A good question to ask when trying to improve teaching in an individual classroom or across a school is, What problem are we trying to solve? Defining a problem makes deciding on a solution slightly more straightforward (although we can still disagree or feel uncertain about a way ahead).
In an discussion on Mind the Gap podcast, Jon Hutchinson used a term I’ve been pondering since. ‘Speed camera’ coaching describes the process a coach (or observer) can go into a lesson observe a teacher and spot a single missed behaviour (for example, a teacher who could cold call but doesn’t) and jumps on that as the next step for the teacher.
Jon’s point was that we can often quickly latch on to a behaviour that is well-defined. It’s easy to say ‘X was missing so you need to do X’ rather than delving in to what the teacher was doing with subject knowledge in the lesson or how and why they made specific choices about how they taught a topic. We can assume a missing behaviour is causing problems without actually checking that it is.
One of my main jobs in the last two years has been to give teachers feedback. As I’ve done that, I’ve been struck by the tension between the teacher behaviours and the teaching of the curriculum. Neither of these is insubstantial.
When it comes to teachers behaviours I’ve seen regularly causing problems in lessons, I’d include:
- Not enough students are paying attention to the lesson, the teacher or the activities.
- Not enough students have to participate in the lesson. Often this leads to fragile, underdeveloped knowledge and poorly understood processes.
- Check for understanding doesn’t happen or checks too few students to give the teacher an accurate picture of the class’s understanding.
In the majority of lessons I have seen in the last two years, a version of one of these could have been the focus of our feedback discussion. As such, lots of whole school CPD, and other school improvement work has focused on these areas in that time. And these areas generally produce straightforward and practical next steps: a change in teacher behaviour that can be defined, scripted and practised.
Here’s the tension: we could rightly spend time in these areas because they are massive barriers to learning that cut across lots of subject and phase differences. I observe outside specialism and generally feel there’s a useful conversation to have when it comes to the list above. We can’t get into deep conversations about subject if students weren’t paying attention or if they don’t have the knowledge or ability the teacher expects them to.
However, there are other big issues as well, specific to the context of the subject or phase. It’s difficult to talk about these in generic terms because they are specific to the subject but they often concern:
- The knowledge defined in the curriculum or the sequence of the curriculum don’t enable students to be successful.
- The planned activities of the curriculum or lesson, including assessment, don’t enable students to remember/do more.
- Central resources/share planning is/are inconsistent and so the delivery of the curriculum (and student learning) is inconsistent.
- Explanation or modelling assume knowledge or a scaffold doesn’t adequately support students to access an independent task.
These broader problems will be worked out in subject specific ways in lessons.
If the person visiting lessons (whether they’re a coach, a line manager or someone else) doesn’t adequately invest in knowledge about the area they’re working in, feedback (and improvements with them) can all too easily remain superficial.
It’s very difficult to create a clear rule that enables you walk the line between these two sets of problems and it probably isn’t productive to have to streams of feedback – one for the first set of problems, one for the second.
Instead, operating by a set of principles that helps you to manage how you walk a line between these sets of problems.
1. Prioritise problem identification over a decision about a next step
If we go into a lesson with a set of steps we’re keen to apply to any teacher, we’ll likely find an opening to use one of them. We may well be right. Often teachers can refine their use of cold call, their routines or their check for understanding.
It may be a teacher you observe could use cold call more readily and that students would have benefited from a fuller check of their understanding. If the lesson is badly planned and students are given independence too quickly or steps aren’t broken down clearly or a concept is explained poorly, then these might be areas of more significant concern.
But we can’t just go to a teacher and say, ‘Your explanation wasn’t clear.’ We need to…
2. Find evidence for the problems identified (or ditch them)
We can do this when the teacher does miss that behaviour we’d like to see in the lesson or when we make a prediction about the lesson. We investigate how the prediction plays out. To do this, we have to look at work, at how students approach tasks, at what they produce.
If you can’t find evidence to support your prediction about what is and isn’t a problem in the lesson, then don’t pursue it further. This is a frightening (and at times annoying) part of observing lessons. A hypothesis is forming in your mind. Certain teacher actions or inactions appear likely to you to be causing problems. When you check, you find that this is not the case. The problem you thought existed doesn’t.
This may be frustrating for the observer but this is nothing compared to the frustration a teacher deserves to feel when the feedback they receive glosses over the genuine problems they face in the classroom.
3. Be inquisitive about how a subject is taught
It’s okay to go into a lesson in order to give feedback to the teacher and leave with questions about how the lesson or the curriculum have been put together. Non-specialists can give helpful feedback but only when they recognise that subjects have subtleties that are worth exploring.
There’s a weird push and pull that happens in discussions about subject distinctiveness; at times, it feels like some are saying that a non-specialist can’t pronounce on anything, even how students are paying attention or the need for a check for understanding because each subject is distinct. I don’t buy this.
But observers of all kinds should apply Stephen Covey’s principle of Seeking to understand before being understood. Those going into lessons are often the ones who have obsessed over the craft of teaching; they have – written or unwritten – a set of behaviours in their mind that make up great teaching. And maybe these behaviours are quite important. When a teacher outside our subject does something we don’t expect, we can prepare an action or some feedback for them but we can also prepare some questions to better understand it.
Seeking to understand doesn’t mean we never give our feedback or we hold back when we know there’s a problem that could be solved in by a nudge to teacher behaviour. We shouldn’t overcomplicate this process to the point at which we have to ask so many questions to get to the point that we feel able to give feedback. We might gain quite a shallow understanding by asking about the curriculum in one feedback conversation but that understanding deepens each time we do it.
A lot of the above is predicated on having enough time to devote to the feedback conversation. A lot of schools have found the time to introduce some kind of coaching programme but only just. This can lead to a lot of brief discussions aiming to deliver a set of behaviours rather than support teachers to improve. If we want to identify real problems in the classroom, we need time to delve into them; we need time to get to grips with subjects we don’t teach; we need time to slow down some of our feedback conversations to make them worthwhile.
Peter Foster 
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