Clarity Trumps Accessibility

In the last post we explored the link between the hours we work and our effectiveness in the workplace. I suggested that while we associate success with long hours, most of us could work fewer hours and still be as effective. It’s our personal attributes – our knowledge, the way we communicate, our ability to form productive relationships – which make us effective, not the length of our days.

This post will address some particular challenges that teaching presents when it comes to workload, and then some solutions.

Let’s start with email. Teaching must be right up there when it comes to jobs ill-suited to email. Cal Newport, author of ‘A world without email’, suggests that email works well when connecting a small team working on a single project. But it doesn’t scale up well. And it’s particularly damaging in a large organisation, where anyone could email anyone at any point with the expectation of a response. I wonder how many office workers up and down the land open up Outlook in the morning and spend the rest of their day reacting to their inbox, rather than structuring their day based on what they need to get done.

Teachers don’t have that luxury of course, because they spend a fair bit of time teaching. It’s only when you leave the classroom that you realise the intensity of the work teachers do every day. Delivering a presentation, or chairing a meeting, might be the toughest thing that a typical office worker does in a day, yet teachers and school leaders have to be on it throughout the day. For a teacher on a full teaching load of around 20 hours, or anything close to it, simple maths will tell us that with say 30 minutes prep per lesson and 30 minutes follow up, we’ve already hit a full working week.

Returning to Cal Newport and his critique of email, he argues in this podcast that if a university wanted to recruit a superstar lecturer, all they’d have to do is promise them that they wouldn’t need an email address. The opportunity to focus on their subject, free from email’s persistent ping, would be enough to attract the best in the business.

Do teachers really need a school email address?

In his wonderful book ‘4000 Weeks: Time and How to Use It’, Oliver Burkeman says: “Getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder: you’ll feel more rushed, but no matter how quickly you go, you’ll never reach the top.”

Burkeman and Newport agree that email itself is flawed, so no nifty hack is going to free you from its grip. For Newport, workplaces should be “citadels of concentration”, yet too often workplace communication is a free for all, as different people and different departments fight for time and attention via email. As a result, we work with what Burkeman describes as “crushing intensity”.

Does it have to be like this?

Thankfully, as well as raising concerns, both Cal Newport and Oliver Burkeman offer plenty of solutions.

Burkeman shares the story attributed to Warren Buffett that if you’re serious about productivity you should write down the 25 things you want to achieve in life and then cross out all but the top 5, because it’s the other 20 that will distract you from the most important stuff. You can’t do it all!

I think we could learn from this in education. “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any” says Jim Collins, yet how many school or department improvement plans limit themselves to just three or fewer priorities? Too often these plans cover all the things that a department or school does, rather than focusing on the key things you’re looking to really push on over the course of a year.

“Focus on doing a few things that count” says Burkeman. He recommends taking a fixed volume approach to workload, so you decide the hours you’re able to work, and the number of big tasks or responsibilities you can handle at any one time, rather than taking on more and more. Playing the long game helps. Burkeman recommends sticking with stuff long enough to get good at it, and for things to get interesting. Ask not what you achieved today, but what you want this year to be remembered for.

Once we’ve agreed and shared our three priorities, how do we carve out time to return to them, to work out what the next step is? I’m not a fan of the typical strategic planning grid where we somehow predict a series of actions we’ll take many months from now to achieve a particular goal, but I think it’s helpful to return to big priorities regularly and ask yourself what you’re doing this week, or this month, to make them happen.

Next we can consider our personal systems for capturing stuff. David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ has some good advice here, including a reminder that “your head is for having thoughts, not holding them”. Whether it’s a to-do list or a calendar or a note on your phone, having somewhere to store key thoughts, notes, deadlines and reminders seems like a good place to start.

We began this series by questioning the link between the hours we work and our effectiveness. But what if your team and your colleagues need you to be available? There’s a line from Cal Newport that stuck in my head this year: ‘clarity trumps accessibility’. Perhaps by providing clarity we can help colleagues do their work, and in the process free ourselves from being ‘always on’.

In schools, we can provide clarity in the following ways:

• For regular team meetings, use a rolling set of slides that everyone can access, so that the whole team can see what was discussed and agreed previously.
• Start meetings by returning to those three big priorities.
• Limit key policies to a single page, and try to keep them in place for years.
• Middle and senior leaders could hold regular office hours eg “I’ll be in my office 4-5 every Tuesday and Thursday” so that people know they can find you without emailing you (these office hours can be held online too).

Teachers and school leaders, almost by definition, are likely to be interested in people and the world around them. It therefore makes sense that they may wish to have a life beyond school. As I said in the previous post, I have no issue with people who work evenings, weekends and holidays. Throwing yourself into teaching or running schools seems to me like a meaningful way to spend our limited time.

But we must also recognise the occupational hazard that teaching presents: it attracts well-meaning people for whom there is always more work to do.

Let’s think back to those highly effective colleagues who we brought to mind in our first post. Would they still be effective if they worked a bit less? I think so. Worth a try at least.

The Hours We Work

Consider the most effective and impressive people you’ve worked with. Do they work long hours? In my experience, they do. I’d rather this wasn’t the case. I’d like to think there’s no relationship between the hours we work and our success in the workplace.

But correlation is not causation. A surge in ice cream sales might be correlated with an increase in forest fires, but the Cornettos do not cause the infernos. Countries with higher chocolate consumption have churned out more than their fair share of Nobel prize winners, but claims of a causal link between a sweet tooth and great intellect would be rather far-fetched.

What these examples have in common is a third, underlying variable. Ice cream sales and forest fires both increase in hot weather; high chocolate consumption and nobel-prize winning endeavours are both more likely in wealthy nations. So our fixation with the first two variables can distract us from the real cause beneath: heat waves and GDP.

Returning to our highly effective and hard working colleagues, perhaps there’s an underlying cause here too: people who are highly effective tend to be deeply committed to their work, and people who are deeply committed to their work tend to work long hours. So the underlying cause, by this hypothesis, is a deep commitment to the job. Or to put it more simply, it’s the personal attributes that these people bring to the table, and not their long hours, which make them effective.

To extend the hypothesis, people who are effective at work get satisfaction from their job, since it’s quite fun being good at something and being valued for it. So over time they devote more hours to their work, until their being good at their job becomes completely entangled with their working long hours at their job, even though these two things are in fact separate. 

Now we can add an additional factor. In education, our work is never done. From the role of teacher to middle leader through to headteacher, 3 people could do the role of one person and they would all still be busy. So we’ve now got a scenario where effective educators might be more likely to work long hours in a field where there is always more work to do.

Returning to the most effective people we’ve worked with. Would they have been less effective if they worked fewer hours? I don’t think so. So although their long hours seem to fit with their effectiveness, they could cut their hours and would still stand out.

I’ve been working part-time for the last few years as we started a family. Going part-time shouldn’t mean losing one’s ambition or reducing one’s impact, but if it’s tough keeping up with turbo-charged leaders when working full-time, what hope has a part-timer got?

The problem here is not with the hyper-committed high-flyers. I’m quite comfortable with people choosing to start early and finish late, and to check emails and write reports during holidays and weekends. But we don’t have enough of these people to build a system around them. We also need folk who want to do the nursery pick-up at 5pm and who expect to shut their laptop on a Friday and not pick it up until the Monday – a perfectly reasonable course of action, yet one that might seem rather radical to a lot of people in schools.

Teaching children and running schools is tough. If we want to recruit and retain the people we need we should try to break the association between being effective and working long hours; the sense that “that’s what you have to do to do well here.”

As flexible working becomes more common, I hope we become open to different ways of being effective. Long hours might be correlated with effectiveness, but this doesn’t mean they cause it. So here’s to more models of effective teachers and leaders who work a normal day and then go home.

First Thousand Days

In case anyone is starting a new role in September I thought I would challenge the conventional wisdom that it’s vital to get off to a flying start. This approach is often expressed in terms of ‘the first 100 days’ and tends to advocate a buccaneering start to a new role so that you can make an immediate impact. Its premise is that one’s ability to make a difference will diminish over time. Best to fly out the traps, to move fast and break things.

I saw this view articulated by none other than Barack Obama in his recent memoir. He quotes his chief of staff: “the presidency is like a new car. It starts depreciating the minute you drive it off the lot.”

I can see why this view holds water in the world of politics, where leaders have a shelf life, set either by a constitution, or by the iron law that your popularity amongst your party and your electorate will wane over time. Tony Blair puts it well, reflecting that he started as PM at his ‘most popular and least capable’ and ended it a decade later at his ‘least popular and most capable’!

But I’m not sure this applies to education. In my own experience, when awaiting the arrival of a new colleague or boss, I can’t remember hoping that they come in all guns blazing. Unlike our political leaders, my sense is that our ability to get things done increases over time as people get to know you and trust you. Of course this also gives you a chance to assess the lie of the land, to understand why things are as they are, and to get to know the people who you will rely on to support you and get things done.

Taking your time also enables you to clear your path: to identify and remove the obstacles that might stand in your way, creating the space for the stuff you decide to pursue.

I appreciate this might sound rather bland and cautious, perhaps even timid – not exactly words that we associate with effective leadership. But I wonder if we can channel our ambition and urgency by widening the lens. So when taking on a new role we set out our values and expectations with clarity, and we reassure colleagues that we know what we’re talking about. But we also demonstrate the confidence and curiosity to listen and reflect, to play the long game, and to place more weight on our first 1000 days than our first 100.

Curriculum: The Mirror and the Window

Of course it was the working group of English teachers who came up with the image that stuck: the mirror and the window. The mirror signifying that all pupils would see themselves in our curriculum. The window representing our ambition to show all pupils the world beyond their immediate experience. And so it was that our work to enrich our curriculum to better reflect the diversity of our country became less about balancing different perspectives, and more about bringing all pupils into a shared story.

Our curriculum review was a collective effort by teachers across our schools. Teachers of each subject considered their curriculum afresh. We wanted to remain true to each subject’s unique quest for truth, and we needed the end product to be a coherently sequenced programme of study based on the National Curriculum, but it was time to widen the lens to include voices and stories that we’d previously overlooked, to ensure that the knowledge we teach is not just powerful, but powerfully diverse.

Many of the biggest changes are in history, where we are including more global history for primary and secondary pupils and teaching pupils about the experiences of minority ethnic communities in European history – both the substantial positive contribution of people of colour over centuries and the least comfortable aspects of this history.  We are also supporting our teachers to teach these topics effectively and sensitively. But the changes stretch beyond history, and include, for example:

• In English, ensuring that pupils are exposed to a variety of texts by black and Asian authors and with characters with a variety of ethnicities, and that these texts are varied and not limited to stories of oppression.
• In Geography, representing the diversity that exists in all places, so that our case study of Mali’s capital includes images of Bamako’s affluent suburbs as well as its poorer neighbourhoods.
• In modern foreign languages, providing pupils with context to explain why so many countries across the world speak French, Spanish, Portuguese and English.

At a whole-school level we reflected on the way that curriculum choices can affect the curriculum that pupils experience. At one school, pupils told as that their curriculum in History, Geography and RE becomes more inclusive at key stage 4 and key stage 5, but lacks diversity at key stage 3. We resolved to enrich our KS3 curriculum, so that all pupils are exposed to powerfully diverse knowledge, regardless of the path they go on to take.

We reflected on the hidden curriculum – the unwritten and unintended norms and values that students experience in school. Our annual student survey, with its questions such as ‘I feel that I belong in this school’ and ‘the adults in my school treat pupils fairly’, provides a way in to this vital but hidden aspect of the school that pupils experience, rather than the school we think they experience.

As a result of this process we’ve renewed our curriculum vows. So alongside familiar references to entitlement, mastery, coherence and character, our curriculum principles now include a line on representation: ‘all pupils will see themselves in our curriculum, and our curriculum takes all pupils beyond their immediate experience’.

At the launch event for our enriched curriculum the historian and broadcaster Professor David Olusoga compared British history to a great decaying mansion in which only a few rooms are inhabited, while the others are firmly locked. He challenged us to open up these rooms and face up to the nuanced reality of our national story, where good and evil, dark and light, hope and despair, sit side by side; to give the story of slavery the same attention as the story of abolition; to acknowledge the complexity, diversity and globalism of our past rather than revel in tales of heroism and exceptionalism. 

The curriculum is never done. As each school brings this work to life in their own local context, we hope that all of our pupils recognise something of themselves in our curriculum, and that all of our pupils are taken to new places by our curriculum. This is the power of curriculum.

Tomorrow We Will Run Faster

“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

These final lines from The Great Gatsby remind me of the optimism around current thinking on catch-up – if only we could extend the school day, or provide summer schools, or extra tuition, our neediest pupils would soon get back on track. But just like the elusiveness of the dream that gripped Jay Gatsby, so too our fixation with catch-up could frustrate us, however fast we run. Jon Hutchinson puts it better than me here:

Jon’s note of caution applies to schools as well as teachers. In 2019 around 1 in 7 schools secured a positive progress score for their disadvantaged pupils. So it seems optimistic to think that all pupils can catch-up if we simply try harder, or do more.

But it’s not all bad news. If the problem here was caused by pupils’ absence from school, then the solution lies in ensuring their presence in school. So attendance must be at the heart of any catch-up plan, particularly the attendance of those who have suffered the most.

Another thing about catch up is that it’s only to us, when we compare where the pupil is to where they might have been, or where their peers are, that it’s about catching up. To the pupil, it’s about learning new stuff for the first time. So the solution is likely to be found in simple questions of what pupils know, what they need to know and how best to teach it. Questions that teachers and subject leaders ask themselves all the time. So our recovery plan for pupils as they return to school can be less about structural changes to school holidays and school days, and more about responsive planning and teaching.  Let’s give more time to departments to meet and remove operational matters from these meeting agendas if we haven’t done so already.

At a whole school level we can build a catch up plan around the things that have worked best over the past 12 months. The 20,000 Chromebooks that we’ve distributed at United Learning will continue to provide remote access to the curriculum for pupils. Our bank of pre-recorded lessons, and those provided by Oak National, will continue to take the school curriculum into homes up and down the land. And websites like Seneca, Dr Frost Maths, Hegarty and Sparx will continue to provide a personalised programme of study for pupils every time they log on.

It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come since the start of the pandemic. I remember in the first lockdown many schools – often with good reason – felt that it was too much to expect pupils to learn new things away from school, so they focused instead on consolidation and retrieval. Fast-forward a year and pupils throughout the land are following their normal curriculum; learning and applying new skills and knowledge just as they would in school. This marks a massive breakthrough, and provides a strong foundation for catch-up.

To sustain these breakthroughs we can provide support, structure and accountability for pupils. We do this by carefully mapping these online tools to our own curriculum, by providing the time and space in school for pupils to access these sites, and by monitoring each child’s use of the online curriculum, stepping in to provide support when required. An effective catch-up plan will look pretty similar to the remote learning plans that have served schools so well this term, with a greater focus on asynchronous resources and getting through to the pupils with the most to gain.

Finally, while it’s right to think carefully about the core learning that we need all pupils to acquire before they leave our care, let’s make sure that our recovery plan includes the full breadth of the curriculum, and the full benefits of school. I look forward to athletics on our school fields this summer, uplifting tunes flowing from our music rooms, and familiar smells wafting from our food tech corridors.

The ingredients of recovery are in our hands: start with attendance, give teachers and subject leaders time to adapt their plans, and harness the gains of the last 12 months to provide out-of-hours access to the school curriculum.

…

7 Rules of Rosenshine

Last weekend we (United Learning) launched our Expert Teacher Programme. We are using Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of instructions as a core text for this course. At our launch I proposed 7 Rules of Rosenshine to support teachers in developing expertise through these principles.

Rosenshine Rule 1: Theories of teaching begin with theories of learning

Whichever Rosenshine paper we choose to read, from his classic 2012 PDF published in the American Educator, to the lesser known 1982 Instructional Functions paper, it’s clear that his guidance on teaching is rooted in his understanding of how we learn. We see this in these lines from his 1986 Teaching Functions paper:

“When too much information is presented at once, our working memory becomes swamped. This suggests that when teaching new or difficult material, a teacher should proceed in small steps and provide practice on one step before adding another. In this way, the learner does not have to process too much at one time.”

Rosenshine Rule 2: Combine theory and practice

Teacher expertise won’t develop in a library or a lab (unless you’re a science teacher). Teacher development rests on a careful combination of written theory and applied practice. Rosenshine recognises this, as we see in the opening lines of his 2012 paper:

Rosenshine Rule 3: Look beyond the poster

I love the 1-page PDFs of Rosenshine’s principles that stare back at me in staffrooms, classrooms and even toilets across our family of schools. But the more I study Rosenshine the more I realise that he is proposing a ‘general pattern’ (his phrase) of teaching rather than separate principles to be applied step-by-step.  Even his classic 2012 paper misses some key points from his earlier work, like this enlightening paragraph on the instructional core at the heart of the principles:

“Three of these functions form the instructional core: demonstration, guided practice, and independent practice. The first step is the demonstration of what is to be learned. This is followed by guided student practice in which the teacher leads the students in practice, provides prompts, checks for understanding, and provides corrections and repetition. When students are firm in their initial learning, the teacher moves them to independent practice where the students work with less guidance.”

It’s clear that Rosenshine does not see his principles as separate steps to be followed in order. A quick example of this is the way he phrases the 6^th principle in the 2012 paper:

So we don’t just check for understanding between points 5 & 7 – we do this throughout the process.

Rosenshine Rule 4: Confidence with caution

Rosenshine presents his work with nuance and caution. Take this from the 1982 paper:

In this spirit, we try to moderate our language when talking about the principles. We talk about them as the characteristics of effective teaching and the things that effective teachers tend to do more of and do well. They are not a checklist for every lesson.

Rosenshine Rule 5: This method of teaching is highly interactive

Rosenshine’s principles are associated with direct/explicit instruction. But they do not mark a return to chalk and talk; to cold, sterile, heartless teaching. Applying his principles requires teachers to be highly attuned to their students, gauging their understanding throughout the lesson so that they know when it’s safe to withdraw from the lesson and allow pupils to work with greater independence (this is my understanding of Principle 7 – obtain a high success rate – i.e. knowing when to move from teacher instruction, to guided practice to independent practice).

This Rosenshine lecture on YouTube (Part 1 and Part 2) makes it clear that he wants teachers to apply the principles with alacrity, citing a study where effective teachers taught with ‘brisk pace, energy and enthusiasm, a fierce commitment to student achievement.’

This lecture also reminds us that there’s still a place for experiential, independent learning, but this tends to come after pupils have a secure understanding of their subject, not before:

• ‘The more effective teachers believe in acquiring basic learning as a first priority’
• ‘Experiential learning is more effective AFTER pupils have acquired fundamental knowledge and skills’.

Rosenshine Rule 6 – a foundation on which to build

We have committed to these principles for the long run, and we want them to serve as solid foundations on which to develop great teaching across our trust for many years to come. The principles help ensure that when it comes to teaching and learning, we’re all talking the same language. With this platform in place, we want teachers to explore the principles and bring them to life in the context of their subject, school and students. The closing words of his 1982 paper support this:

Rosenshine Rule 7 – a challenge

Towards the end of his lecture, Rosenshine describes a common frustration. He would check the state results every year in search of schools with excellent outcomes despite high levels of disadvantage. He would visit these schools but would often leave disappointed, not because these schools weren’t brilliant, but because their brilliance depended on ‘an extraordinary effort by principals and teachers to make this achievement’.  Rosenshine was concerned – ‘This bothers me … This isn’t sufficient … We cannot expect a nation to make this extraordinary effort.’

This strikes me as a critical challenge we face in our nation’s schools. We know that some schools have achieved success through running hyper-efficient, finely tuned organisations which demand extraordinary levels of commitment from teachers and leaders. Good for these schools, but it’s tough to replicate this everywhere.

We hope that our expert teacher programme will make a small step towards this by empowering a group of teachers up and down the land to engage with evidence and gradually refine their classroom practice, thereby doing less of the things that don’t much matter, and more of the things that do.

Subject Improvement

Over the years I think we’ve overlooked the role that subject improvement plays in school improvement. Perhaps in the days of retakes, early entry, coursework, ECDL etc we could use generic management approaches to raise outcomes in schools. No longer!

With increasing numbers of pupils following a general academic curriculum, and with reforms to assessment leading to longer, terminal exams, school improvement now requires pupils to demonstrate a good understanding of their subjects, an understanding that can only really be gained through 5 years of a coherent curriculum and good teaching in each subject.

It’s for this reason that subject improvement is at the heart of our approach to school improvement at United Learning. I explain our school improvement strategy as follows:

Our Regional Directors ensure that the basic foundations are in place in all schools: leadership, curriculum, behaviour and teacher development. With these foundations in place, our subject advisors ensure that subject specialism thrives in each school.

I manage our team of subject advisors who all have the same objectives:

• Raise standards in your subject: We believe that the most important thing we can do for our pupils is to send them out into the world with a good set of grades. We therefore provide sharply focused guidance to heads of department and teachers so that pupils make good progress over the 5 years and end up with good outcomes
• Build the capacity of teachers and leaders in your subject: For our subject advisors their team is their Heads of Department – they meet with them regularly and visit them in their schools to support their subject leadership.
• Develop curriculum and assessment resources in your subject: As a large group of schools we are able to develop a central bank of teaching resources that ease teachers’ planning and ensure that all of our pupils benefit from a consistently challenging classroom experience.

Underpinning these is a fourth point about communication: the advisor is the advocate for their subject and communicates clearly and confidently so that headteachers and line managers know what they can do to support the subject in their school.

We’re currently recruiting a third advisor in each of the core subjects: English, maths and science. Details HERE. If successful, you’ll see parts of the country you never knew existed. More importantly, you will be immersed in school improvement while retaining your subject specialism, restoring subject improvement to its rightful place at the heart of school improvement.

Still Fighting the Last War?

They say that we over-estimate the impact of big changes in the short term, but under-estimate their impact in the long run. So in the 90s those who thought that mobile phones were going to change the world might have initially doubted themselves. And those who now scoff at the impact of driver-less cars might want to wait twenty years before getting too smug.

We’ve had our own ‘big change’ in education in recent years, as reforms to curriculum and assessment have increased the amount that pupils need to know in each subject. Back in August 2015, a few days after a volatile set of GCSE results in schools across the country, I wrote the post below. The post argued that some schools and heads were still seeking improvement by squeezing kids over last year’s grade boundaries, rather than gradually gaining a proper understanding of their subjects over five years. The low hanging fruit within reach of tactical approaches to school improvement (early entry, ECDL, iGCSE etc) gradually ran out, and schools that relied on them suffered.

The 2019 Ofsted framework opens up a new front in the war against tactical school improvement. With the outcomes judgement now subsumed within a broader ‘quality of education’ judgment, Ofsted has placed more weight on what pupils learn over 5 years, rather than the grades they walk away with. Last month at the Wonder Years conference The Chief Inspector suggested that ‘getting a grade 3 in history GCSE may ultimately prove more beneficial than a Merit in a BTEC’. She might have completed this sentence with ‘even if the BTEC makes the school look better in the league tables’.

A few years ago if you went to a headteachers’ conference you would hear talk of the latest quick win that could be shoe-horned into the curriculum late in Y11 to score a few league table points. Times have changed. Last week in our headteachers’ meetings we discussed how to give more time for departments to meet together to share subject knowledge, and how to organise our curriculum to ensure that pupils revisit prior content. Earlier in the year we heard from educational psychologist Paul Kirschner on how our knowledge of how we learn should affect how we teach.

Longer, tougher exams that can’t be retaken didn’t change our education system overnight. But like mobile phones and driver-less cars, their impact in the long run is proving to be profound.

 

Fighting the Last War – Reflections on 2015 GCSE Exam Results

August 27, 2015 steveadcock81

National measures might have remained stable in last week’s GCSE results, but this stability hides significant volatility amongst schools serving lower attaining intakes.  Many schools that have become accustomed to strong outcomes based on intense intervention struggled to get students over the line this year.

As I reflected on these results the line that stuck in my head was that too many schools are fighting the last war.  In too many classrooms, teaching Year 11 involves helping students to pass the previous year’s exam.  In too many revision sessions, students are coached to creep over thresholds based on the previous year’s grade boundaries.  This approach might have worked in the past but it’s ill-suited to the new landscape in which we find ourselves.

This new landscape includes longer exams with tougher questions; questions which require students to have a solid foundational understanding of their subjects.  It’s easy to say, but we need to nurture mathematicians in our schools, rather than spend our time helping students hunt around for the easier marks to scrape a C grade on a GCSE Maths paper.

In this new landscape there’s no place for the props on which so much GCSE ‘success’ was built: early and repeated entry and a strong reliance on vocational equivalences.  Even iGCSE English is no longer the safe bet that it was.  It’s a shame that so many students’ apparent success in English was actually based on meticulous preparation for speaking & listening and controlled assessments, followed by a few easy marks in the final exam to take them over the line.  This had become a trusted method for securing C grades with challenging students, but this year it failed to deliver.

Meanwhile in Maths, a rise in the grade boundary for a C grade at one popular exam board was met with consternation by many teachers who felt aggrieved that they had done their bit to get students over the line, only for the exam board to change the rules at the last minute.  Laura McInerney was right to tweet “a higher grade boundary does not mean it was harder to get a certain grade; that’s not how it works” but the sad reality is that many students had been taught how to score a C grade against last year’s grade boundaries.  The sense of entitlement felt by many teachers that a score which gained a C last year should gain a C this year shows the paucity of assessment awareness in our profession.

The last war was fought by directing a huge proportion of a school’s energy on Year 11.  The best teachers, the best classrooms, the best heads of year were allocated to Year 11.  Schools opened their doors after school, at weekends and in the holidays to deliver intervention for Year 11.  Some schools paid for the whole year group to attend residential boot camps, while others brought in external tutors and swat teams for holiday revision programmes.  One company guarantees to raise every student’s maths grade in a week, or you get your money back.

The law of diminishing returns is now dampening the impact of Year 11 intervention.  These tactics, tips and techniques to get students over the line have become a victim of their own success in the (almost) zero sum game of national exams.  While schools will always pay close attention to the fine tuning that gives students the best chance to do well in exams, we need, at last, to play the long game and invest in high quality teaching in every subject and every year group.

No longer should a forensic knowledge of exam tactics be a prerequisite for school leadership.  In turn, school leaders need to be given time to turn their schools around, rather than feeling pressured to make superficial year-on-year gains based on intensive coaching of borderline students.  The introduction of Progress 8 is an opportunity to re-focus on every student and every grade.

Year 11 intervention is becoming our Trident nuclear defence system – a costly relic of a war that is no longer relevant, and a distraction from the threats and opportunities in the here and now.

The Rosenshine Papers

Why Rosenshine?

In 2018 we (United Learning) adopted Rosenshine’s principles of instruction as the basis for our approach to teaching and learning across our schools. It’s the first time that we’ve taken a collective position on teaching and learning, rather than leaving this critical issue to each school. Our focus previously was on supporting each school in having an internally coherent and effective T&L strategy. With the adoption of the Rosenshine principles we were attempting to go a step further by ensuring that each school’s approach was anchored in a shared understanding of the characteristics of effective teaching.

We did this for a few reasons. Firstly, we wanted to support schools in challenging approaches to teaching that are not supported by good evidence, such as teaching which is overly driven by the exam specification, teaching that is founded on the belief that pupils learn better by discovering things for themselves, teaching that takes differentiation too far by placing different groups of pupils on different ‘tracks’ in the same lesson, and teaching that is overly focused on securing evidence of progress in each lesson, rather than gradually building a secure long-term understanding of each subject.

As a growing Trust, and a Trust that comprises primary and secondary schools in the state and independent sector, as well as an initial teacher training programme, we could see benefits in building a shared understanding of the characteristics of effective teaching. A trainee teacher could leave their summer institute and arrive at their school in September safe in the knowledge that the philosophy towards teaching and learning would be consistent; a deputy head leading on teaching and learning could share resources with counterparts in our other schools; subject advisors could produce curriculum materials confident that they would be applied in the classroom in similar ways. We would move from each school having an internally coherent approach to teaching and learning, towards a coherent approach across the whole group which would serve as a foundation for great teaching in each school and each subject.

Over time we are using the principles to develop a shared and precise language for the way we talk about teaching and learning. In my experience, the language commonly used to describe teaching and learning is anything but precise. Obvious examples would be phrases such as ‘the lesson lacked a bit of oomph’ or ‘pupils weren’t fully engaged’ or, more positively, the lesson featured ‘awe and wonder’. But even terms that seem more clear such as ‘pace’ and ‘challenge’ can lack the precision required to develop teaching practice. Take ‘pace’ – do we mean that the teacher went through things too slowly or that pupils didn’t work quickly enough, or perhaps the teacher wasn’t clear on timings, or maybe the start of the lesson drifted and time was squeezed for the challenging stuff at the end? That leads us to ‘challenge’ – was the content itself too easy, or was it the task, or are we simply saying that not enough pupils produced work at the standard required?

We chose the Rosenshine principles because they’re sensible, evidence-informed and provide the shared foundation we were seeking rather than a rigid checklist to be applied to every lesson. As an established set of principles we were able to avoid a long process of navel-gazing which would inevitably have been required if we had attempted to write our own. The fact they’ve been around for a while also enabled us to reassure our schools that we would commit to these principles for several years ahead, rather than replace them with a passing fad in twelve months’ time.

We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re seeing some early fruits of our labour.  I write this while returning from an inset day in Shoreham where all teachers from four of our schools started 2019 by gathering together to explore the principles in the context of their own subject. Meanwhile our subject advisors have written case studies on how to apply these principles in their subject. The curriculum resources we are producing contain the modelling, the question prompts and the scaffolds that Rosenshine promotes in his work.

So what might Rosenshine look like in the classroom?

As we’ve worked with schools in exploring Rosenshine’s work we’ve confronted the question of what his principles look like in the classroom. I’m in two minds here as to how usefully Rosenshine presented his research. On the one hand, I’m grateful that his principles are contained in short, concise pamphlets such as this 2012 one and this 2010 one. One of the simplest things we’ve done is simply ask schools to ensure that all teachers read all 9 pages of the 2012 paper.

But I do have a few gripes with the way Rosenshine presented his work. Firstly, the 2012 paper contains a list of 17 principles alongside the main list of 10. Rosenshine explains this decision (the list of 17 provides slightly more detail and overlaps with the list of 10) but given Rosenshine’s knowledge of the limits of working memory and cognitive load, it seems slightly curious to share two separate lists alongside each other.

We can take this overlap as a reminder that the principles do not seek to provide a checklist to be followed in order in every lesson. This becomes clear when we note his sub-heading for point 6 (check for student understanding): “checking for student understanding at each point can help students learn the material with fewer errors” (my emphasis). So – to be clear – we don’t check for understanding between point 5 (guide student practice) and point 7 (obtain a high success rate), we check for understanding throughout the whole process. Tom Sherrington has noted that this becomes clear when we read Rosenshine’s 1986 and 1982 papers which emphasise the importance of checking for understanding.

The 1982 paper also helps us understand Rosenshine’s intentions in proposing the principles:

There’s another gem lurking in his earlier papers that I think gets lost in the latter versions. In his 1986 teaching functions paper Rosenshine writes:

“Three of these functions form the instructional core: demonstration, guided practice, and independent practice. The first step is the demonstration of what is to be learned. This is followed by guided student practice in which the teacher leads the students in practice, provides prompts, checks for understanding, and provides corrections and repetition. When students are firm in their initial learning, the teacher moves them to independent practice where the students work with less guidance. The objective of the independent practice is to provide sufficient practice so that students achieve overlearning (Brophy, 1982) and demonstrate quickness and competence. A simple version of this core is used frequently in the elementary grades when a teacher says: “I’ll say it first, then you’ll say it with me, and then you’ll say it by yourself”.”

This seems like critical guidance, and helps us to understand the intention behind Rosenshine’s principles, which I think we can now summarise as:

• Prior review
• Instructional core (I>we>you):
  • Presentation and modelling of new material in small steps
  • Guided practice with prompts and scaffolds
  • Independent practice with monitoring and feedback from teacher
• Future review

At each of these points – every single one of them – we check the understanding of all pupils by asking lots of questions and providing correction and feedback.

This model – the instructional core sandwiched between prior review and future review, with checking for understanding at each point – captures the essence of Rosenshine’s principles of instruction and provides an answer to that question of what Rosenshine looks like in the classroom.

Rosenshine’s back catalogue also helps us understand his 7^th principle ‘Obtain a high success rate’.  In his 1986 Teaching Functions paper he writes: “Although there are no scientific guidelines as to exactly what the percentage of correct answers should be, a reasonable recommendation at the present time (suggested by Brophy, 1980) is an 80% success rate when practicing new material. When reviewing, the success rate should be very high, perhaps 95% and student responses should be rapid, smooth and confident.” So this idea of success rate supports teachers in deciding when to move through the instructional core, particularly when to move from guided practice (when around 80% of student responses are correct) to independent practice (when around 95% of student responses are correct).  This 7^th principle seems a bit obvious and not overly helpful in the 2012 pamphlet, but it gains practical use thanks to the 1986 paper.

These principles now serve as a foundation for our support for teaching and learning across our schools. There’s a couple of things about foundations – in the sense of a building’s foundations – that I think are useful here. One is that we don’t tinker with foundations once they’re in place. They’re built to last. The second is that foundations are designed to be built on. We hope that throughout United Learning our teachers will explore these principles and bring them to life in the context of their school, their subject and their pupils. Rosenshine closes his 1982 paper with this very point:

 

Periodisation: Learning from the Flying Finn

This post has been co-written with United Learning’s Head of Sport Shaun Dowling (@ShaunD10)

“Some do well in other races, some run fast times, but they cannot do well in the ultimate, the Olympics … The question is not why I run this way, but why so many cannot.”

These are the words of Lasse Viren, also known as the ‘Flying Finn’ as he tried to explain his knack of peaking at the right time – a knack that landed him four gold medals in long distance events at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics.

Like our pupils, athletes have a long build-up to the events that matter, and like our teachers, it’s the job of coaches to break this build-up into smaller units to ensure that their athletes peak at the right time. It’s a process athletes call ‘periodisation’.

Amidst growing concern about the impact of high stakes tests on pupils’ mental health, perhaps we can learn from periodisation to support our pupils in playing the long game and peaking just in time for their public exams.

A definition of stress which will be familiar to many PE and psychology students and teachers is ‘the difference between the demands placed upon us and our perceived ability to cope with them’.  Public exams will certainly be demanding, but if the specification has been covered and the content learned thoroughly, then students can be in a position to approach the exams with confidence and optimism.

Attribution Theory describes the Locus of Causality: an individual’s perception of whether their success is within or outside of their control.  The timing, importance and difficulty of the public exam season clearly falls into the latter category. However, many of the stresses being placed upon KS4 students are ones which schools do control: extra lessons; compulsory revision sessions; regular high-stakes assessments; all in the pursuit of target grades which might be based on flimsy evidence … all, of course, with the very best intentions in mind.

However, an unintended consequence of all of this (as well as the additional workload for teachers) is what appears to the students to be a constant and unrelenting pressure.

Is there a solution?

“The starting place for your planning is adopting the belief that training must be a steady and gradual building process.” (Joe Friel, 2016. The Triathlete’s Training Bible. 4^th edition. Velo Press)

Periodisation in sport involves athletes identifying the races/tournaments which they want to be at their best for.  If they trained and raced with the same intensity all year round they would risk:

• fatigue
• injury/illness and
• stagnation/boredom.

Sound familiar?

So what would the 5 years of secondary education look like if we approached them as an athlete/coach would?

The literature on periodisation varies in the number and names of the periods which they break down the training plan into. In a linear periodization model they can be grouped into three broad headings:

1. Base
2. Build
3. Pre-competition (leading in to the A race itself)

To support this, an athlete’s season is likely to be broken down into macro, meso and micro periods: four-week meso periods within the yearly macro period, with four one-week micro periods within each meso one.  A twelve week build phase, for example, may have three meso periods of four weeks, the fourth micro period of each being a recovery week.

Applying this principle of periodization to secondary education could look something like the simplified model below, with the exam period of Year 11 classified as the students’ ‘A Race’, their mocks exams as their ‘B Races’ and end of term tests as the ‘C Races’.

Within this model, the micro period idea of a weekly plan of what and when takes place is particularly helpful for revision timetables and avoiding clashes with scheduled revision sessions and other ‘life’ priorities.

Base period

KS3 = mastering the basics, focusing on core skills and preparing for the harder work to come. It should be a relatively stress-free and enjoyable period of time with opportunities to learn new things and explore wider opportunities, but it is also an opportunity to baseline and set goals. Target-setting using both quantitative data and qualitative information can be adjusted throughout the period, but there are no high-stakes assessments. This phase is designed to provide both a strong base for the build period to follow and to enhance enjoyment of the subject.

Build period

• Build 1 – Autumn term Year 10: increasing demands from KS3 but managed in a way to protect health and avoid burn-out
• C Test – low stakes indicator of progress towards goals
• Build 2 – Spring term Year 10: potential for re-setting based on previous test (i.e. adjust training zones). Gradually increasing demands.
• C Test – low stakes indicator of progress towards goals, including aspects of Build 1
• Build 3 – Summer term Year 10: potential for re-setting based on previous test (i.e. adjust training zones). Gradually increasing demands.
• C Test– low stakes indicator of progress towards goals, including aspects of Build 1 and 2
• August = recovery period (re-charge in order to come back stronger)
• Build 4 – Autumn term Year 11: final build stage leading into opportunities to practice preparations such as exam technique, revision techniques and nutrition prior to the ‘B’ exams
• ‘B’ exams (mocks) – all work covered thus far and, on occasion, in conditions similar to the ‘A race’ exam season. This includes timings, density, environment, rules/expectations etc.

Pre-competition

Spring Year 11: Increase in specificity and intensity as every effort is made to ensure that all knowledge has been learned thoroughly. Final preparations and a tighter focus on the micro periods to space out revision effectively and manage the other pressures on 16 year olds’ lives. As the exams draw nearer, prioritise time and manage ‘essential’ sessions so that students are fresh for them.

‘A’ race – exams!

May/June Year 11: Tapering for exams – shorter periods of high intensity revision sessions, the exams themselves, brief recovery, preparation for the next one. Make every effort to psychologically prepare too, getting the exams into perspective, teaching processes of positive self-talk, how to manage the “Chimp” and how to arrive in the exam hall full of confidence and looking forward to the challenge.

 This periodisation approach relies on honest and clear communication with pupils, with frequent reminders of which point they are at in the 5-year journey. We can’t expect pupils to step up in Key Stage 4 if we’ve pretended to them for three years that their KS3 exams are cliff-edge assessments. By sharing the 5-year journey with our pupils we are trusting them to respond appropriately to the demands of each phase. In doing so, we provide a sense of ownership and control, perhaps reducing the pressure on staff and leaders to throw everything at Y11 in the hope that some of it might stick.

Concerns that playing this long game would lead to a lack of urgency at KS3 should consider the current situation we see in many schools where there is a stark difference in the intensity of Y7 compared with Y11. Periodisation seeks to harness the urgency of Y11 and use this to provide purpose and focus throughout the secondary years, rather than unleash it in a sudden wave when students return from their summer break at the end of Y10.

There is an argument, of course, that just by adopting this periodization model nothing will change in terms of outcomes. There are so many variables that influence exam performance that this is just one more idea that the impact of which would be impossible to measure.

However, if schools adopting the periodisation mindset means that the pressure felt by students is indeed “steady and gradual”, then isn’t that worth a try? Is it not worth trying to alleviate the increasing mental health concerns by re-thinking how we approach the secondary phase of education, KS4 and the lead-in to the public exams? Not all athletes who periodise their training go on to become Olympic champions. But athletes who do tend to become better athletes than they would have been had they not adopted this approach to their training. And along the way they pick up fewer injuries, less fatigue and a reduced risk of burnout.

That has to be worth considering.

For articles on periodization see numerous online posts by Joe Friel and others or here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/macrocycles-mesocycles-and-microcycles-understanding-the-3-cycles-of-periodization/