Beyond Good

In this week’s episode, Matt and Femi discuss a comment made by Adam Boxer –that the most common issue he sees in classrooms he has visited is that students are simply not properly paying attention to the teacher.This is another conversation that will be relevent to teachers of all subjects – it is not maths-specific.  The duo talk about why this is a problem and how it makes teaching harder, what ‘good’ looks like in this respect and how norms are established and broken, ways that attention gets diverted from the core principle the teacher is trying to teach, having a broad awareness and keeping plenty of capacity in working memory in order to take in and use the information in front of you – i.e. what students are up to.  They cover cues and signals that students may not be fully attentive, learning from other teachers by seeing it done expertly, the importance of explanations and high quality questioning, not rushing in to help students in the initial period of independent practise, and the difference between rules that describe what you don’t want to happen such as no calling out, versus providing students with proactive routines for what you do want to see, such as Doug Lemov’s SLANT.

In this episode Matt and Femi discuss Ofsted.  What is on offer is not a position on Ofsted, it is simply a balanced discussion limited to the perspective of class teachers and middle leaders.  There is no subject-specificity to this one, so hopefully educators of all stripes will find this useful.The discussion took in some of the following features of the landscape:Ofsted preparation and the body of knowledge and skills accrued through daily effort over years versus cramming ‘the night before’.  The incremental improvements on paper to the school inspection framework and Ofsted attempts to make that less onerous and to judge whether what you are doing is effective as opposed to telling you what we want to see.  The Legacy of snake-oil salesmen cashing in on fear of Ofsted and trying to sell ‘the answers’.  Business as normal vs putting on a show and advice for a teacher who was anxious about their classes during the inspection.Differing stakes and impacts on teachers, middle leaders, senior leaders and heads.  Key features of the current inspection framework, the balance of weighting that inspectors give between ‘having your finger on the pulse’ versus the actual quality of outcomes for children.Pre-inspection planning and workload, and paperwork for inspections such as lesson context sheets.  Being honest with inspectors about strengths and weaknesses.  Strategies schools use to prepare staff: what’s good and what’s not.  Interacting with inspectors – the importance of details like the reception area, staff and the state of the toilets.  Briefing students about the inspection, or not.  Typicality, and other topics. 

in today’s episode Femi and Matt discuss centrally planned lessons.  Their discussion extends to the various forms of lesson resources such as starters, practise materials, and mixed revision as well as teaching examples.  They talk about workload, modelling, the use of different media, meeting the needs of the students sat in front of you, the effects on pedagogy and teacher development, the utility for cover and non-specialists, ECTs, worksheets, textbooks, consistency, expectations and many other issues.

In this episode of the podcast Femi and Matt discuss the broad ranging, but critical, topic of 'checking for understanding'.  The discussion covers the various time-scales at which teachers might check for understanding; from moment to moment through the lesson all the way up to termly tests, and they discuss a variety of strategies that teachers use to check for understanding and debate their effectiveness.

In this episode Femi and Matt speak to Rachael Southern who they asked to come on the show after learning about her fascinating and inspiring story:  Rachael has recently returned to teaching after nearly a decade out pursuing a successful career in corporate law in the city.Not only is Rachael’s journey a fascinating one, but she is in a fairly unique position to share her observations and insights as an informed and knowledgeable 'outsider'.  Along the way Rachael’s passion, energy and enthusiasm for teaching is palpable, which Femi and Matt both found refreshing, invigorating and inspiring - and we hope you do too!  

This episode begins with some further thoughts on department development plans - following on from episode 15 on that topic.   Matt and Femi talk about defining what processes will be running in the department rather than trying to describe a particular endpoint and also incorporating teacher’s career ambitions into departmental development plans.They then posit that teachers are the most important resource that a school has and that results are largely determined by them, and not the systems and structures in a school.  Matt and Femi recognise that you do need systems and structures but conclude that the ambition should be to create systems that support less effective teachers while simultaneously not clipping the wings of more effective teachers.They talk about the implication of this which is that the lion’s share of non-teaching time in schools should be spent discussing pedagogy and developing teachers rather than on the development and implementation of ever more systems and structures.This is yet another episode which is not subject-specific and should be of interest to teachers from all backgrounds.

In this episode Femi and  Matt speak to Aparna about her experience of education as a mother of two exceptional children.  The conversation shines a light on some of the challenges students, their families, teachers and schools face when the children don’t fall into that broad middle 99% that we are accustomed to working with.   Hopefully the conversation provides some awareness and stimulates thinking about those children who live life at the far edge of the distribution– whether that is in terms of physical or emotional needs, natural ability, cognitive approaches, or any other dimension of relevance to a successful schooling.The trio discuss the dangers of schools placing these children in boxes simply because those categories are the familiar ones, and the challenges and frustration of trying to unpick that, the importance of making an accurate assessment of what students can actually do – which might not be revealed when the analysis is at the level of a single number summarising the score on a standardised test.  They debate whether cognitive science implemented in schools does or does not cater for the exceptional, or whether this is a failure of quality first teaching and it raises the interesting question of how deep we should reasonably expect teacher’s pedagogical skill and subject knowledge to run to truly qualify as quality first teaching.  The conversation touches on the idea of cognitive underload and the need to frame learning within a wider context, how students fundamentally need to feel they have something interesting and challenging to do in lessons, opportunities to ask their bizarre questions and feel included, possible classroom strategies, the importance of having a centralised plan and it not being left to each individual teacher, and the possibility of teachers even just acting in more of a coaching role – equipping these students with material and then checking in and following up with them.

Matt and Femi turn their attention to the subject of Departmental development plans and, as you will hear, this is a topic that they come at from quite different perspectives.   They discuss the issues with development plans in the way they all too often appear in schools, vision and ambition for the department, auditing the current state of affairs, and the importance of pricing in the available capacity to enact said plans.  They touch on the tension between the need for differentiated individual development vs commonalties across the whole team.  Line management, the relationship with a line manager and what line management should really be about feature heavily and there is also some discussion about the culture of teacher development in schools, or lack of it.This is yet another episode which runs across all subjects so hopefully all colleagues will enjoy and find value in it.

The central theme of the discussion in this episode is ‘teaching low ability students’.  In a fairly wide-ranging discussion, Femi and Matt touch on expectations, setting and sink groups, profiling, behaviour, avoiding conflict, and some common pitfalls they have seen, amongst other things.  Although they do cite a few maths-specific examples, on the whole this is another episode that is largely not specific to maths teaching so should be of interest to teachers of all subjects.  

In this week's episode, Femi and Matt mull over a topic which seems to get a disproportionate amount of air time on social media, which is teachers’ thoughts and feelings about their SLT.   As always, the Beyond Good team would love to hear your thoughts and responses to the episode: @BeyondGoodPod