A summary by Mike
Cladingbowl, National Director, Schools.
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Earlier this year, I wrote about why inspectors observe
individual lessons and how they evaluate teaching in schools. I hope it helped
to clarify what inspectors do and why. If you have not seen it, then you can
read it here: www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/140050.
Like many others, I have strong views
about inspection and the role of inspector observation in it. I believe, for
example, that inspectors must always visit classrooms and see teachers and
children working. Classrooms, after all, are where the main business of a
school is transacted. It is also important to remember that we can give a
different grade for teaching than we do for overall achievement, particularly
where a school is improving but test or examination results have not caught up.
But none of this means that inspectors
need to ascribe a numerical grade to the teaching they see in each classroom
they visit. Nor does it mean aggregating individual teaching grades to arrive
at an overall view of teaching. Far from it. Evaluating teaching in a school
should include looking across a range of children’s work, establishing how well
children acquire knowledge, understanding the teachers’ own views, observing
direct practice, and checking on the views of children and parents.
Although I hope all this is now better
understood by schools than it was, I am still concerned that ineffective and
unnecessary lesson observation is going on in too many of our schools.
I won’t pretend that some of this is not
the result of Ofsted inspection. But when I speak to headteachers I am adamant
that it is for them to decide how to assess teaching – and what style of
teaching they want – in their school. It’s not for Ofsted or anyone else to do
that. I am equally adamant that neither schools nor individuals should use
inspection to justify their own particular view. Too often, teachers tell me
that teaching is evaluated narrowly or they are told to plan lessons in a particular
way, or even to adopt a specific way of teaching, because ‘that’s what Ofsted
wants’. Well, it usually isn’t.
I know there are a few out there who
continue to peddle this myth of ‘that’s what Ofsted wants’. But teachers and
schools must be allowed to teach as they see fit. After all, they know what
works for them and what works for their children. Teaching has always been a
responsible profession, which is why children are entrusted to teachers, and
they should be able to exercise their craft without undue intervention.
So inspection should take a pragmatic
view. Teachers should be encouraged to adopt the methods that work best for
their children. It’s equally unhelpful in my view to advocate traditional
methods only as it is to favour only progressive ones. Traditional versus
progressive, false dichotomies or otherwise, might make for an interesting
debate when it’s underpinned by evidence but in most classrooms teachers do a
bit of both these days. Put another way, children need facts but also need to
develop the skills to use those facts.
So what has any of this to do with
grading teaching in individual lessons? I think the time has come to try
something different. While I am confident that most inspectors have got the
message, I fear it is not yet established firmly enough in schools. I suspect
that many in the profession still think that teaching can be assessed well by
observing, episodically, a few aspects of an individual’s work for only a short
period of time.
So in a pilot from 9 June 2014 onwards, across
the Midlands region, inspectors will not enter a grade for teaching on each
individual lesson observation form. Instead, they will record their observations
about what is going well, and what is going less well, and use this to feed back
to teachers (if teachers want this) or even groups of teachers. But inspectors
will not feed back a specific teaching grade or use grades to arrive at an
overall judgement.
They will summarise the strengths and
weaknesses of the teaching they encounter, along with plentiful other evidence
from the scrutiny of books, discussions with teachers and children, the
school’s own view of teaching and so on. Taken together, this will provide a
catalyst for discussion and allow inspectors to form a view about teaching
overall.
I also want the range of comments made
about teaching by inspectors and by those in schools to widen. Like others, I
don’t favour individual lesson check-lists that are aligned to specific behaviours.
This does little to encourage good teachers or increase professional reflection
on what is effective practice.
Of course, inspectors and schools do
focus on many of the right things when they look at teaching – for example is
the work hard enough and do the children work hard at it? But comment on teaching is often focused on
the same issues – the length of the introduction, the activities set, the match
to the needs of children, the quality of questioning and comment on the marking
of books. In some instances, it can focus on explaining why the grade was
awarded rather than adding fresh insight.
What about teachers’ subject knowledge,
the children’s sense of routine, the ability to turn direction mid-sentence, a
common sense approach to differentiation, the sense of humour, the
infectiousness of the explanation? I see too little of this kind of comment
about teaching. I hope we see more reporting of it during the pilot.
None of this runs contrary to the key inspection
guidance available to inspectors. Nor will it give preferment to schools where
the new approach is tried out. But I do hope it will lead to better inspection
and more good teaching in schools.
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