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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Didau
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April 3 - April 11, 2022
Hargreaves and Fullan suggest that “too often the sage criticisms of top-down leadership and quick-fix systems made by experienced teachers are dismissed as alienated grumblings of high-priced old curmudgeons”.113
One of the most effective ways of working with this group of teachers is to shine a light on what they’re doing well by making the rest of the staff aware of it. Send other teachers to watch and learn, praise them in staff briefings, and get them involved in new initiatives from the outset by asking them what has been tried before and what went wrong. (These are ideal candidates to involve in pre-mortem meetings.) These teachers often possess extremely healthy professional scepticism which should be encouraged (no matter how annoying you might find it!).
Hargreaves and Fullan suggest that “collaborative cultures require broad agreement on values, but they also tolerate and to some extent actively encourage disagreement within these limits … because purposes, values, and their relationship to practice are always up for discussion”.
Once a skill has been acquired, we stop being able to see the joins between the items of knowledge that went into its creation. Our actions begin to feel intuitive and effortless. The more expert we become, the more invisible and automatic our skills become until, eventually, we are no longer able to see how we acquired them.
Consistency – making all teachers do the same things regardless of their level of expertise – inevitably reduces all to the lowest common denominator.
Where the emphasis in a school is on processes rather than outcomes, it becomes inadvertently or deliberately focused on compliance rather than mastery.
Mastery in any complex activity tends to require knowledge and independent critical thought – the professional scepticism referred to in Chapter 1. It is therefore unlikely that thoughtless compliance will lead to mastery. This explains the ‘mystery’ of why non-compliant teachers tend to (inconveniently) gain good results.
Aim to be a ‘responsive’ leader when seeking collective organisational knowledge: ask teachers what they think – as graduate professionals they really ought to have something to offer. Suggest some ways of working and ask them to think critically about what might not work or be unrealistic.
Leaders need to be clear about what they stand for, seek consensus from staff, make the most intelligent and educated bets available, and remain humble enough not to get sucked into sinking additional costs into failing ideas.
Imposing consistency invites dissent and division, whereas aligning your actions to shared beliefs and values is more likely to result in the kind of consistency that helps teachers to thrive.
Senior leaders determine the aims and values of the school. Consensus is sought by explaining the rationale behind these decisions. Constructive criticism and professional scepticism are encouraged so that weak points can be identified in advance. Best bets are selected to advance the agreed values and purposes of the institution. Middle leaders – if they have earned autonomy – are trusted to interpret these bets with their teams in the ways that best suit their areas of responsibility. If they have not yet earned this autonomy, they are supported in doing so. Teachers are trusted to implement
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Teachers, and especially subject leaders, really ought to be more expert in their subjects than senior leaders.
If subject leaders earn the autonomy to be trusted and then held to account for this trust, all should be well.
One of the great advantages of thinking in terms of teaching rather than teachers is that we are more likely to stop looking for – or at – individuals and instead start thinking about behaviours and the activity of teaching.
For instance, if teachers are divided into three groups (more effective, average and less effective), students taught by the most effective third of teachers make 40% more progress than those taught by the average teachers, whereas students taught by the least effective teachers make 30% less progress. Students taught by the most effective teachers make twice the progress of those taught by the least effective teachers.123
The most effective teachers are, on average, four times as effective as the least effective teachers.
We have a natural tendency to look for explanations in the stable characteristics of individuals and to underestimate situational variability, which may lead us to over-interpret value-added measures as a property of the teacher.
Students’ performance tells us relatively little about what a teacher has done. There are some children who will make limited progress whatever you do and some who will fly despite you. Teaching is leading the horse to water; learning is having a drink.
the positive performance of the least advantaged is more likely to be due to teacher and school effects – left to their own devices, and without recourse to additional tuition, these students are much more likely to fail.
We might improve what we do in schools if we assumed: The factor most likely to influence children’s educational attainment is their socio-economic profile. Schools systematically privilege the most privileged and disadvantage the least advantaged. The success of children from more advantaged backgrounds is just as likely to be despite, not because of, actions we’ve taken.
Improving exam results is not the same as improving teaching
When lessons are graded, the observer looks for those things she approves of and is critical of anything else, regardless of the impact on students.
If teachers do not have the opportunity to routinely see – and be seen by – their colleagues it’s not hard to see how they can become professionally isolated.
When we enter another teacher’s classroom looking for certain elements to be present, we warp our ability to see what’s going on. What’s more, if teachers know what we’re looking for, then we violate the second principle of intelligent accountability.
Instead, if you’re in the privileged position of being able to observe a fellow professional, go in with the mindset that you are there to learn: be responsive rather than directive. Look at what is happening and make notes about what you see and questions that arise. When you have the opportunity to discuss the lesson with the teacher, the discussion should be framed using questions like these: Why did you …? Were there any surprises? How might you have done that differently? Can you explain what was happening when …? Were you aware of …? What do you think the impact of X might be? Where does
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It is the knowledge that teachers want students to acquire that defines the curriculum, how they do this is what we refer to as pedagogy and how they reflect on whether they are successful is always part of any teacher’s pedagogy.
If the teacher being observed asks for or is interested in your opinions, wait for them to ask you. Otherwise, try to keep your judgements to yourself.
At some point you might be tempted to share what you would have done. Resist this temptation. It is a pointless piece of self-indulgence to try to download your preferences as ‘expertise’ on to another teacher. They won’t thank you for it, it won’t change their practice and it’s probably unhelpful.
We learn more from observing than we do from being observed. It’s also generally true that those who observe most teach least. Therefore, the most useful thing school leaders with lighter teaching loads can do is to use their time to cover colleagues so they can observe each other.
If we’re serious about professional development, we need to lay the groundwork for an enquiry model of observation which allows teachers to investigate and reflect on aspects of their own teaching.
Explaining something to someone who doesn’t share your knowledge base is challenging and all too often results in vague maxims and proxies which necessarily omit the crucial details that need to be demonstrated rather than explained. But if we show teachers how they could improve, rather than simply telling them what to do, we sidestep the difficulty of being unable to put our expertise into words.
If teachers have an opportunity to see effective teaching modelled by another teacher, they are more likely to understand how new techniques can be implemented.
When teachers watch someone else teach their class, things that seemed mysterious or confusing suddenly become clear.
Senior leaders making themselves vulnerable in this way builds trusts and credibility.
The current vogue in education is for observations to focus on students’ learning. Well, the bad news is that doing this encourages teachers to prioritise short-term approaches because we are focused on current performance rather than long-term learning. It’s more productive, especially if we want to concentrate on improving instructional support, to observe what the teacher is doing.
Rather than creating unnecessary workload, it would be better to simply say either, “We trust you to have a secure overview of the starting points, progress and context of all students, and how you go about doing that is up to you.” Or, for teachers who have not yet earned autonomy to be trusted, “We will specify how you should monitor the starting points, progress and context of your students until you have earned the autonomy to no longer need this structure.”
The only thing worth checking for is the quality of students’ work.
It’s far harder to assess the quality of work than it is the quality of marking, and so we have an entirely natural tendency to do what’s easier. If we’re just looking to see whether a marking policy has been followed, Teacher 1 might get a gold star despite the poor quality of the work. And I can well imagine a scenario where Teacher 2 is forced to comply with a marking policy despite the successes of the students.
Another related point is about who’s doing the book monitoring. Senior leaders will not have sufficient expertise in all subjects to be able to do this work effectively.
work monitoring should be carried out by subject leaders and, ideally, be made transparent in departmental meetings, with all members of a subject team holding each other to account.
The standard to which we should hold teachers is this: is students’ work sufficiently good? If the answer is no, then whatever teachers are doing isn’t working. But if the answer is yes, no other questions need to be asked.159
The factors most clearly associated with continued teacher improvements Consistent order and discipline. Opportunities for peer collaboration. Supportive head teacher leadership. Effective professional development. A school culture characterised by trust. A fair teacher evaluation process providing meaningful feedback.
“Great teaching must be defined by its impact: a great teacher is one whose students learn more.”
Arguably, teachers are best when they are themselves. If you force an individual to change too much, you’re likely to make them less effective. Every teacher’s path to improvement will be different because every teacher is differently skilled and will need to work on improving different elements of their craft. This means teachers need choice, but not too much choice. Too much choice leads to teachers heading off down blind alleys and raises the ever present spectre of lethal mutation.
While most teachers were trained in the use of lollipop sticks to select students in class, almost none were introduced to the underlying research. While almost all schools leapt on the idea that students should have a better understanding of their progress relative to their starting point and end goal, this was widely interpreted as needing to write more and more comments in exercise books and issue target grades to students.
To prevent good ideas from lethally mutating – and to sort the wheat from the chaff – teachers need to be encouraged to express intelligent and informed professional scepticism. Perhaps lethal mutation can only be avoided when teachers are empowered to move away from learned helplessness and ask, with real information to hand, questions such as, “Why will this work?” and “Under what conditions is it more or less likely to work?”
One of the most fundamental principles of effective professional development programmes is that teachers with different levels of expertise require different types of professional development.
Trying to alter what teachers do in their classrooms involves dismantling highly automated routines. In order for teachers to change their practice, they need to change their habits.
