for the children who need them most.

Clear Teaching sums up the Engelmann legacy: “He showed that poor and disabled children can learn at reasonable rates using standard levels of funding, and that it is therefore fair that we hold ourselves accountable for their learning. He showed that student behaviour is inseparable from instruction: the better the instruction, the better students behave. He showed that teacher quality is inseparable from curriculum: the better the program, the better teachers teach.”

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Curriculum and enrichment

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It goes without saying that the curriculum is the education preoccupation of the moment. As a profession, we’ve come to recognise the limits of a focus on pedagogy alone, and we’ve moved towards a debate on what children study, what their entitlement is, and what that looks like in a school.

In creating the curriculum entitlement for Ark Soane Academy, I’ve had to do some soul-searching. It became rapidly clear, staring at those 29 squares of lesson time, that there was no way we could do everything we wanted to. My own dream curriculum would have 7 lessons of English a week, 8 of Maths, 3 History, 3 Geography, 2 Religious Education, 5 MFL, 7 Science, 2 Art, 2 Music, 2 PE, 2 Drama… we’d have to either find 14 additional hours, or compromise. It came to me early on that we couldn’t do everything, and we certainly couldn’t do everything well.

So, moving away from the boxes, I went back to first principles. We want to ensure that students can achieve great results in academic subjects, not only because academic subjects open doors, but so they can be introduced to the academic conversation, participate in cultural debate and discussion, and have a broad awareness of human thought that is the entitlement of every child. With that in mind, the curriculum at Soane will be highly academic. We make no apologies for wanting every child to learn core academic subjects, and expect all Soane students to study the following to GCSE level: English, Maths, Science, History or Geography, and a foreign language.

That is not to say that we only care about academic subjects at Soane; far from it. After all, we take our name from the most famous architect in British history: Sir John Soane. Soane, born the son of a bricklayer, made his legacy through his art: in his case, designing innovative, enduring buildings like the Bank of England and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. We absolutely recognise and celebrate the importance of the arts. In fact, to designate the arts “non-academic” is clearly inadequate. The arts can be taught as “academically” as any other subject, and they will be at Soane.

Another thought I could not shake was the importance of enrichment. I was inspired hearing Lizzie Bowling’s speech at New Voices last year on enrichment, where she lamented how few children came to her wonderfully planned, hugely inspiring lunchtime clubs. Her rallying cry: “enrichment for all!” rang in my ears. We had to ensure every child had an enriched experience of school, not only those who chose it. So we have built enrichment into the school timetable, to ensure every child who attends Soane gets to choose something extra-curricular to pursue. Our aim with enrichment is to provide students with a broader educational experience, and to enable them to have an aspect of choice in their education: students will have free choice over a myriad of possibilities, and the opportunity to change each term to try something different. What these possibilities look like will be shaped by the passions and expertise of the teachers we hire in January and February next year.

At all open events, the children want to hear about school trips. I’ve worked at schools where teachers ran trips every week, taking a handful of children to some new and exciting place. This ultimately left behind cover work  and all its attendant difficulties for the teacher’s classes, and scores of children crying “unfair” – it was often seen that the same students got lots of opportunities, and others very few. In other schools I’ve worked at, we would run trip days or “academy days”, like I know a lot of schools do now. Taking a whole year group out on an enriching trip means no cover left behind, and no children left behind. This will be our approach to trips at Soane.

If you like the sound of an academic curriculum full of cultural capital with enrichment as an entitlement for all, please stay in touch – we will be accepting applications from December 2019.

Booklets

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I’ve been meaning to post about making booklets instead of separate resources and PowerPoints, but felt that so many others had written so eloquently on this recently I wasn’t sure it was needed. But after a couple of people have got in touch asking for tips, I thought it might be useful to have a guide for how I approach making booklets for lessons here. It goes without saying that this is just my preferred way of working; I’m sure others go about this in different ways and produce marvellous results.

First of all, why booklets? I think it makes sense to simplify the resources needed in a lesson. I covered a lesson a few weeks ago where I had a PowerPoint, textbook, YouTube clip and worksheet. If the teacher had prepared all that for a cover lesson, goodness knows how much effort went into their usual lessons. And of course, it’s great that teachers want to spend time planning their lessons. I just think that time could be better spent decided how to teach a single resource, rather than pouring hours into PowerPoints and photocopying.

Teachers who share PowerPoints: has anyone ever taken a PowerPoint from the central area and thought: ‘that will do,’ and just taught it? In my experience, central resource areas are filled with: ‘PPTLesson2V3MISSHILLSCLASS’ and the like. In my view, we waste time tweaking a PowerPoint to our classes. It’s not the best thing to be focused on.

With a booklet, which is like a textbook that you have created for your own class, every child has it and every adult has the same one. There is total clarity over what the class is learning and how. For Heads of Department, they have total clarity on what is being taught in every lesson. I have seen consistency unlike that found using any other methods through the use of booklets, both at my current and previous schools. You also have clarity for new teachers and new students, because you can give them the exact lessons the class has already done, packaged in one handy format.

I’ll go through how I make booklets, using the example of the one I have most recently made for teaching Jekyll and Hyde. First of all, clarify your aims. This was intended as a first exposure to the text. We wanted the students to grasp the key contextual factors and understand the story. We would do some analysis, but that wasn’t the focus this time around – that can come later when they’re a little older and we revisit it later in their GCSE course.

I started by dividing up the text so there was a double page spread for every lesson, with room at the ‘top’ and ‘tail’ of the lesson for recap activities and writing activities.

I then did a bit of research on the text and asked a few teacher friends their advice, and wrote a couple of pages of key context in language that would be accessible to all abilities, with a little bit of challenge built in for the top end. I then drew out the most important concepts, or the ones I thought they might struggle with, and did another two pages on those, essentially saying the same thing in different words. Finally for the ‘up-front’ stuff, I wrote a simplified plot summary.

At this point, I would usually feel confident that I knew the key context, plot, characters and themes, and put these into a knowledge organiser. On this occasion, my Head of Department had already made one, so we did some minor tweaks together and pasted it to the back cover of the booklet. Using the organiser and the context pages, I then started drafting the early recap questions – five short questions with an extension to help the students use the testing effect to remember knowledge for the long term.

Then I started on the text, emboldening words I thought the students would struggle with (in teaching this, I’ve realised I’ve missed lots!). After each extract, I wrote comprehension questions with some guidance of line numbers for trickier questions, and some deeper ‘analysis’ style questions, and building in some (but not enough) of the tips from the amazing book The Writing Revolution.

After dealing with the text, including starting to add recaps that were lesson-specific, so I could be sure students were understanding the text, I went back and thought about where we could have some specific ‘writing’ lessons, where students could practise close analysis and extended writing using extracts like they will have to in their GCSE exams. Again, I tried to add some shorter questions to scaffold this for the students and teachers. There’s lots more I would add to these if I were editing the booklet, like additional guidance and example paragraphs.

The expectation is that teachers take this booklet and work out the best way to use it to teach the children in front of them. Teachers absolutely need to plan their lessons – but their plan will normally involve annotating the text prior to teaching it, thinking how they will ensure the students understand the key ideas.

This might sound like a big time demand, and I confess, booklets do take ages to make. If you’re pressed for time, I might plan every lesson as a ‘two-pager’ as you go, but then copy and paste them into one document at the end to come back to next year as a ready-made booklet.

Some drawbacks to be aware of:

Heads of Department will need to keep on top of teachers. You want to absolutely discourage complacency – the booklet is a resource, not a lesson – it’s up to the teacher to think carefully about what to say and how to say it to ensure maximum student learning.

That said, don’t let people over-plan. There’s no need to make supplementary worksheets or PowerPoints; instead, they can spend their time editing the questions and throw their changes to me at the end of teaching scrawled in their teacher copy so I can build them into the next iteration.

The major drawback of booklets is your print budget, though any school telling you one double sided page of A4 per child per lesson is excessive may not have spent enough time in a classroom.

Here’s my ‘finished’ booklet. It is full of errors. It is a hastily pulled together first draft, made over about two frantic weeks of evenings and snatched weekend hours. Obviously, feedback is massively welcome!

1. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Part One

2. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde part two

The Writing Revolution

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I have always been convinced that children need to read texts with high cultural capital. It is only in the last five or so years that I have begun to think more carefully about reading, and why it is so vital every child reads in every lesson, and how we can go about checking children’s reading. But I have really neglected to think about writing. In my early years as a teacher, I would get children to do ‘extended writing’ for fifteen to twenty minutes every lesson. More recently, I began to see the merit of using short-answer comprehension questions to check children’s understanding.

What The Writing Revolution provides is both a revolutionary rethink on how we teach writing across a school, and some really easy-to-integrate, sensible activities to help hone students’ writing skills. Below are some key take-aways for me.

 

The content drives the rigour

Just like reading, the more rigorous the content studied, the more challenging the writing required. Writing about a very simple text is much simpler than synthesising the key elements in a very complex one.

 

The stem of writing is a short, simple statement…

…but children need to be able to expand on that statement in a variety of ways. The authors use the connectives because, but and so. Using these, you can really see how much children have really understood of the teacher instruction and the text read. In his foreword, Doug Lemov gives an example to illustrate this: if the sentence stem is: ‘the Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city,’ the three sentences the student writes might be: ‘The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city, because at the time, citizens didn’t have the knowledge to stop the fire before it spread;’ ‘The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city, but London survived and thrived;’ ‘The Great Fire of London burned 4/5 of the city, so the city was rebuilt as a result.’ After reading a complex text, we can give students a sentence stem and get them to finish it in these three ways to encourage them to apply their knowledge, as well as focusing on creating a grammatically accurate sentence before they are ready to write long paragraphs.

 

Note-taking is crucial

Taking notes by pen consolidates understanding. Children putting ideas into their own words is invaluable in helping them to process what they are learning. We need to explicitly teach children how to take notes, and explicitly teach them the signs and symbols associated with note taking.

 

Teach sentence types and transition words

We need to teach children: topic sentences, sentences of supporting detail and concluding sentences. Using this language across subjects will help to ensure student paragraphs are more coherent. Likewise, teaching the three ‘transition’ types and the associated words (time and sequence transitions like ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘finally’; conclusion transitions like ‘in closing’, ‘consequently’, ‘in the end’ and illustration transitions like ‘for example’, ‘such as’, ‘particularly’) will help to add coherence to student writing.

 

A cheat for quotations

We need to explicitly teach children some helpful words to introduce quotations and drill them so they practise this – getting students to embed quotations is notoriously tricky. I think almost all English teachers already do this, but perhaps some feel like they shouldn’t. I think we should feel happier about drilling ‘Shakespeare writes’ and ‘Romeo states’ because this is the crucial first step to accuracy, without which children can never move on to use their own insight and creativity to express their ideas more originally. After quoting, we need to teach children to paraphrase the quotation to display their understanding immediately after using it, again by teaching some useful fragments like: ‘in other words…’, ‘therefore, according to the author…’ ‘Romeo’s point is that…’ With my intervention group of year 11s, I’ve simply introduced ‘this means…’ which has really revealed to me who understands the quotation and who does not.

 

Summarising is vital

One of the best tasks the iGCSE English required, in my view, was that students write ten bullet points (not in full sentences) about a text and then made these into a short summary. Summarising is a helpful skill in and of itself, but it is also a great activity to consolidate learning in the acquisition phase, and one that is easily incorporated into lessons. The authors provide some incredibly useful scaffolds in their book to develop summary writing even further.

 

Explicitly teach them how to craft essays

The authors break down the art of the essay into really manageable steps, including writing a thesis statement and then supporting it with paragraphs that are developed using a very clear and simple scaffolded plan, relying on student knowledge of the sentence types outlined above. If we teach the individual elements of writing, crafting the essay draws on this explicit knowledge and helps students to form cogent arguments.

 

 

There is a lot more to The Writing Revolution that I haven’t covered. Every school’s current situation will be different, and for me the aspects above are the most pressing ones for us to address now. Yet all of the above seems, to me, entirely manageable with a few tweaks. The beauty of The Writing Revolution is that a few tweaks will lead to a lot of gains in learning.

 

 

 

Teach Knowledge

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What can you do when you inherit a clueless year 10 or 11 class? Teach them the test. It’s something that teachers who join struggling schools know well. Principals who are drafted in to turn around failing schools are not fools to throw their resources at year 11 intervention, a.k.a., teaching to the test. What is the alternative?

But kids at private schools and grammar schools don’t do better on these tests because they were drilled better in exam technique. They don’t even do better because their teachers are better paid, or better qualified, or their schools have bigger, better buildings. They do better on the tests because they have deep subject knowledge, built up incrementally over a great number of years, often beginning in the cradle with a loving parent’s reading aloud each night.

In state schools, we have, for too long, been teaching skills and neglecting knowledge. In English, we have taught any novel, or any poem, thinking that the thing that is important is the ‘skill’: of reading, of inferring, of analysing. And yet, novel finished, what have the children learned? Daniel Willingham says that memory is ‘the residue of thought.’ The problem with skills-based lessons is that they don’t require thinking about anything you can commit to memory. Nothing is learned because nothing is being remembered. Over years and years of skills-based teaching, children aren’t actually learning anything. They are simply practising some skills in a near vacuum.

And yet, when it comes to the exams, we all know what to do: we teach them the test. We don’t like knowledge, but we’ll drill children in quotations and PEE and techniques used in key poems. We’ll drill kids in how long to spend on each question and how many marks are available. We’ll drill kids on the key words in each question (‘bafflingly, when AQA says “structure”, what they actually mean is…’). And then we will complain that we have to teach to the test.

I say ‘we,’ because I am equally culpable. Before joining Michaela, I could not see an alternative way of teaching English. Surely it was all about the skills! Who cared when Oliver Twist was written or what the characters’ names were? The kids could look that stuff up! What mattered was their ideas about the text!

We hugely underestimate how vital knowledge is. Skills-teachers across the land cannot work out why their kids cannot improve their inferences, cannot improve their analysis. Why can’t their ideas about the text just be a bit, well, better?

The kids’ ideas can’t be better because they don’t know enough. We don’t think it matters whether they learn chronology, but we forget that it is not obvious to children that Dickens is a Victorian. It is not obvious to children that Shakespeare is an Elizabethan. It is not obvious to children that the Elizabethans pre-date the Victorians. They simply do not know this.

The children who grow up being taught facts and knowledge will thrive in their national exams. They will use all their background knowledge and cultural literacy to deliver deft insights in glorious prose, and sweep up the top grades with ease. The children taught through skills will improve slowly, painfully, and nowhere near fast enough to compete. They will endure two years of teaching to the test and lose any love of learning they might have gleaned in the previous years.

Is there another way? Of course: teach a knowledge-based curriculum from the very start. Stop giving the rich kids a head start.

We Have Overcomplicated Teaching: Research Ed 2016

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I was overjoyed to be asked to present at Research Ed’s national conference last Saturday.

We have massively overcomplicated teaching. In my talk, I explored how we have overcomplicated it, why, why we need to go simple and how that would work, using examples from Michaela Community School.

I began the session with a series of questions, which readers may wish to revisit:

  • How many activities do you need in a lesson?
  • How often do the activities change in a lesson?
  • How many different ‘starters’ do you create?
  • How many different ‘plenaries’ do you have?
  • How many variations on tasks do you have?
  • How many slides do you have on a powerpoint?
  • How many resources do you print for each lesson?
  • How many ways are you expected to differentiate for children?
  • How many pages does your scheme of work fill?
  • How often have you changed schemes of work?
  • How often have you taught the same curriculum two or more years in a row?
  • How many intervention sessions have you run after school? Weekends?
  • How much feedback do you give children?
  • How much data do you gather? Input? Use?
  • How many CPD sessions have explored new ways of teaching children?
  • How many targets do you have to meet for your performance appraisal?
  • How many trips do you take?
  • How many forms do you have to fill out to take a trip?
  • How many forms do you have to fill out to log a behaviour report?
  • How many external agencies are working with your young people?
  • How often do children miss your lessons for interventions?
  • How do you get children to turn up to detentions, and what happens when they don’t?
  • How many action plans have you written?

I spent four years teaching thirty slide powerpoint lessons. Life in a dark room, filled by clicks and mumbles, was uninspiring for both the children and me. The failures of the past, not purely powerpoint-related it must be conceded, have led to what I called ‘intervention hell’ in the present, something that will be kicking in soon for many teachers, if it hasn’t already. We are drowning in data we don’t use. External agencies are taking children out of the one thing that will change their life: lessons where they are learning.

Schools are no longer seen as places of learning – in the expectation that we will educate the whole child, prevent radicalisation, encourage healthy eating, and teach financial literacy (among other initiatives), we are missing the crucial thing: kids learning stuff, passing exams, having successful lives. In 2015, only 53% of kids in the country achieved the old benchmark of 5 A*-C including English and Maths. 47% of kids didn’t even get five Cs including English and Maths. Schools are categorically failing to teach all kids effectively. Our role has been massively overcomplicated.

But the over-complication is not only the state’s fault. We too must accept responsibility. In the ‘missionary teacher’ or ‘martyr teacher’ paradigm, too many of us have decided to ‘sacrifice our lives on the altar of pupil progress’, to borrow a phrase from Joe Kirby’s Michaela debate speech. Working fourteen hour days, working weekends, working holidays (as it seemed nearly the whole room was doing or had done at some point) is categorically not sustainable. Who can do that for thirty, forty years? Our martyrdom has spawned an arms race, where ambitious teachers strive to outcompete each other. Add to this soup flawed accountability measures, spurious research (learning styles, anyone?) and the ‘teacher as entertainer’ model pedalled by teacher training organisations and SLTs up and down the country, and you have a recipe for disastrous burnout, as evidenced by the 50,000 or so teachers leaving the classroom every year.

Why is simplicity better? Three reasons spring to mind: sustainability, consistency, retention. Sustainability for teachers: simpler teaching means we can have lives and carry on doing the job we love for the long-term. A career is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency for children: teachers who stay massively impact on the children. Having the same teachers year in, year out, is undervalued at the moment. (In a later conversation, I mused about school improvement. I think a lot of mediocre schools who achieve great results do so by being strong on two fronts: behaviour, and teachers staying. Behaviour is obvious – better a calm than a chaotic school. But teachers staying, as long as they are middling to excellent and not diabolically harmful to children, has a massive impact on consistency within the school and consistency for children.) And retention: teachers who want to stay in the profession is of obvious benefit to schools who spent enormous sums of money and time on recruitment each year.

How do we simplify teaching? I explored three strands: curriculum, pedagogy and systems.

With the curriculum, I focused on within subject choices, rather than whole-school curriculum. When planning the curriculum, instead of fourteen page schemes of work that no child will ever see (or arguably benefit from), make unit packs. All ‘worksheets’ can be in the pack. No need for a powerpoint – everything is happier when your curtains are open in the classroom, and technology is an added stress teachers simply don’t need in their lives. At Michaela, we use packs to cut workload, but also to benefit kids: the text is central. Kids are reading a vast amount across subjects, not just in English. We add recap questions to strengthen pupil memory, resource comprehension and discussion questions to prevent teachers thinking these up on the spot or the night before, and prepare model exemplars to guide pupils to where we want them to end up.

With pedagogy, I foregrounded the three arms of practice at Michaela: direct instruction, questioning, and extended practice. There is a huge gap between our pupils and their wealthier counterparts, and the gap is partly knowledge and partly practice. To close the knowledge gap, we teach with urgency. We never ask pupils to guess, but instruct upfront by reading text and explaining. We then question to check understanding, and recap to aid memorisation. To close the practice gap, we make sure when we’re not questioning and teaching, the kids are reading and writing. Kids are generally great speakers, great debaters and especially great at arguing; that’s not where the gap is. Our kids need more reading and more writing, so we make sure they do lots of that. We need to teach with urgency all the way through school – from reception to year 10, we teach like every second is vital (because it is). Hopefully that way we can prevent the intervention hell that is year 11.

I showed some clips of what direct instruction looks like, as it can sound massively off-putting:

 

Notice how interactive these lessons are. It’s certainly not a case of teachers lecturing at bored children. We can’t just talk at children – that much is true. We have to constantly question and check they have understood and remembered what we have taught.

Finally, I explored three systems to simplify teaching: behaviour, homework and feedback. Currently, I would imagine the majority of schools ‘allow’ teachers to set their own detentions. This is great for building teacher-pupil relationships, but I would argue the drawbacks outweigh this benefit. Teachers set detentions of any length they choose, so children can judge different teachers to be stricter or ‘easier.’ If a pupil doesn’t turn up, individual teachers have to hunt the child down. Too often, teachers end up chasing detentions that are multiplying, constantly trying to remember who has and has not turned up, and liaising with form tutors and parents to cajole the children into serving their time. Long-term, many teachers give up. I don’t blame them. The administration involved in setting, sitting, chasing detentions is too much. So teachers stop bothering.

Similarly with homework – and homework isn’t just challenging in terms of sanctioning non-completion. Teachers are desperately trying to think up new and different homework tasks, setting it, and then marking it. Again, all this administration is overburdening and discourages pupil completion (‘son, what’s your science homework?’ ‘No idea. Something about research? It might be due next Tuesday? Dunno.’) At Michaela, all teachers set the same homework on a rigid timetable. All kids are revising their subjects for the same length of time in the same way. Absolutely no confusion over what they need to do or when; no excuses. (We use knowledge organisers to set this revision.)

Finally feedback – I’ve written at length on this before, so I would encourage you to revisit my lengthier piece if you’re interested. The long and the short of it: don’t do it.

I ended with some advice for leaders. When you have a shining star working 14 hour days, it is tempting to let them get on with it. But that sets unrealistic expectations for others, and could set up unfair comparisons between them and other teachers. They are also too often using their time pointlessly: extra marking, making transient displays, or forty five slide PowerPoints with the requisite resources. Instead, have the conversation with them: could every teacher do what you are doing? Do you want a family one day? Will you be able to do this when you do? When you lead a department, would you want every teacher doing this? Thousands of teachers leave the profession every year – how do we make this a school where people want to stay? What is the impact of your excessive workload on others in the department?

Leaders need to lead by example, teaching rigorous content, actually teaching, limiting their activities, resources and feedback (I suggested teachers carry a red pen around with you when kids are writing, and use icons to set targets instead of laborious written comments). Leaders need to mitigate the impact of school systems on teachers: if you lead a department, you set a centralised detention for that department if your school will not (show the SLT it works).

There were a number of questions and comments following the talk. One common thread in these questions was: where is the room for teacher creativity with such a rigid system? I guess we don’t really value creativity as highly as consistency and workload at Michaela. Although there is plenty of space for creativity in delivery (see: Jonny Porter jousting, above), we don’t let teachers make whizzy jazzy PowerPoints or decide to teach their own thing in their own way. Michaela is not for everyone.

But I would challenge questioners: sometimes what we enjoy doing most is not the best thing for the kids. And sometimes what we enjoy doing in our own classroom, going above and beyond for our kids, has an adverse impact on the others around us, not to mention our own workload. And finally, great content is exciting in and of itself! I wouldn’t choose to teach Julius Caesar – it’s not my favourite Shakespeare play. But I absolutely loved teaching it, because it’s Shakespeare! Same with Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ – not my favourite poem, but again, it is a great one, and so great to teach.

I was heartened by the people I met afterwards: it was especially lovely to hear teachers say to me: ‘I’ve done this for years and always been told I was wrong!’ What I’ve said is not revolutionary: many, many teachers have always known this. I hope Michaela can shine a light on what works for kids and teachers and allow these brilliant professionals to just teach, and then have a life. Some of what I said was not appreciated by some members of the audience; I had reports of some eye-rolling and tutting as I was speaking. I’d like to say: thank you. Thank you for coming to hear me speak, thank you for not walking out, thank you for taking the time to be challenged. Next time: ask a question, get in touch, tell me what you don’t like. It is wonderful to debate these ideas. I really think that in sacrificing some individuality and creativity we can deliver amazing results for pupils, and amazing work-life balance for teachers.

Teacher Instruction

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While moving my blog from Squarespace to WordPress, I witnessed some worrying things. I was horrified to see the extent to which I had relied upon group work, philosophy circles and multimedia to engage pupils. I considered, briefly, expunging these articles from my blog. But I decided, ultimately, that it was more honest to leave them. I have, you see, been on a journey.

When I first met Joe Kirby, Katie Ashford, Bodil Isaksen and Kris Boulton in 2013 to write an e-book for Teach First starters, I was their polar opposite. While they talked about knowledge and instruction, I raved about student-led lessons and pupils’ personal interpretations. We had common ground only on curriculum choice: the one thing that united us was the idea that kids should be taught great literature. We were desperately divided on how to teach it.

By September 2014, Michaela Community School had opened, and I was still nay-saying in the corner. It wasn’t until Katie Ashford shared her pupils’ essays with me that I had the profound realisation: their way worked. My way did not work. With my way, some children thrived, and others were left hopelessly far behind. With their approach, Katie’s set 4 (of 4) year 7s were outperforming my set 3 (of five) year 10s.

Teacher instruction sounded terrifying. For one thing, I’d never done it or been trained to do it. What would I say? How on earth could I fill 60 minutes of learning time with… Me? In my head, teacher instruction was like a lecture, and in my experience lecturers would speak once a week, and have a whole week to prepare it. How could you possibly lecture six times a day?

But that isn’t at all what it is. When I first visited Michaela, I accepted the theory, but had no idea what to do in practice. Seeing it, I saw there was a lot more common ground than I had thought. In fact, even in the dark days of 2013, I might even have done a bit of teacher instruction myself.

Teacher instruction is highly active, not passive. We explain, read, expand, yes; we also probe, question and test. We spend time writing out explanations and printing them up for pupil and teacher to read together. We spend time in department meetings discussing what we will teach and the key learning points we will be drawing out as we teach. The result is powerful: a highly engaging and dynamic classroom, full of pupils learning, answering questions, and recapping their prior knowledge. Visit Michaela and you see one thing very clearly: pupils love learning. They aren’t sitting in lessons bored, waiting for the next video clip or poster activity to engage them. They are answering questions, positing ideas, listening and annotating or taking notes, reading, reading reading; writing, writing, writing.

For a flavour of what teacher instruction looks like, watch year 8 annotating as Joe Kirby talks. Notice how he recaps on their prior knowledge throughout instruction – picking up on vocabulary they have learned, along with their prior knowledge:

Watch Olivia Dyer questioning year 8 in science. This is the start of a lesson, where she is recapping their prior knowledge. Look how many pupils have their hands up wanting to contribute! I always love visiting Olivia’s classroom – her manner is extraordinary: she is patient, quiet, calm and encouraging.

I love Naveen Rizvi’s excitement about the Maths as she carefully models for year 7, and engages the pupils every step of the way:

And finally, Jonny Porter’s expert use of a pupil demonstration to explain jousting to year 8, again recapping on their prior knowledge all the way:

 

 

The Means and the Ends

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In the past, I have confused the means and the ends.

In my first year of teaching, I thought back to my most recent experience of school: A-level English. Looking at the oldest class I taught, year 10 set 5, I thought there could be no better path than the one teachers older and wiser than I had taken me on. At ages 17 and 18, I had written an essay a week.

So, I decided to set my year 10 set 5 an essay a week.

Obviously, this was doomed to failure. My poor struggling year 10s, so far behind in literacy, failed so utterly in this first homework I lost their trust entirely. It took a very long time to build it back up.

I had confused the means and the ends. Of course I wanted year 10 to write beautifully crafted, intelligent essays. But I hadn’t considered that the way to get someone to write a great essay is not to just write a lot of essays.

I see this a lot in unit planning, especially at KS4. We’ve become awfully good at drilling to the exam. But two years is a very long time to drill to the exam. We have two years to teach, with perhaps two weeks (or, if desperate, months) to drill exam practice. Too many KS4 units on English language, for example, teach using unlinked, decontextualised texts, like random novel openings or random excerpts from unlinked news articles. Although this is the format students will encounter in their eventual exam, it is surely a wasted opportunity to only teach disparate content in the ‘teaching’ stage. Of course in the end, we want students to be able to write about decontextualised pieces of writing, but in the run-up it is surely much more effective to lead students through a well-designed scheme, for example short stories, or articles linked by a common theme like feminism, or social justice – schemes that will allow students to practice key exam skills, but also learn something.

The means don’t have to look like the ends. In fact, they rarely do.

When successful adults turn around and say: ‘I didn’t enjoy school. I want our children to have a more fun experience than I had,’ they are confusing the means and the ends. We all want children to have fun; or rather, fulfilling, happy lives. But you don’t get to those ends by making school all about having fun. Many adults have succeeded because of schooldays filled with hard, hard work, not fun and games. We can have fun and games now, because of that hard work.

In Education is Upside Down, Eric Kalenze writes about ‘engagement first’ teaching. This is the paradigm in which I was taught to teach. It was only after too many years of seeing my poorest students make insufficient leaps in their education that I realised my error. We can’t put fun first; we can’t even put exams first.

We have to put learning first, and the means do not often look like the ends.

What is mastery?

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On leaving my job as Assistant Principal for Curriculum Design, I was charged to write down everything I knew about mastery. I sent it around to the smartest people I know, the ones I stole all of the ideas from, and one of them said it might be useful to other people. It is just under 2,500 words, so rather than paste it into the blog, I’ve attached the booklet. It outlines: what mastery is, the science of learning, what a mastery curriculum looks like, what a mastery lesson looks like, and some suggestions for further reading.

Mastery Handbook JFA

Challenges to a ‘mastery’ curriculum

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In my role this term, I’ve been implementing a knowledge-led mastery curriculum across all subjects, following the thoughts of great educationalists like E.D. Hirsch to shape students’ learning around core knowledge to increase their social and cultural capital and ensure they can access the greatest number of choices in their future lives.

So far, the three greatest challenges to implementing this kind of curriculum have been the concerns of SEN and EAL students, along with behaviour.

SEN

My school has a very high percentage of pupil premium students, and it is the peculiar case that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are far more likely to be diagnosed with special educational needs (SEN) than their wealthier peers. Our school certainly has an extensive SEN list.

Now, while I am not an SEN expert, I do tend to the view that, as it seems unlikely that poor children are just predisposed to having special educational needs, there must be something else at play to explain the higher numbers on the SEN registers of schools serving economically deprived communities. Partly, I wonder if this is just one symptom of the wider knowledge and practice gap between our students and their more advantaged peers, diagnosed and labeled to be worked around.

Whatever the root cause, there can be no doubt that there are certain children who take much longer to learn stuff – any stuff. Try to teach all children incredibly rigorous material, and these children in particular will struggle. I don’t think that is an issue – struggle is the very stuff of learning, after all. But there is the inescapable issue of time: if these students will take longer to learn, how to we ensure we allow them the same space to master core content?

One solution is to focus the curriculum offer, giving more time to the key subjects (like humanities, science, English and maths) to ensure these students have time to truly master the key subjects. It is a point of contention at what stage such a focus should take place – is it in the early years of KS3, to drench them in the basics and catch them up, or should they have equal access to all subjects at KS3 and narrow at KS4 in preparation for the exams?

In general, I would advocate focusing sooner, as the latter can tend to lead to students pushed through a clutch of technical qualifications in an attempt to ensure they leave school with something they can use later in life. Too diffuse a subject offer at KS3 for these subjects means some will continue to struggle, and even fail, thus perpetuating a vicious circle of lack of buy-in.

EAL

The second challenge to consider in our school’s particular context is its EAL students. We have a particularly high number of new arrivals, and a phenomenal job is done by the EAL team with these.

But there are students who still really struggle with the basics of communication in English. As one teacher told me, ‘to allow one student to access the lesson, her TA has to look up the words in Portuguese just so she can answer the questions – in Portuguese. What is the point in her learning a nineteenth century novel?’

I have much sympathy with this view. Of course, we would like all our EAL students to miraculously pick up perfect English just by sitting in mainstream lessons, but there might need to be a smarter solution for these students.

It also depends how much time they have before their all-important exams; clearly a student in year 7 can struggle through the year and probably make enormous progress in mainstream lessons, where a new arrival in year 10 or 11 might need alternative curriculum provision to ensure they are not drowning in syntax.

Behaviour

The greatest and widest-ranging challenge to a mastery curriculum is behaviour, because behaviour affects every teacher and every student in a school. If in the past I was guilty of delivering lessons with too much group work and student independent research, this was partly because it was incredibly difficult to deliver to a class that you couldn’t reach silence with. In that circumstance, in my early years as a teacher, I believed it was better to teach them something than to have a complete riot with nothing being learned.

But I know now that I failed those children in many ways. We do not have time to waste – the gap is too large, the stakes too high. These children do not have time for guessing, for card-sorts, for making posters with their friends. They need to read, write, and learn.

Delivering a lesson which is composed of reading, questioning and silent writing is not easy with students who are used to a variety of engaging activities which allow them a quiet word with their friends. A year 11 student only recently reminded me ‘I’m doing the work while I’m talking!’ when challenged, as if to say that as long as their pen was near the paper they were fine to not be 100% engaged with the lesson. (I firmly disagreed with the student, for the record.)

The major concern with implementing a rigorous knowledge curriculum is that the people who deliver it, especially NQTs, teachers who are new to the school or trainee teachers, all run the risk of immense challenge from students who have grown accustomed to lessons which are part learning, part social time.

To be able to deliver effectively to children, for them to really engage with and reflect on the knowledge they are learning, for them to learn enough in a short enough time to close the gap, behaviour must be absolutely impeccable. And if it isn’t, that has to be the number one priority to allow mastery to take place.