Beyond Good

Today Femi and Matt discuss their approaches to handling complaints.  None of this is specific to maths and so the conversation should be relevent for colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds.  The pair talk about - Receiving complaints well- Prioritising responding to parents and acting promptly- The importance for people of simply being heard- The pros and cons of different approaches to investigating complaints about a colleague.  - Avoiding big surprises by knowing what is going on in your department - by walking the shop floor- Relationships with parents and reputation in the community,  - Some common ways in which schools frustrate parents.  - The balance of representing colleagues and representing children, taking an approach which seeks truth rather than rebuking the complaint – being neutral and not making any assumptions.  - Recognising a view point vs condoning it.  - Whether things change when parents are paying a lot of money for their child’s education – i.e. in private school.  - Reframing the complaint or query and looking at it from the parent’s perspective. - Setting out your protocol with the team- Using your line manager for guidance vs gossiping.  - Chain of command.  - Accepting fault when appropriate and being proactive to make first contact when we’ve clearly got it wrong.

Today Femi and Matt discuss an article by Dylan Wiliam titled ‘Teacher Quality: why it matters, and how to get more of it’.  In addition to this central theme the pair touch on the failures of policy initiatives to raise standards, teacher learning communities, considerations of the alignment of personal professional development with the school priorities, the learning cycle of teacher improvement, the common failings of school leaders to be strategic and to prioritise effectively, and the forces that incline us all towards initiative central.  They also talk about alternative approaches to professional development (including coaching), the need for initial teacher training to deliver both high quality training and to instil attitudes of a career long commitment to professional learning, creating a culture of improvement as a leader and what it means to ‘fail better’, amongst other things.

Matt and Femi are in a pensive mood for a  thought-provoking discussion on CPD.  They discuss the good and bad of inset days, utilising skilled practioners to model and share expertise, team building, sequencing and differentiation in professional development, ‘hit and run’ CPD vs sustained behavioural change, coaching and culture, Jim Knight and the Impact Cycle, video, email, the tremendous importance of being able to see good practise in action, the reluctance to recognise differing levels of expertise in this profession; and other topics. 

In this episode of Beyond Good Tom Bennett joins Matt and Femi to discuss all things schools and behaviour.Tom Bennett began teaching in the East End of London, and is currently the Director and founder of researchEd and a Teacher Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.  From 2008-2016 he wrote a weekly column for the TES and TES online, and is the author of four books on teacher-training, behaviour management and educational research – most recently ‘Running the Room’.In 2015 Tom was long listed for the GEMS Global Teacher Prize, and was also listed as one of the Huffington Post’s ‘Top Ten Global Educational Bloggers’.  In 2017, Tom published an independent review of behaviour in schools.  He recently chaired the Behaviour Management Group for the DfE and is currently their Independent Behaviour Advisor. He coaches teachers and schools in all aspects of behaviour management and research integration and he currently leads the Department for Education’s Behaviour Hubs project. In this discussion we talk about the need for education to be evidence-informed and to move away from the legacy of junk pedagogy, the state of behaviour in schools and what Tom typically does and sees on school visits.  We discuss the case for good behaviour and approaching behaviour as a curriculum.  We talk about experienced vs effective teachers, the importance of detail and clarity around all the micro-behaviours in schools, creating school culture and how that has to come from leadership.  We talk about school priorities, managing and modifying the behaviour of staff – by teaching them(!), leadership and accountability, issues with leadership training and 'non-competent' leaders, teaching behavioural habits as an end in itself in addition to being a means to the end of knowledge acquisition, experiencing the education system as a parent, and other topics.

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.