Beyond Good

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 

In this episode of The Beyond Good Podcast, Matt and Femi discuss resilience.  There is an old adage that students should be working harder than the teacher, and they explore this, discuss what they each think is right at the core of good teaching, talk about engineering success, what that looks like in the classroom and how it evolves over time, metacognitive understanding and touch on teacher resilience amongst other things.

The theme of Femi and Matt's discussion in this episode is “things that schools could get rid of - or at least do less of”.   While it is rarely the case that these ‘things’ are totally ineffective, more likely they are effective to some degree, but in the cost-benefit analysis do they meet the threshold of being effective enough to justify our time?  Could they be culled in order to allow us to spend more time doing things that are even more effective?With no subject specific element to this topic, and colleagues from all walks will hopefully enjoy the discussion.  

In this episode Femi and Matt discuss what they were each doing at the beginning of their teaching careers that they felt was very effective, and as importantly what they were not doing, and then what other aspects came in later when more bandwidth came online as they developed automaticity (unconscious competence).This is a discussion about low hanging fruit / first order effects / climbing the steepest part of the curve as quickly as possible and the law of diminishing returns.  For the most part this episode is not maths-specific and there is value here to teachers from all specialisms.  The duo also talk about how important it is to be constantly striving to improve teaching and share what they are each working on at the moment.  They elucidate the 'soft' metrics that they were using to test their own competence while developing skills in these core areas.  Alongside this is the emphasis on sticking with an approach, reflecting and refining the ability to make it work effectively, and not giving up and looking for the next silver bullet.