A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
The 9x4
A Framework for Developing The
Characteristics of Exceptional Teaching
Tom Cassidy & Charles Cassidy
©2012 Tom Cassidy
What is the 9x4?
1
Introducing the framework,
where it came from, why it’s
called the 9x4, and how it
relates to developing the
characteristics of exceptional
teaching.
Indicating why the chosen
characteristics are important.
Chapter 1
What is the 9x4?
Chapter Contents
1. It’s a framework for developing the
characteristics of exceptional teaching.
2. How does it work?
3. Why this particular choice of characteristics?
1. A framework for developing the characteristics of exceptional teachers
Meta studies of the characteristics of exceptional teaching point
to a number of key qualities that these teachers possess. Our
own research on the impact of teaching on student outcomes,
from 2005-2012 using the 4Matrix system, supports these findings and we have now extended these conclusions into an actionable framework.
2. How does it work?
There are 9 broad characteristics of exceptional teaching, each
representing either something teachers believe or something
they do. In order to develop these characteristics, you concentrate on just one aspect at a time, on a weekly basis until you
have covered all 9. This takes 9 weeks. At that point, you repeat the cycle and continue to repeat it until you have completed the cycle 4 times. This takes 36 weeks which corresponds with the length of the academic year, hence The 9x4.
The idea of ‘One thing at a time’ as a developmental tool is not
new. It was first turned into a system by Benjamin Franklin who
used it to master the skills he required to develop his character.
It has often been referred to as the Franklin 13, or Franklin’s
Thirteen virtues, since he was working on the full 52 weeks in a
year and 13x4 = 52.
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3. Why these particular characteristics? Why not others such as subject
knowledge, behaviour management
etc?
These characteristics have been deduced by looking at the results of a number of extensive research studies, by looking at
our own results from the hundreds of schools we work in and
through engaging in deep dialogue with a variety of teachers
who have consistently delivered exceptional outcomes over an
extended period.
tion framework. We’re talking about teachers who facilitate such
extraordinary distance travelled by students along the learning
journey that phenomenal outcomes are consistently achieved
by all learners. We’re talking about students remembering the
impact of these teachers for the rest of their lives.
N.B. All the OFSTED outstanding teaching requirements are
met by exceptional teachers in the single 9x4 focus point: ‘Do
the basics well’.
These characteristics are perhaps less tangible than expected.
There’s a reason for that - many experts are often unaware of
what it is that they are doing when they are at peak performance, as it comes so naturally to them. Many of the characteristics are at the level of identity and belief, rather than at the level
of skill. It transpires that qualities like being plugged in to something bigger than the self, being on purpose, having a very clear
idea of your value to society and your contribution tend to have
a greater impact on student outcomes than having a tidy classroom.
We’re not talking about good teaching or even outstanding
teaching. We’re not really talking about the rather transactional
definition of outstanding teaching in the 2012 OFSTED inspec4
Why does it work
so well?
2
Proposing 5 reasons why the
9x4 programme works so
well
Chapter 2
Why does it work
so well?
5 Reasons Why The 9x4 Framework Works So Well
1. It’s a framework for taking action
2. It’s a continuous process of development
3. It works at the level of focus
1. Taking Action
What we aim to do with this document is provide a compelling
reason why teachers should adopt this system as a framework
for continuing professional development. It has been designed
for teachers who are currently being graded consistently at the
satisfactory or good level in the 2012 OFSTED inspection criteria. It’s important to realise that you don’t become an outstanding teacher in a day and you also don’t become an outstanding
teacher through delivering outstanding ‘snapshot’ lessons upon
observation. Being an outstanding teacher is about consistently
applying the principles of great teaching and learning on a daily
basis. This framework has been designed with that purpose: to
inculcate the qualities of the outstanding teacher in the simplest
way possible.
4. It’s a low floor, high ceiling approach
2. Continuous Process
5. It involves minimum administration.
The process has no end goal. You do not become an outstanding teacher once you achieve a certain level of competence.
You develop the characteristics increasingly and work on these
aspects on a lifelong basis. This is not the checklist approach to
landing a rocket on the moon, rather it is the continuous approach of creative growth, possibility, development of potential.
It is evolution.
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3. The Level of Focus
Many people are suspicious of initiatives because they think
they will involve more work. Their subconscious mind is already
saying:
‘Hey, I’m working hard enough already - the LAST thing I need
is some new initiative that makes me have to work harder. Get
out of here with your fancy new ideas!!!’
This programme supports that perspective implicitly. Throwing
more time and more effort at a problem is a legacy of the industrial age. When productivity needed to be increased, the mandate was clear: work harder and work longer.
Today’s economy has brushed this notion into the dust, yet
many of us are still living by this approach and trying to fit in
with a world that has outgrown this thinking.
The simplest way to look at it is this: If your job was to generate
electricity, then you could run like a hamster on a wheel and
use your physical resources, or you could use your ingenuity
and skill to design something to harness the energy of the sun,
the wind, the waves, or indeed the evident running ability of legions of hamsters!
If you choose to operate at the level of physical resources then
indeed working longer hours and running faster would generate
more output. However, at best it is not sustainable and at worst
it does not utilise the talents of human creativity that we are
working so hard to develop in students.
This programme works at the level of focus, requiring no more
work than you are currently doing. It simply requires you to focus on a particular characteristic when you are planning your
lessons, when you are delivering your material in the classroom, and when you are evaluating your efforts.
4. Low Floor, High Ceiling
Think of the piano, not the violin. The piano is the easiest instrument on which to generate a decent sound. Any child of 5 can
hit the piano and it sounds ok. This is called a low floor - it is accessible to virtually anyone. Contrast this with a stringed instrument such as the violin. You need considerable skill, time and
effort to produce even a half-decent sound on a violin. Of
course, a piano having a low floor doesn’t mean that it’s any
easier to master than the violin. Indeed the piano could be
played every day for eight hours by the most talented pianist in
the world and they would never suggest for a second that there
was nothing else they could learn or improve upon.
We call this a high ceiling and this is what we look for in any
‘change leadership’ frameworks such as these. The journey has
to begin with ease yet remain open-ended enough to extend
even the most able, indefinitely.
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By creating a framework that initially requires nothing more than
a level of focus on a particular characteristic, we have created
the ultimate low floor system of development. Each time a particular characteristic is focused on, it will lead to improvement in
this aspect. Yet, there is little doubt that anyone would ever consider themselves at the summit of all capacity in any of these
domains. Hence, the system’s high ceiling, with infinite extensibility.
that focusing on more than one thing will result in failure. ‘If you
chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.’
5. Minimum administration
The last thing an organisation wants is a system that is burdensome to administrate. Anything that isn’t incredibly easy to administer will limp along for a few weeks, perhaps months and
then collapse, to founder with all the other noble-intentioned initiatives.
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ - Anon
This again causes a problem for the management of the organisation who often lose credibility as a result.
The genius of this framework is its simplicity. There are no 10
steps to success, or ‘do these 5 things every day and you will
achieve great results’. No, it is far more simple than that: there
is only ever one thing to focus on at a time. While this can appear too simple for some people, the wisest minds know well
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The Characteristics
3
A detailed look at the 9x4
characteristics using the
following structure:
Focus
What is the focus point?
Justification
Why is it important?
Tool/s
How to implement the
characteristic
Chapter 3
The 9x4
Characteristics
The 9 Characteristics
1. Believe in Yourself
2. Know Why You’re Doing It
3. Have High Energy
4. Think Big
5. Tell Your Story
6. Take Risks
7. Do The Basics Well
8. Reward Effort
9. Get Out of The Way
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Chapter 3
Week 1: Believe in
Yourself
are an exceptional teacher, you can then see yourself as
one.’
This is all summed up by the concept:
Identity follows reality.
Principle:
The gateway to your effectiveness is
your identity: ‘How you see yourself’.
In order to be an exceptional teacher
you have to first see yourself as an exceptional teacher.
Justification:
Of course the biggest problem we run into with this approach is
that we are conditioned to think this puts the cart before the
horse. A little voice in our heads will say something like this:
‘No, that’s not the way the world works. You first have to
be the exceptional teacher, and then once you actually
However, a study of successful people in all arenas indicates
that this concept is flawed. Without exception, successful people have a very clear idea of what they believe they can become, what they think they are capable of, a ‘vision for themselves’ that exists long before the reality is created.
How To Do It
1. Notice. That’s it. Just start to notice your thoughts.
Notice how you are seeing yourself, what thoughts you are having about your ability, about how brilliant you are as a teacher
about whether you believe that you are the sort of teacher that
can excel in the current environment.
The biggest question to ask whenever you do find yourself noticing your thoughts is this:
What would you choose?
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Now, if the answer is that you would choose what you are thinking, then fantastic. That’s you. You are actually thinking what
you would choose to think, if you were choosing.
Brilliant, authentically you.
Now, if it turns out that you wouldn’t choose the thought you are
having, in some ways it’s even better because then you can relax. It’s just the ‘script’ that you’ve been given, the little voice of
doubt in your head choosing for you. It can’t be the genuine
you, since we’ve already established that you wouldn’t choose
it. The genuine you is what you would choose.
To get a bit more clarity you can follow up on the thought you’re
having with these questions:
Is what I’m thinking actually true? Is it scientifically proven beyond all doubt?
Is it helpful?
you would choose something different from what you are currently doing and that is the authentic you, your ‘true’ voice.
2. What are you putting in? The Sausage Machine
The sausage machine is a very powerful metaphor for life. If
you want pork sausages out, you put pork in. If you want beef
sausages out, you put beef in. So, if you want a successful
teaching experience out, that’s exactly what you need to put in.
Exceptional teachers realise that they are at the creative end of
the sausage machine, choosing the ingredients and turning the
handle, rather than waiting at the other end for the sausages to
come out, hoping that they’ll taste nice!
Next time you are planning, delivering, interacting with students, working as part of a team, just ask yourself this question.
What am I putting in?
What thought might be more helpful?
The relationship with yourself - What are you putting in?
Which would I choose? The original thought or the more helpful
one?
Yourself as an exceptional teacher - What are you putting in?
The important thing to realise at this stage is that you don’t
have to DO anything. You don’t have to suddenly start putting
pressure on yourself to choose the more helpful one all the
time. Not at all. The only thing you need to do is to realise that
Your expectations for your students - What are you putting in?
The outcomes of a lesson/project - What are you putting in?
What you expect out of life - What are you putting in?
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Chapter 3
Week 2: Know Why
You’re Doing It:
Your Core
Philosophy
Principle:
Know why you’re teaching the topic,
what its importance is, why it’s relevant
to students, how it relates to the world
outside academia, how it fits into your
core philosophy of the subject and the
benefits that its mastery will bring to
students.
Justification:
Everything comes from this. There are so many theories,
‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn'ts’ about teaching that one can end up
being bounced around in the middle in a state of indecision.
This leaves you, pupils and parents very unsettled. Having a
core philosophy is at the heart of it all and it's from this core that
everything else springs. I would say that it IS subject specific
and one should start there i.e.
'I believe the World of Maths is important because.....' rather
than 'My Philosophy of teaching is....' This is simply because
your philosophy of your subject will directly determine how you
then teach it.
Once you have clearly conceived your core philosophy, it
should constantly be referred to in lessons so students begin to
ponder your well-thought out ideas. It's also incredibly helpful
for when you talk to parents or decision-makers on the staff. It's
very reassuring for them that you have spent time thinking profoundly about what you do. (So they don't have to!) It obviously
influences planning and it fires your whole teaching approach in
the classroom. It's basically everything.
Having a reason for doing something is so important for the
questioning mind. We have evolved way beyond the ‘because I
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say so’ mentality. That doesn’t work very well for teachers and it
works even more poorly for students.
At the level of focus, you just need to be constantly relating anything that you are actually doing to a bigger purpose.
Why is this topic important?
Why do students need to know this?
Why do I need to teach this?
Do I actually need to teach this?
Is it really relevant?
Is there a justification for learning it that I can suggest that will
make sense to them?
‘Sir, what’s the point of Algebra?
‘Miss - I can’t really see the point of learning about prime numbers - I mean who cares about that? How am I going to use that
in real life?’
Most other subjects have this from time to time, but the reasons
for learning Mathematics are poorly understood by students
mainly because they are poorly communicated by us as teachers.
One metaphor that comes in handy is the ‘Weight Training For
Your Brain’ approach. You explain that you don’t go to the gym
and lift weights so that you become good at weights, good at lifting things off your chest in case you get run over by a trolley at
Tesco. Not at all. You do weight training so that you build up
your muscles for health, to increase your energy, to get in good
shape. You end up with a stronger, faster and more powerful
body.
How To Do It
Mathematics is weight training for the brain.
1. Have a core philosophy. A ‘Why My Subject Is Important’
A subject like Mathematics is often targeted by students over its
relevance:
‘Miss, when are we ever going to actually use this?’
Exercising the brain makes it stronger, faster, and more powerful. There may be a few students who don’t believe that Maths
does this, but there won’t be any that will argue with you over
the benefits of having a stronger, faster and more powerful
brain.
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Whether that metaphor works for you or not, this is something
that you really should develop. Know why it’s a good idea for
students to invest their time, energy and enthusiasm into the
subject and communicate that clearly to them.
2. Be interested in it yourself!
Actively demonstrate how interesting the subject is by actually
being interested in it yourself. Think about what you’re doing
and the mental skills you’re learning. Think about how the basic
skills of pattern recognition and significance spotting are vital in
real life. Think about how you’re developing the skills of abstracting and how valuable they’ll be in a career in business.
You don’t have to do any extra work to get interested in something, just think about it a bit more than usual.
This passion for the topic will be contagious and if you are doing everything else right, your enthusiasm legitimises the subject for your students. It gives them permission to like it themselves, because you like it.
Pupils often look up to a teacher and model themselves on your
behaviour. If you find the material interesting, it's as if they are
being recommended a great film/band by someone they respect. Furthermore, you are also making it more acceptable to
have an interest in the subject. It's okay to get really excited
about Prime Numbers because Mr. Cassidy does etc. Declare
your passion and don't be shy about your interest in the subject. Students will then become comfortable doing the same.
Your message is 'We're doing this, not because we have to, but
because it’s awesome.’
3. Constantly refer back to your core philosophy, reinforcing the metaphor at all times.
The more you reinforce your philosophy, the faster you access
the subconscious part of your students’ minds, as repetition is
the gateway to the subconscious.
Once your core philosophy is in their subconscious, it will stay
there for life. If you do this you can give yourself a pat on the
back - you’ve changed their lives forever.
'We're doing this, not
because we have to, but
because it’s awesome.’
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Chapter 3
Week 3: Have High
Energy
Principle:
The single most attractive personal attribute is energy. Teachers with high energy give the impression of increase
for all their followers.
You need to be offering something that
students want...
If they want what you’ve got, they’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. If
they don’t want what you’ve got, then
you could be teaching Computer
Games and Pizzas and they’d still
hate it!
This is so important, I’ll come back to it again and again. It’s not
about the students looking at you and thinking:
‘Wow, I’d just love to be a teacher - it looks so cool.’
Absolutely not. In fact it will most likely bypass their sophisticated, mammalian brain and go straight to the reptilian, lizard
brain that has evolved over millions of years to want to be
around people that give the impression of increase.
Justification:
The impression of increase is just that: students perceive you
as being able to bring more to their lives.
I could sum up the whole of being an exceptional teacher in this
single philosophy:
More ideas, more knowledge, more fun, more money, more
qualifications, better feelings, more security, more confidence,
more poise, more power, more control, more wisdom.
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Exceptional teachers give the impression of increase routinely,
without even being aware of it.
Their students want to be around them - they won’t leave them
alone, they follow them around at lunch, they stay after school,
they bother them at every break time. [Be prepared, you have
been warned...]
So, How To Do It
1. Act with enthusiasm whenever you can.
2. Be excited about stuff. About what you’re teaching,
about life, about them. Be on fire.
3. Love your job. Tell students how it’s the best job in the
world, how you are the luckiest person alive because
you get to do something as amazing as ‘messing with
people’s minds’. [Believe it first of course! My perspective is this: Some people have a job selling coffee, or
computers, or insurance. I get to sell ideas, I get to influence people, to be with them as they have breakthroughs, as they suddenly start to believe in themselves, as they have eureka moments in their learning
journeys. Now, that’s an awesome way to make a living.]
4. Love yourself. You’re the only person in the world who
can never leave you. That should be reason enough to
love yourself. If you really love yourself and believe in
yourself, then you are teaching the best lesson that can
ever be taught.
5. Love your students. Want for your students what you
want for yourself - the same joy, success, security, happiness that you crave as an adult, they want it too. We
all want the same things and you can want it for them
as well.
6. Create Fun whenever you can. Don’t wait for funny stuff
to happen - be the creator. Do something funny every
day.
7. Believe that you are increasing yourself: in awareness,
in capacity, in confidence, in potential, in self-belief, in
teaching skill.
8. Be authentic. It’s vital that you are high energy in the
way that would be exactly right for you. Not everyone is
going to be a bundle of electricity, fizzing about the
place like a lump of sodium in water. Be high energy in
the way that’s right for you. You know what that is, you
know when you access it, when you go into the zone.
Don’t copy anyone else. Don’t try to be like anyone
else. It won’t work. They’ll see through it.
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Chapter 3
Week 4: Think Big
ways, the converse argument really brings home the point: if
you expect things to go badly they almost certainly will.
Principle:
Think big about what could be possible with your students. I appreciate that you may not think you have seen any evidence of
greatness in your students, but actually it just depends on your
perspective. Every single person you teach has already won
the most severe competition of all, the fight for life that takes
place before conception.
Visualise great outcomes for your lessons, expect students to be inspired
for life, set high expectations in all domains of student contribution and
don’t be afraid to dream the impossible
dream.
Justification:
From a biological perspective, each and every student has already beaten around 4 million other potential humans in the
race to fertilise the egg. Not only that, their genes have got
them to today, through millions of years of evolution, just the
same as our genes brought us here too. In evolutionary terms,
we’re no better than anyone else on the planet. Even the least
among us is capable of feats that would be classified as miracles. According to one of the greatest teachers of all time, Jesus.
The key to unlocking all this potential is to start believing in it
and expecting ‘outrageous outcomes’ in the journey you will
travel together.
Expectations are the ‘gateway to achievement’. If you expect
great things from yourself, from your lessons, from your students, you will see great things happen before your eyes. As al-
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How To Do It
1. Think Big about yourself, your capacity, your skill, your
attitude and your contribution.
2. Think Big about your lessons, about how well they’ll go,
how much learning will take place, how astonishing the
results and the progress of all students will be. Think
OUTRAGEOUS OUTCOMES. Be bold and go for it.
3. Change your language. Replace I’VE GOT TO with I GET
TO. When you find yourself saying: ‘I’ve got to teach 7p
now’ replace it with ‘I get to teach 7p now’. Small
change, BIG DIFFERENCE.
4. Think Big about your students. Expect them to behave
well, expect them to be interested, expect them to make
astonishing progress. Expect them to be nice to each
other. Talk to them about your expectations. Communicate what you expect about every aspect of their lives.
5. Expect it to be easy. The little voice in your head will be
saying that all this is never going to work, it’ll be too difficult. Yep, good ideas, but not with these students. Do
you have scientific evidence to prove that it’s going to
be a struggle? Exactly. Expect change to be easy. The
only thing that can hurt you is your resistance to
change.
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Chapter 3
Week 5: Tell Your
Story
Principle:
In order to be followed, you have to be
respected. In order to be respected,
you need to tell your story. They’ve got
to know what you’ve done, what you believe in, what you stand for. Again, students have got to want what you’ve
got.
Justification:
There are two reasons why this is crucial:
1. Students will respect you more if they know something
about you.
2. They will be interested in the learning topic if you personalise it. Telling a story makes it relevant to you and therefore
relevant to them by association.
We have evolved to prize stories above all other forms of communication, since we relied on the oral tradition for the first 99%
of our human existence. It is hard-coded into our DNA to prick
up our ears as soon as you hear the words:
‘Hey, I’ve got a good story...’
This is why soap operas are so popular, because the story
never ends, it develops. And that’s what keeps people interested.
All the great communicators; teachers, preachers, politicians,
business leaders, statesmen were great story tellers. And if you
can think of anyone who hasn’t got a story, then I guarantee
they won’t be around for very long. Get a story.
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How To Do It
1. Tell the students about you. Tell them personal stuff to
connect with them. Tell them about your family, your
friends, what you like doing for fun. Tell them about the
football teams you support, the holidays you’re going
on, the stuff you don’t like, the challenges you’ve got.
2. Tell them about your dreams, about things you believe
in. This is so important because it connects you to the
students. They have dreams, things they want to do.
They still believe that they can do lots of fun things in
life - that life doesn’t have to be hard, that they don’t
have to end up doing something they don’t really like
for the rest of their life. If you open up to students about
what you want to do later in your life, or in your spare
time, your holidays, they will begin to see you as someone to look up to. They will see you as a believer and
they so scarcely get to see this from adults that they
will start to identify with you.
And this gives you the opportunity to bring the topic
into everyday life and massively increase its relevance.
4. A few tips when telling stories:
★ Don’t make them up - that won’t work
★ Don’t use other people’s stories - your own life is interesting enough
★ Talk in pictures
★ Give unusual detail
★ Keep them short
★ Make them funny
★ Don’t be afraid to choose embarrassing ones (be careful
not to take it too far!)
3. Introduce any learning topic with why it’s relevant to
you.
What happened to me when... This morning, on my way in
to school I was... When I was at school we did this...
I’ve got a good story...
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Chapter 3
Week 6: Take Risks
In order for students to be comfortable with making mistakes,
with failing, with things not going to plan, you have to be able to
do it yourself.
You have to show students that you are prepared to do things
differently all the time, to experiment with your teaching, your
content, your delivery, your style.
Principle
The greatest risk to students’ development is not taking risks. In order for
students to take risks, you’ve got to
take risks yourself. You can’t pass on
what you haven’t got.
You have to push yourself out of your own comfort zone continuously in order to make it easy for students to push themselves.
You can’t pass on what you haven’t got - they will do what you
DO not what you SAY.
[Important note - this is not about taking physical risks with
health and safety issues!!!]
As Edison famously commented when he was asked how it felt
to have been wrong over 3,000 times before he finally cracked
scalable electric light-bulb production:
Justification:
The best learning comes from experimentation, from doing,
from playing around, from trial and error. All of these necessarily involve getting things wrong quite a lot of the time.
‘I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric
light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be
true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth
of my theory.’
He also said of his scientific method:
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‘If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I
am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is
another step forward.’
I like summing it up with this:
‘There is no failure, there is just science.’
How To Do It
1. Try new approaches in the classroom
2. Try new things in life
3. Tell students what you’re doing and why you’re doing it
4. Communicate your approach to conventional ‘failure’
5. Make it OK to be wrong by admitting your own ‘mistakes’ every time you’re found something that doesn’t
work using the following process:
!
What did we DO?
!
What did we LEARN?
!
What could we TRY NEXT?
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Chapter 3
Week 7: Do The
Basics Well
Principle:
The gateway to exceptional teaching is doing the basics well.
Most things in life can be reduced to a simple set of principles
that if followed, will generate successful results.
This week, just reflect upon the 9 aspects of the basics of great
teaching and make sure you are still focusing on them.
The Basics Of Great Teaching
Here is a summary in diagram form and the full details of how
to do this are covered in Chapter 4 - ‘Doing The Basics Well’
1. Planning must be well thought-out
2. Lesson structure must be clear
3. Lesson structure must be appropriate
4. Content must be equally accessible
5. Content must be engaging
6. Students must be managed well
7. Resources must be managed well
8. Outcomes must be achievement-oriented
9. Outcomes must be authentic
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Chapter 3
Week 8: Reward
Effort
Principle:
Reward student inputs not outputs. Students need to be able to access the rewards of our compensation system by
things that are 100% within their control. When we give the highest accolades to student effort, we are reinforcing the important life skill of working
hard and teaching students that application is to be prized above all other
character traits.
Justification
The single biggest motivational factor for the majority of students is ’praise’. If output attributes like ‘intelligence’ or ‘aptitude’ are rewarded then students can only access praise if they
happen to create these outputs. Alternatively, if you reward student inputs, you are rewarding attributes that can be controlled,
such as ‘working hard’, ‘trying’ or ‘making every effort to improve’. Students can access praise at any time simply by working hard and all students have equal access to praise. This ensures that no students are left feeling less valued simply because they are not currently able to attain a high level of output.
Students should only be praised for things that are within their
control. They should be praised for applying themselves to the
programme, adhering to tasks, directing their will power etc., in
many cases we can reduce these all to ‘effort’.
Hard work is something that should be articulated constantly as
a prized character trait in front of students. It’s especially important to praise students for effort made on developing their creative abilities as well as just applying themselves through hard
graft at their current level of capability. The acquisition of the
habit of effort in students has tremendous long term developmental benefits. It leads to a constant reinforcement of the
‘growth’ mindset, whereby students can grow to be good at any27
thing they so decide, provided they have the core ability to apply effort to a situation.
In essence we need to be confident that we can design the
learning and development programmes for students so that
they generate outcomes by doing one of two things:
• Applying their current level of capability in any domain to
create an output (solve problems, create solutions, design
original work etc.)
OR
• Developing their level of capability by learning new skills,
working on themselves, improving their tools of effectiveness.
game such as the Olympics, there can be only one winner, but
reaching the standard would be the benchmark achievement.
Contrastingly, in education, there are no limits.]
The skills we are trying to value above all else are the skills of
commitment, endeavour, persistence, application, desire to improve, or effort in the broader sense, as these are the fundamental attributes of success.
I subscribe firmly to Edward de Bono’s belief that we can design programmes to teach ANY attribute, even such rare qualities such as creativity and entrepreneurship, and if we teach students the important attributes of applying effort and developing
the growth mindset, then they will become able to master anything to which they choose to dedicate themselves.
Clearly, these will often go hand in hand.
How To Do It
A good analogy would be one likening teachers to Olympic Rowing coaches. The expert coach designs a training programme to
take the team from their current level of performance to gold
medal standard. The only thing the team needs to be praised
for is their ‘efforts in sticking to the programme’. Perhaps in
some advanced cases, they could also be rewarded for contributing to improving the training programme. The key thing here
is that the team does not need to be praised for the results.
Olympic gold medal standard will be attained as the logical conclusion of adherence to the training programme, if it has been
designed well enough by the experts. [Of course, in a zero-sum
1. Change vocabulary from 'What a smart class/individual!' to
'What a hard-working class/individual!'. Constantly reinforce
the value of applying themselves.
2. Reward ‘contribution’ rather than accuracy. Make student
contributions the prime currency of the student compensation system. It is essential that attempts have a higher reward than correctness. Resist the temptation to say - ‘excellent try, well done, but that’s actually not quite right’ and then
move on to someone else to get the ‘right’ answer.
28
3. Constantly remind students to ‘Trust The Process’. The development path that students are on has been designed by
educational experts to produce optimum learning and development. The programme of learning will generate the desired outputs provided that they stick to it, and all they have
to focus on is controlling their inputs, controlling what they
actually DO.
4. Reinforce the growth mindset at every opportunity. Reaffirm
that they can learn the skills to accomplish virtually anything
they choose provided they have acquired the attribute of effort.
5. When we talk of rewarding effort, it’s important to realise
that we are talking about the more global ‘effort’ of controlling the habits and behaviours that are 100% under their direction. So, when we are looking to praise effort we are looking to praise students that do a great job maintaining a great
attitude, a positive perspective, a belief in themselves as
well as more easily observed manifestations such as their
working as part of a team, listening to others, being organised etc. So reward behaviours like maintaining a good attitude, exhibiting spirit, persistence, possibility and belief in
themselves
dents for sticking at things, for being persistent and do it in
the following way:
"
I’m really impressed with how hard you’ve worked on this
project, Lucas.
"
‘What I like about the way you work is that you try really
hard to keep going, even when you’ve found something difficult.
Great job, Sami.’
‘Dedication, uh huh, dedication, uh-huh, dedication - that's what
you need.’ - Roy Castle
This is an incredibly deep topic with applications far beyond the
classroom and the pioneer in this field is a lady called Carol
Dweck from the US. She has written some wonderful books on
this whole concept of rewarding student inputs. Google ‘Carol
Dweck’ for more info, or have a look here at her 2012 book,
Mindset
6. Effort over a consistent period of time, the long haul can be
thought of as dedication. Reward dedication and praise stu29
Chapter 3
Week 9: Get Out of
The Way
Principle:
Allow students to discover the learning
themselves. Learning through discovery involves far more brain function
than learning delivered in fast-food
form. This increased neural activity provides a deeper learning experience and
is more valuable to students in the
long term.
Justification
For a long time, teaching was all about the master, delivering
learning in the most effective way, telling people the information. This is indeed effective and it does deliver learning but it is
a long way down the list when comparing ways to effect deep
learning.
Learning by doing, by exploring, by playing is the best way to
learn. Let’s think about how children learn to walk.
How much do we need to motivate a child to learn to walk?
Exactly. They see it everywhere, they have no doubt whatsoever in their minds that they’ll be able to walk. They see it as a
valuable skill, because everyone else is doing it and they try
over and over again despite a litany of failings.
They never give up, they just keep on going and pretty soon
they work it out.
You don’t have to sit them down and explain how to do it, to inspire them to try, to impress upon them the value of acquiring
the skill. Not at all.
They see everyone else doing it. They want to do it. They believe they can. They try it. They master it.
30
The message here is that our greatest contribution as teachers
is that ‘we must be what we want students to be.’
Thankfully the role of teacher as master deliver of information is
an unworkable model. It is impossible to keep up to date with
the amount of information being generated on a daily basis by
even the active minds in the UK, let alone the whole world.
As teachers we have two choices:
A. Limit the amount students are learning to what teachers
themselves can learn first and then pass on.
B. Allow students to bypass teachers and go straight to the
source.
Currently the exam-based system does limit what is being
learnt and we seem to be fairly happy with how that’s operating.
The only problem is that it doesn’t work: Students are still suffering from a Victorian model of education that is all about delivering information.
Information is NOT the answer. When we look at people’s lives
and try to work out the difference between the successful and
the unsuccessful people, we find that information plays a very
minor role.
The key success factors are almost always attitudinal, and
these are the factors that teachers need to claim as their ‘reason to still be relevant to students’ lives’.
Indeed, Option B is the only logical way to progress and the
best teachers are those who realise this. They are the bravest,
as it completely redefines their role as providing the aspects
that can ONLY be provided by face to face contact.
★Inspiration
★Example
★Self-Belief
★Awareness
★Contribution
★Effort
Information is easy. Attitudes are difficult.
You might ask why it’s important to mention all this in the section about ‘Getting Out of the Way’. Well it’s because it’s really
helpful to reframe things in a way that makes your role even
more important than you previously thought. Let’s have a look
at two possible scenarios:
31
Why am I teaching this stuff, when they could easily learn this
on the internet? From books, through games etc.
Oh, it’s because they will learn it much better from you
since you are a great teacher.
How To Do It
1. See yourself as great at all the things you want students to
be good at
a. Believe in yourself (see Week 1)
[Hmmm.... that makes me feel that I am just a better version of
an information delivery system. Even if that WERE true, I
wouldn’t be that excited about it!]
b. Praise students liberally yet specifically (see Week 8)
c. Think Big (see Week 4)
How about this answer?
d. Have High Energy (see Week 3)
Well, it’s because you are an inspiration, they want something you’ve got, they see you in action and pick up the
fact that you believe in yourself, you work hard, you think
differently, you have great personal energy, you tell great
stories...
That’s a much more helpful mindset to adopt.
So, ‘getting out of the way’ is all about the teacher not being the
bottleneck, not trying to control the outcomes, not trying to
guide students towards a particular answer, not leading them
towards your understanding of the world. Rather, it is all about
realising that they are capable of literally astonishing accomplishments once you let them learn what they want and customise how they want to learn it.
e. Be great at being wrong. Fail. Make mistakes. Take Risks.
Be really comfortable with failure. (see Week 6)
2. Consistently ask yourself this question:
!
How can I let students attack this themselves?
3. Allow students to customise their learning. Wherever possible get students to take control over the content of their learning. (There will of course be syllabus restrictions, but even
so, there is usually a huge amount of material that can be
customised.)
4. Teach students co-operative learning techniques to maximise
their learning efficiency.
32
5. Get students involved in creating learning materials for their
peers that reflect their own learning styles. Have students prepare resources to teach the content at a less advanced level.
6. Gamify the learning. Wherever you can, incentivise the outcomes, turn it into a game, play around with it, have fun. The
future of learning is gamification. [This just means you take
the attributes of a good game; individual, interactive, customisable, challenging, exciting, growth-oriented, etc. and you
structure your learning in the same way.]
33
Doing The Basics
Well
4
The key ingredients of
Outstanding Teaching are
included in Week 7: Do The
Basics Well. Here is a more
detailed analysis of what
that looks like and how to
do it.
Chapter 4
The 9x4 Teaching
Basics
The Fundamentals Of Great Teaching
1. Planning must be well thought-out
2. Lesson structure must be clear
3. Content must be equally accessible
4. Students must be managed well
5. Outcomes must be achievement-oriented
6. Lesson structure must be appropriate
7. Content must be engaging
8. Resources must be managed well
9. Outcomes must have an authentic purpose
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Chapter 4
Week 1: Planning
It is vital that you spend time considering all the different aspects of great teaching in advance, that you think in depth
about such issues in some detail.
There are so many different areas to consider that we need to
be realistic and reduce planning to a simple set of questions
that you ask yourself, each question addressing one of the fundamentals of great teaching:
Principle:
The start of all great teaching is preparation: thinking about what you are going to be doing.
How To Do It:
1. Set aside a specific time in your weekly routine that will always be easy for you to stick to. It should be no more than 2
hours in total.
If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Anon.
2. Go through the following 4 questions for each lesson
i. Is my structure clear and appropriate?
Justification:
The important issue with planning is not ‘doing a lesson plan’.
That is a system introduced to eradicate mediocre teaching: demanding a written lesson plan forces teachers to reflect on their
practice. The important aspect of planning is exactly this: thinking about what you are going to be doing.
ii. Is my content engaging and equally accessible?
iii. Have I thought of how I will manage students and resources?
iv.Are the outcomes achievement-based and authentic?
37
3. Constantly reflect on these 4 main areas as you are delivering the lesson/lesson series and make mental notes of how
to improve things next time.
4. At the beginning of each weekly planning session, spend 5
minutes looking back at the previous week’s lessons to remind yourself of what worked, what could be developed and
also, what you might leave out next time.
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Chapter 4
Week 2: Clarity of
Structure
Principle:
Students must know
•what they will be doing
•how they’ll be doing it
•where they are at any point
•what’s coming next
•what’s expected of them
•how they can succeed.
Justification:
Often the best practice in teaching is developed out of necessity and the importance of structure is something that has re-
sulted from the great work of our colleagues in the area of special educational needs.
It often transpires that what works for students of complex learning ability is also excellent practice for the more typical students.
The importance of clarity of structure has been something that
has developed out of work done with Autistic Spectrum Disorder students whose particular learning needs are only met in a
highly structured environment.
The main messages you want to be getting across to students
are the following:
★ You know exactly what is happening at each stage of the lesson because you’ve planned it
★ They can see exactly what they should be doing at any time
by looking at the same place (see below)
★ They know what’s coming next
This is so powerful because it prevents any wriggle room. Students know that when they come into your lessons it’s going to
be run like a military operation, they’ll have no chance of messing with you because you have a definite plan. The fact that you
know what’s going on is almost enough in itself and if you can
39
add to that the idea of communicating this clarity to the students, it will make a tremendous difference in how engaged students are in your lessons.
★ Working Individually
★ Presenting
★ Doing Numbered Heads (or any cooperative learning activity etc)
How To Do It:
Create A Visual Lesson Storyboard:
This is just one way to do this and there are many, so it’s important to trust your own intuition on what will work best with your
students. Of course, there may well be a department or school
policy to adhere to. This one works quite nicely because it does
two things with a two column storyboard.
The parts of the lesson are listed in the first column and the students get to see what ‘their job will be’ at any stage.
This is how to do it:
1. Decide what all the various different types of activities the
students might be doing. Here’s a list of possible activities:
★ Listening to Teacher
★ Working in Groups
★ Working in Pairs
★ Reporting findings to whole class
You can have as many or as few as you like and there’s no
need to agonise over the categories. Trust your intuition to work
out how many you need and what they each are.
One way of classifying these activities is to think of what the students’ job will be:
This is a helpful phrase:
We’re exploring patterns in the times table and ‘your job’ is going to be working in pairs.
2. Create Graphical Icons for each of these activities. Make
them about the size of a side-plate. They have to be visible
from any part of the classroom. Stick a velcro strip on the
back.
3. The visual ‘storyboard’ of the lesson should ideally be on a
small whiteboard next to the main display board in the classroom. This one will have two columns, one called ‘What
We’re Doing Today’ which is for completing with a marker
40
pen, the next column titled ‘Your Job Will Be’ which has a
long velcro strip.
1. If they know a more exciting activity is coming up, they can
look forward to it and you can use this to motivate them.
4. In the first column you write the various parts of today’s lesson, customised totally to whatever you’re trying to achieve.
There will usually be 4-10 discrete parts in a lesson, depending on session length etc.
2. If they know a less exciting activity is coming, they will work
even harder to enjoy the current stage.
5. On the velcro strip you attach the relevant icons, next to the
lesson part.
One serendipity of creating the visual storyboard is that it forces
you to reflect on the type of activities you are doing with students. You can quickly spot if your lesson structure is repetitive
or your activities are always the same.
6. It can work putting all the icons down for the whole of the lesson but for some ability groups it’s better to only put down
two icons at a time. Students can see all the different lesson
parts but they only see what their job is for right now and for
what’s next.
Yes, it does take a bit of work but it’s the sort of thing you can
knock up in 2 minutes when the students are doing their starter,
once you get the hang of it.
It is a brilliant tool to have at your disposal because you can
point to it all the time to remind students of what part of the lesson they’re on and what their job is at the current stage.
The fact that they know other things are coming makes behaviour management easier for two reasons:
41
Chapter 4
Week 3: Content
Must Be Equally
Accessible
Principle:
to it than how much distance has been traveled along the journey.
Let’s extend the metaphor of travel along the journey and represent the students as learning vehicles.
Students will all be at different starting points, but they are also
driving different vehicles. Some students are driving Ferraris,
some are driving Hondas, some may be driving tractors and
some may even be crawling along on all fours!
Equal does not mean the same.
You treat learners equally by treating
them all differently.
In choosing the content of a lesson for a selection of different
learning vehicles, we need to be mindful of not only the different
starting points of the vehicles, but also we need to be aware of
the vehicles differing capacities to travel and the different
modes of movement - i.e. styles of learning.
Justification:
This is summarised in the educational term ‘differentiation’ but a
lot of people have a fairly rudimentary idea of what this actually
means.
I like to use the learning journey metaphor when considering
student progress. Students travel along a learning journey and
it’s our job as professionals to enable them to travel the greatest distance possible along this journey.
A lot of people think that differentiation is just about giving different work to different groups.
Here’s a few tips on ways to differentiate content that will really
help.
Most people agree that this is a simple, yet powerful metaphor
but they often focus on too narrow a perspective. There is more
42
How To Do It:
1. Expected Progress
The first thing you need to be thinking of is the golden question
in education:
What progress am I expecting students to make this
lesson?
Note, this is very different from:
What am I going to teach today?
This includes what students now believe about themselves, about their capacity to improve, about their effectiveness as a learner.
So, let’s simplify things into three questions you might
want to ask your learners in the plenary of every lesson:
★
What do you know that you didn’t know before?
★
What can you do that you couldn’t do before?
★
What do you believe about your capacity that you
didn’t before?
What will students learn today?
It’s also a much better focus than what you want them to be
able to do by the end of the lesson, or what skills you want
them to have picked up, because the concept of progress has
two dimensions:
1. How far have students traveled along the learning
journey, given their particular learning vehicle?
This includes the knowledge acquired, the understanding
deepened and the skills developed.
2. How have students been able to customise their
learning vehicle to improve their future rate of progress?
2. Access to Progress
This is a subtle one, but this is the whole concept of making it
easy for all the different learners to access the progress you are
expecting them to make. It is not just about giving students different work!
This is the question you need to ask yourself:
How does what I know about learners’ different starting
points and their different learning vehicles impact how I
facilitate their expected progress?
43
This includes all the following differentiation tactics:
Giving different tasks. Students do not need to be doing the
same work. Indeed it is extremely unlikely that exactly the same
tasks would facilitate appropriate progress for all learners.
Giving the same task but explaining it in different ways.
Adapt how instruction is given to the leaners. Using different visual aides, concrete examples, hands on activities, or group
work may help different students access the learning.
Giving the same task but offer different levels of support.
Different support for different groups. Invite students who are
excelling at a concept to help groups needing assistance
could create a graph of their enjoyment as they progressed
through the storybook, they could create a t-shirt, create a
‘wordle’ diagram from all the student reports, undertake a ‘oneword survey’ and create a poster summarising the findings,
they could draw mind maps of the plot, characters, and annotate with their own feelings, thoughts and questions. They could
write an open letter to the author with suggestions, queries etc.
This attention to detail is done mostly at the planning level, but
if you can be aware of points two and three while you are delivering, then you will be well on your way to a sophisticated level
of awareness, of the different needs of your different learners.
Creating tasks that reflect all the different learning styles.
Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic. etc. Keep a checklist of all the
whole-group activities to make sure you reflect the learning preferences of the learners, not your own learning preferences. Our
delivery will tend to gravitate towards our own preferred learning style.
Enabling activities to reflect different working preferences Individual, Pair, Unstructured Groups, Structured Groups
Creating a variety of ways for students to demonstrate
learning. Allow students to demonstrate they have a grasp of
the material covered in class in different ways according to ability. Instead of your standard book report for example, students
44
Chapter 4
Week 4: Manage
Students Well
Principle:
It falls apart pretty quickly if you don’t
manage students well. This includes behaviour, organisation, expectations
and attitudes.
Justification:
The thing is that when a well-planned lesson goes badly, 9
times out of 10, the reality is that it wasn’t actually a wellplanned lesson in the first place...
Let me explain.
Student behaviour is almost always a consequence of the environment they’ve been placed in. If they come into a class with
incredibly high expectations for student behaviour, where they
generally end up doing something really exciting, relevant, engaging, with a teacher who encourages and praises them and
who ‘has something that they want’, then they are unlikely to
cause problems.
However, if they know that very little is expected of them, there
is no seating plan, no system of consequences for poor behaviour, no prospect of doing anything fun, then they are already
poised to be difficult.
So, it’s crucial that you address these areas when managing
the students.
There’s nothing more demoralising than planning a great lesson
that falls apart because of student behaviour.
• Organisation
It’s very disappointing and you feel that the students have let
themselves down, let you down and ruined your great work and
all the exciting learning you had planned for them.
• Expectations
• Behaviour
• Attitude
45
How To Do It:
The gateway to managing behaviour is organisation. If the students are organised well, then good behaviour is a logical consequence. Your expectations of students are crucial and you
need to let them know as often as possible exactly what the parameters are.
Here’s a few tips to get started.
i)
Make an appropriate Seating Plan for every class
This is so fundamental but very few people do this well.
Does your existing seating plan really work?
Have you tried boy/girl/boy/girl across the whole class?
Do you put the most easily distracted students closest to
you?
Does your seating plan change for the different types of activities they may do?
Do you review your seating plans regularly?
ii) Teach with the door open. But what if it’s noisy? Do it anyway. Students learn what to do and a little noise is not a bad
thing, there are very few natural working environments that
are totally silent.
iii) Greet students at the door at the start of every lesson. Welcome them in with a big smile and let them know that you’ve
got something exciting planned for the lesson. Be excited
about it yourself and it will rub off on them.
iv) Take a register every lesson. Make a big deal of getting to
know student names as quickly as possible. One tip is to not
take the register right at the beginning of the lesson, but get
them straight down to learning right away. You can take the
register during the middle of the lesson, by having a quick
look. If you’ve got a seating plan, you can immediately tell if
anyone’s absent.
v) Immediately pick up any uniform issues. Never put up with
even the slightest discrepancy. Shirts must be tucked in, ties
done up, headphones away, scarves off, bags off the desk,
phones away, jewellery off. Anytime you let anything go you
are giving away your power.
vi) Only have one rule for your classes: No-one talks when
you’re talking. That’s it. It’s simple and kids can remember it.
You can tell them you only have one rule and you expect
them to be able to remember it. They won’t of course, they
will need constant reminding, but with that single rule you
establish control over the entire class instantly. Everything
else comes form that single rule.
46
vii) Use ‘The Wait.’ Never speak over students. If you start
speaking and they don’t immediately stop talking then just
stop and wait. Wait it out. They will stop. Eventually! One tip
here is to just start the sentence you were saying over and
over again until they get the idea that even the tiniest bit of
muttering is not going to be tolerated. This is probably the
single biggest thing that most teachers get wrong. They
hear a little voice in their head going something like this: ‘Oh
well, it was only a tiny little interruption, in fact, most of the
class probably didn’t hear it and you can pretty much carry
on without making a big deal of it.’ Unfortunately, that little
voice telling you to ‘move on, it’ll be ok, they are pretty much
all mostly following the rules’, is not the voice you should
trust. If you are not a complete fascist with this rule, you will
come undone in double quick time. The devil is in the details
and this is one that needs nerves of steel to pull off. But it
works like a charm. Another really important thing when you
are doing the wait is to not get frustrated by it. This is crucial. Smile, be nice, be insistent, be relaxed, be calm. Just
don’t ever yield. EVER! I hope I’ve made myself clear...
viii)Pens down when you are talking to them. This is such a ridiculous one that it shouldn’t really make much difference.
However, it’s a stroke of utter genius. There’s something
about holding a pen that destroys the ability to concentrate,
and the great thing about asking for pens down is that it’s
such a non threatening request for a teacher to make. The
psychology of using non-threatening requests to gain compliance is a fascinating topic and if you are interested in furthering your knowledge in this area, I thoroughly recommend
Robert Cialdini’s seminal book, Influence: The Psychology
of Persuasion.
ix) Never raise your voice. Raising your voice is a sign that
you’ve lost your power. You may occasionally need to just
get their attention with a simple: ‘Right, listen in...’ or something like that, but when you are addressing them, speak solidly and clearly but never in a raised voice. If they can’t hear
you at normal volume, it’s because they’re not listening, so
use ‘the wait’ until they are.
x) Proximity is your best friend. Go to the problem. If there’s an
issue, go to it. Don’t ignore it, don’t try and raise your voice,
go over to the problem and deal with it quietly in a nonconfrontational way.
xi) Never set detentions. They don’t work. Even if you do the
detentions yourself, like keeping them in at the end of the
lesson so they’re late for break, (which often seems to be
effective) it doesn’t work in the long term. Anytime you
threaten anything to students you are giving away your
power. You want to train students to do what you want them
to do because you expect it, because ‘those are the rules’,
because ‘this is what we do in my lessons: we listen to each
other, we take turns, we give everything our best shot, etc.’
47
xii) Never mention sanctions. Always talk about positive outcomes. Replace ‘If you don’t do X, I will give you a detention, extra homework, etc’ with ‘Right, so you’ll want to get X
done as quickly as possible.’ ‘Yes, this is what you’ll want to
be doing’. Replace the ‘Do-this-or-else!’ mentality with the
‘It’s going to work out really well for you when you get this
done.’ Again, small change, BIG DIFFERENCE.
xiii)Never EVER send a student out unless there is a chance of
immediate physical danger to other students or yourself.
You need to deal with the problem in as low-key a way as
possible, keeping the student in your room, under your direction. Get creative, move them around, change the seating
plan, get them to come and sit under your nose, to stand up,
to stand on one leg, to take over the class, to do a 2min
show for everyone to get it out of their system - anything.
Get creative but find a way to keep them in the room. Anytime you send a student out of your room you have transferred your power to the student. They win this round and
the next time it will be even harder.
xiv)Never refer a difficult student to another member of staff.
Again it’s a question of power. Every time you refer anyone
you are losing a little bit of your power. You are basically saying loud and clear ‘you’ve beaten me, but I’m now going to
send you to someone more powerful than me; the Head,
Vice Principal, Mr X etc’. It seems like a good idea at the
time but you are making it a much harder road for yourself
in the future, because you are admitting that you don’t have
the power to deal with things yourself.
xv) Follow up on any poor behaviour yourself. Call parents as
often as you need to. Take the trouble to actually do it. The
first time even a small incident occurs, call parents and
make sure everyone knows that you’re going to do it, and
actually do it. One tactic that works very well is to invite the
parents in to sit with their son/daughter for your lesson, or to
follow them in all their lessons for a day. This is unbelievably
powerful and will get you instant results in nearly all cases.
Everyone else in the class knows that from then on you are
not to be messed with.
xvi)Pick up on student uniform issues whenever you see it,
wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. How you comport
yourself around the school, how you talk to students who
you don’t even teach, how you interact with everyone along
corridors, in the lunch hall etc. will send the message out
pretty quickly that you are one of the teachers not to be
messed with. Don’t be mean about it, just expect it to be
done. A good tip is to say it in a positive way: ‘Thanks for
tucking your shirts in fellas, good lads. Let’s keep those in
whenever you’re in the building’ or something to that effect.
xvii)Establish routines for your class. They need to feel safe, secure and need to feel like they know what is going to hap48
pen in your lessons. They know how you will behave, what
you will expect of them and what the general mood of the
experience is going to be.
xviii)Be consistent. It’s your job to always be the same irrespective of how you feel. It’s not your job to be a mystery to students. It’s OK to be unpredictable in content and lesson
structure as long as you are totally consistent in character.
xix)Be unpredictable! Be different in lesson structure as often
as you can. DON’T fall into the OFSTED lesson structure
trap: students do NOT have to come into every lesson and
do a starter. The idea of a formal lesson structure is to prevent mediocre teaching, not to produce outstanding teaching. Variety is the spice of life. Do different stuff at the beginning of lessons: tell stories, do a demo, have something on
display for students to ponder, have the chairs arranged in a
totally different way, start with a plenary and do the lesson
backwards!
kind to each other, listening well, being cooperative, being
positive etc. Do not praise correctness, getting the answer
right or doing a good piece of work. It’s very subtle but crucial. If you praise the outputs then students have to create
the outputs in order to get the praise. Sometimes that’s beyond their control. However, if you praise student inputs,
they can control it and so they can access the praise just by
doing something that’s 100% within their control. When
praising, make sure you’re lavish about it. Heap praise on
them for each and every input they do that is good. Also,
praise them in advance. ‘I love this class because you guys
are just such excellent workers, you really put the effort in
and I’m dead proud of you. Great job.’ Another tip on praise:
make it specific. Relate your praise to something particular
in as much detail as possible. This lets students know easily
what to do in order to access that praise again. And they
love praise. As do we all!
xx) BE what you want students to be in terms of attitude. Always be uplifting, telling them they can do it, be positive, be
kind, be encouraging. Model these attitudes in the way you
think about yourself, your lessons and the students.
xxi)PRAISE them as often as you can, remembering to praise
student inputs NOT outputs. Only praise what they can control, like the attempts they make, the effort they put in, being
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Chapter 4
Week 5: Outcomes
must be
AchievementOrientated
Justification:
It makes sense to be measuring the effectiveness of teaching in
terms of the distance traveled by learners along the learning
journey rather than the destination reached. Clearly students
are all starting at different points and we would therefore expect
them to reach different points. However the more interesting issue is how far they have travelled from their starting points
along the journey and how much they have increased their capacity to travel.
You could explain it in terms of progress:
Principle:
There’s a difference between attainment and achievement. Good outcomes relate to the distance travelled
along the learning journey and the
work done on improving the learning
vehicle.
How much progress have they made and what is their
current rate of progress?
If they carry on at their current rate of progress, where
are they likely to be at the end of the year/key stage?
How To Do It:
i)
Set high expectations for your students. Expect the most
able students to be making around 6pts of progress per
year - (1 Level or GCSE grade per year). Expect the aver50
age ability students to be making 5pts per year progress (4
levels in 5 years) and the least able to be making around
4pts per year. (2 sub-levels or fine grades)
ii) Use Target Grades based on previous year’s grades
and/or Key Stage 2 data.
iii) Start using the concept of Most Likely Grade (MLG) for
students at the end of each academic year. The MLG is
your best estimate as a professional, using all the resources
at your disposal, of the grade that students are most likely to
get. You should include the following information to help inform your decision:
★ Your knowledge of the curriculum - how it might change
in difficulty from topic to topic and over the course of the
programme of study.
★ Your knowledge of the student. Where they were at the
beginning of the year, what their rate of progress had
been in the previous year, what their current rate of progress is and to what degree they’re following your guidance.
★ Your knowledge of how similar students have progressed from a similar situation to the examined period
at the end of the year or key stage.
★ Your awareness of any intervention that will be made
available to the student and how likely they are to act
upon it.
★ Your student’s attendance record and other non-subject
specific issues.
iv) Communicate to students their ‘on trackedness’. This is
their current rate of progress, and it relates their Most Likely
Grade to their Target Grade. A simple 4 point system will suffice and the best ones would look something like this:
★ 10 - Outstanding Progress - Likely to EXCEED Target
Grade
★ 7 - Good Progress - Likely to ACHIEVE Target Grade
★ 4 - Some Progress - Likely to FALL BELOW Target
Grade
★ 1 - Very Little Progress - Likely to achieve SIGNIFICANTLY BELOW Target Grade
v) Constantly reaffirm to students what they need to be doing to achieve a ’10’ on this scale.
★ They need to know what to do
★ They need to be willing to do it
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★ They need to be organised enough to allow it to happen.
★
What can you do that you couldn’t do before?
And that’s it. Everything to do with ability is irrelevant. If
you know your students well, you will only set them tasks
that they are capable of doing. In this way a student can
achieve a 10 for progress EVEN IF their MLG is an E.
★
What do you believe about your capacity that you didn’t before?
The main benefit of this approach is that everyone is going to
be measured on the same scale - the scale of ‘on trackedness’
or status of their progress. This is a much fairer way to measure
student outcomes and it is also much more useful, since it has
the achievement aspect built into it. You are constantly forced to
look at achievement in preference to attainment. All students
can access the highest ‘On track’ scores and even the least academically able students can be getting excellent scores and getting rewarded for having a good attitude, working hard and being well organised. Ultimately it’s these skills that will be far
more important than academic aptitude in determining the long
term success of students once they move into the world of
work.
So, here’s the 3 simple questions from Week 3 that you might
ask in the plenary of every lesson and which can form the basis
of assessing student achievement, given their different starting
points and different learning vehicles:
★
What do you know that you didn’t know before?
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Chapter 4
Week 6: Lesson
Structure must be
appropriate
Justification:
A really tight lesson structure is terrific to avoid mediocrity, however, the most effective way to deliver consistently outstanding
learning is through constant variation in approach.
You can still easily deliver mediocre learning despite having a
beautifully planned and structured lesson, if the structure is not
matched well to the learning objectives.
Having a starter is great for getting students right to work, for
setting up the learning and for settling down the students. However, not every lesson needs 10 questions on the screen when
they walk in, or a worksheet on the desk.
Principle:
When designing your lessons, make
sure that their structure is optimised to
achieve the lesson outcomes. Do NOT
repeat exactly the same structure for
every single lesson in the hope that
consistency and routine will produce
outstanding lessons!
Having students work in groups can often be excellent, but
what size groups are best for what we’re trying to achieve?
Consider whether or not students might work in pairs, in three’s
in four’s or even in larger groups, depending on what you’re trying to get them to learn.
One of the classic mistakes when using technology follows this
line of reasoning:
A) Computers would be good for this learning activity
B) We have enough computers for every student
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C) The optimum learning will therefore take place by giving
each student a computer
How To Do It:
This will almost certainly deliver less than optimal
learning, despite the flawless logic.
1. Think carefully about the learning objectives for your lesson
In the now famous ‘Hole in The Wall’ study, Professor Sugata
Mitra found that students working in peer-peer learning groups
achieved optimal learning at around 4 students per computing
device.
3. Choose ones that are most likely to achieve the learning objectives.
There is no evidence that suggests the optimal set-up for student learning is 1 computer per child - even when engaged in
individual learning or tasks such as computer programming!
2. Consider all the different lesson structures you could create.
A great summary of some of the more effective cooperative
learning techniques that can help you choose appropriate lesson structures:
http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/intech/cooperativelearning.htm#acti
vities
It seems that the ability to discuss work as students progress is
a major factor. Indeed, most studies report that 2 students per
computer significantly accelerates learning and many find that
‘role-rotation’ models with group sizes of 3, 4 and 5 are demonstrably more effective, since students are forced to cooperate
and allocate their own resources effectively, maximising the
learning for the whole group.
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A Very Flexible Structure: The Blackford
This is an outline of a very flexible structure that can do all of
the things we need which has been pioneered by Mike Blackford. It facilitates proportional progress over time and it can be
done without a great deal of effort, hence it is sustainable.
1. Hook
Something that grabs students’ attention, raises interest, gets
them excited.
2. Input
The main learning point(s) of the lesson. This needn’t be the
teacher standing up and delivering, it could be a group of students who’ve been primed to prepare a presentation.
It could be a demonstration, a short video, a poem, a conjecture, a few examples, a story etc., anything that lets the students know the main body of what they’re going to be learning.
3. Short Assessment
work out where students are on the learning journey in relation to this particular topic. This informs which activity students will be directed towards initially.
4. Student Activities Differentiated by TYPE
These activities are designed around students’ different starting points along the learning journey, in relation to this particular topic.
a. Revisit: Students didn’t really get it, so they need it explaining to them in a different way, or just repeated.
b. Consolidate: Students think they get it and appear to understand what to do but they would benefit from having
several further explanations and examples to work
through, try, practise etc.
c. Apply: Students get the concept and can immediately
start applying the concept in a variety of situations, hence
developing their learning to a greater level.
d. Explore: Students immediately grasp the basic applications of the concept and begin to explore other areas
where the principles may apply, extending the learning in
all directions.
This is the key section. Teacher needs to use a combination
of judgment, self-assessment and/or peer-assessment to
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e. Create: Students are so familiar with the concepts that
they begin to create learning resources for other students
in the class and wider school community.
f. Publish: Students create high quality learning materials
which they publish to the global learning community
through web materials, wikis, e-books, online courses,
apps. etc.
g. Deliver: Students attain such a deep level of mastery in
the topic that they begin delivering learning to their peers,
members of staff and the global community through presentations, webinars etc.
5. Progress Check
Is my current rate of progress appropriate, given my
capacity to progress?
This 5-stage structure can be really of any length from 20 minutes to 120 minutes, so that it can cycle as many times as necessary given the learning objectives of the lesson and its
length.
[Of course, there will also be lots of mini-assessments during
the main body of the lesson, whereby students move along the
hierarchy of activities, they don’t need to spend the whole lesson doing the activities that were initially appropriate.]
This is really important. Plenaries should be irrelevant if you
have structured the learning activities well. The feedback
should be immediate and obvious to all learners, as they progress through the range of tasks. The learning they have
achieved should be very clear.
What is more important though is this question:
Was my progress in this lesson appropriate, given my
starting point and my capacity to progress?
There is a deeper questions of which you should always be
mindful:
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Chapter 4
Week 7: Content
Must Be Engaging
there are constraints upon the curriculum you have to deliver.
Justification:
There is almost no need for the justification of why content
needs to be engaging if you are to be doing the basics well.
Instead it is more helpful to think about what engaging really
means and then how to make sure it happens.
Principle:
Engaging is a word that has become
very popular ‘edu-speak’ and ‘engagement’ is possibly the single most important metric to when assessing the effectiveness of learning. We have a simple
framework to make sure that your content is engaging as possible given that
Students will be engaged in a learning activity if it is the following:
1. Fun - Are they really going to enjoy doing this?
2. Crystal Clear - Have I planned absolutely everything?
3. Low Floor/High Ceiling - Is it easy for everyone to get
into this, but also open ended enough to stretch the
most dedicated?
4. Authentic - Is it relevant to the students’ lives and are
they doing something of genuine value, or is it just a
school project in a vacuum, separated from real life?
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5. Customisable - Can students direct the learning to reflect their interests, abilities and desire?
So, this checklist is a good place to start when you are thinking
about making content engaging.
How To Do It
The first thing you need to realise is that you can make even
the most boring of topics, unbelievably interesting to students if
you put a lot into it yourself.
T HE 3 E’ S
OF
E NGAG E M E NT
E NERGY
How much Energy have you put into it? The planning, the thinking about it and the actual delivery. Are you smashing through it
with a bundle of Energy, or are you kind of just going through
the motions.
E XCITEMENT
Are YOU really excited about what you’re doing? Have you
found a way to personalise it so that you can easily get your excitement across to the students? If you are teaching a subject
you enjoy, then it shouldn’t be that hard to get a level of excitement into your lesson. Even if you can’t be excited about the
topic, you can be excited about being able to change the way
students see the world, even if just by the tiniest bit.
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E NTHUSIASM
This literally means ‘inspired or possessed by a god!’ I don’t
want to get carried away, but what ‘extra dimension’ are you
bringing to what you’re doing, to the lesson topic, to the lesson
purpose, to the purpose of your job?
If you are constantly looking to bring the bigger picture awareness to your lessons, then you won’t be able to help but engage
students. Think of the awe and wonder and amazement you
feel for the topic and bring that into the lesson as often as you
can.
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Chapter 4
Week 8: Manage
Resources Well
Justification:
The main question we encourage teachers to be asking is this:
What is the return on investment for resources used up
in delivering this learning?
Principle:
Resources have to be managed well in
order for maximum learning to take
place. The ‘resources’ we speak of are
broader than conventional physical resources. We’re also challenging teachers to look at their own time, their energy and their enthusiasm, including
planning energy and resources such
as student expertise.
I want to encourage you to be considering this point in a more
granular form by asking yourself two question ruthlessly about
your own resources at every stage of the learning cycle.
Killer Questions:
1. Is this the best use of my TIME?
2. Is this the best use of my ENERGY?
For example - if it takes you 2 hours to produce a learning resource for a 10 minute presentation to students, is that a good
use of your time?
If you spend hours and hours marking student work till late in
the night, every night just so that OFSTED will come in and see
that you have marked their books, is that the best use of your
energy?
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Now, I’m not saying for a second that you shouldn’t mark students’ work. Absolutely not. However I want you to be always
thinking about WHY we do what we do. What is the fundamental purpose of marking work?
There are only 2 reasons for marking work:
1. So YOU know where they are and what they need to do next.
2. So you can COMMUNICATE to the students where they are
and what they need to do next.
Everything else is just fluff.
So, can you be smarter about where you’re putting your energy
and time?
What is the return on investment in terms of student learning, of
1 hour marking work compared with 1 hour planning a lesson?
Do you actually know? Have you ever thought about it?
How To Do It:
Whenever you decide to use resources in the classroom, think
about how best to deliver the maximum learning from the minimum input.
1. Use peer assessment as much as possible
2. Use self-assessment regularly
3. Use reverse-engineering. (Mainly for exam groups)
Teach students to work backwards from the examiners reports and the mark schemes, through the question papers,
to finally arrive at what they should be learning.
4. Use peer learning as much as possible. Cooperative learning techniques work really well, especially if you are doing a
technical subject where some students will have more flair
than the teachers. Don’t be threatened by this - use it to your
advantage and get them helping to facilitate.
5. Use research projects, small groups, breakout rooms as
much as possible to unleash the learning potential of students.
6. Use computers in lower ratios for creation activities. 1 computer to every 4 students works surprisingly well, especially
if the responsibilities are allocated clearly and rotated regularly.
7. Use students to give out and collect materials.
8. Make sure students tidy up. Help yourself by leaving plenty
of time to tidy up.
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9. Get to your lesson early and get the room set up the way
you want. Make sure your resources are in optimum position
to get optimal learning.
10. Divide the learning into segments and have groups create
the learning resources for each segment.
11. Share lesson plans and ideas with colleagues.
12. Teach multiple classes in each year. (This will depend on
the timetable design of course) Given the choice, it is a
much better use of your time and energy to teach more than
one group in a year, since you double up on the planning
and resources. To give balance you can always change
groups you teach every couple of years, to avoid getting
pigeon-holed as a KS3 or a KS4 teacher.
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Chapter 4
Week 9: Outcomes
Must Have an
Authentic Purpose
Justification:
There is nothing more puzzling to me than student learning that
misses the opportunity to have an authentic purpose:
Students building a website in an ICT lesson that won’t ever go
live.
Students designing a logo for a product that they will never sell.
Principle:
The learning must have an authentic
purpose in order to get the most out of
students. It must be easy for students
to see the value of their learning in a
real-world context. The ‘How Can I USE
this?’ question must have an obvious
answer.
Students doing a debate on an interesting, topical subject, without an audience.
These are very simple examples that with very little additional
thought could become really valuable learning projects with an
authentic audience for the student ‘product’.
The ability to build in such obvious authenticity short-circuits the
‘Yeah, but what’s the point of this?’ question and it immediately
galvanises students into a ‘this is real’ mode.
It’s very powerful and it gets tremendous buy-in from students.
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How To Do It:
Be ruthless with these questions:
1. Could this work have a genuine audience?
2. Could this project be presented, displayed, produced, extended beyond the boundaries of the immediate class/year/
school?
3. Why can’t this be turned into learning opportunities for others?
4. Who would benefit from knowing this stuff?
5. How would the output of this project compare with commercial offerings?
6. Can we charge for this?!!!
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Resources
5
Additional Resources for both
teaching and beyond
Chapter 5
Additional
Resources
Beyond Teaching
1. These concepts extended to self-mastery.
2. Some techniques for realising your potential
Within Teaching
1. The 4Matrix Teaching Effectiveness System
2. The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook
3. Tom’s Maths Problem-Solving Book
4. Tom’s Science Problem-Solving Book
5. Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset work
6. Jigsaw Learning
7. Free Online Maths/Science: The Khan Academy
8. Free VLE with Global reach: Edmodo
9. Excellent Online Learning Resource: Udemy
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