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Perhaps I can start by mentioning two teachers to you that I remember
from Mossbourne, my previous school. There are many good teachers there. I just
want to mention two of them as a way of leading into this debate. One is an
English teacher. She’s still teaching there. She’s in her late twenties. She’s
an absolutely outstanding Advanced Skills Teacher and I remember observing lots
of her lessons but I’ll mention just one of them. One of them was a lesson on
the Merchant of Venice and she was teaching incredibly well. She had part of
the class reciting Portia’s speech; you know the quality of mercy. They were
all doing that; this is a middle ability class. She had the Al Pacino film on
the touchscreen behind her. She had a couple of youngsters dressed in Tudor
garb and it was just one of those brilliant lessons that you see and it was
full of energy; it was full of pace and she was moving around between the
different groups doing different things.
That was one teacher; one lesson. The second lesson, or the second
teacher I remember, was somebody in his late fifties. He was the head of maths.
He was a very traditional teacher. He taught in a pretty didactic way, but the
kids loved him across the ability range. He knew how to teach maths. You know
what a great maths teacher does? Builds block by block to ensure that
youngsters don’t move on until they understand the ground rules. He would spend
many, many hours in the evening every night preparing powerpoints for himself
and for the staff in his department and he would disseminate good practice, in
terms of how to use powerpoints, to other people in his department and beyond
his department to other schools in Hackney and beyond. And he produced
absolutely fantastic results although some people would say he was a very
didactic teacher. So these two people were very different teachers but
incredibly successful and the reason why they
were successful was because they developed a style of teaching with which they
were comfortable, not complacent, but with which they were comfortable and
which they knew worked. It worked because children enjoyed their lessons; were engaged; were focused; learnt a
great deal and made real progress.
For me a good lesson is about what works. A good lesson is about what
works. So this is a plea, this evening, for pragmatism not ideology in the way
we judge the quality of teaching. I am reminded about Blair’s words in relation
to that sterile debate on the academy programme and structural reform. He said:
“what works is what’s good”. What works is what’s good and I have the
same view in terms of teaching. We, and in that word “we” I include OFSTED, should be wary of trying to
prescribe a particular style of teaching, whether it be a three part lesson; an
insistence that there should be a balance between teacher led activities and
independent learning, or that the lesson should start with aims and objectives
with a plenary at the end and so on and so forth. We should be wary of too
much prescription. In my experience a formulaic approach pushed out by a school
or rigidly prescribed in an inspection evaluation schedule traps too many
teachers into a stultifying and stifling mould which doesn’t demand that they
use their imagination, initiative and common sense. Too much direction is as
bad as too little. Both teachers I’ve mentioned to you understood this but also
understood that there were other things they had to do.
You can watch the clip below
In the opening debate of a new series of Education Matters Debates with Teach
First Sir Michael Wilshaw HMCI asks: what will it take to ensure that every
child, regardless of socio-economic background, is taught by a "good
teacher"?
Does your SLT or middle leadership team need further training in lesson observations?
I can shadow your observers and offer training in consistent lesson observations.
Get in touch : jmedlicott@hotmail.com