22,79 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
In an era when schools and teachers often seem to operate at one hundred miles an hour, Teaching Backwards offers a more reflective and measured approach to teaching and learning. Where many teachers focus on delivering content in a linear fashion, those who teach backwards start with the end in mind. This means that they know in advance what levels of knowledge, attitude, skills and habits they expect their learners to achieve, they define and demystify ambitious goals, and they establish their students' starting points before they start to plan and teach. Teaching Backwards ensures that learners consistently make great progress over time, and offers a practical, hands-on manual for teachers to further develop their attitudes, skills and habits of excellence both for themselves and for their learners. This book is the follow-up to the best-selling Outstanding Teaching: Engaging Learners. It is based on the analysis of thousands of hours of primary and secondary lessons, part of Osiris Education's Outstanding Teaching Intervention programme over the last seven years.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
PRAISE FOR OUTSTANDING TEACHING: TEACHING BACKWARDS
“Vintage Griffith and Burns: an impressive melding of anecdote and outstanding classroom practice, which provides countless strategies for ensuring that busy teachers see learning through their pupils’ eyes. Simultaneously compellingly readable and rigorously research-informed, this book is the unlikely but deeply attractive love-child of Wilbur Smith and Hilary Mantel.”
Barry J Hymer, Professor of Psychology in Education, University of Cumbria
“Griffith and Burns have provided classroom teachers with a thought-provoking insight into ‘teaching backwards’. They have achieved a highly accessible balance of philosophy and practical approaches, which are totally credible since they are based on years of fieldwork with outstanding and improving practitioners. This variety of fieldwork in a variety of settings means their thesis is clear, coherent and credible and will make sense to all teachers looking to improve their pedagogy. Their practical suggestions range from quick-fix templates and techniques to deeper approaches, but all are explained in a down to earth, real-life fashion, which makes them all the more appealing to a time-poor practitioner. Their prose is good humoured and has the learner at its centre. Teachers are encouraged to see learning from the perspective of the learner, and, by developing the techniques outlined in the book, provide them with the clearest support possible in how to succeed. The graphics and layout help make the ideas accessible and of practical use, especially through the summaries at the end of each section. References to works and ideas by other writers offer the opportunity for the reader to explore concepts in greater depth.
“The accessible, real-life nature of Teaching Backwards will undoubtedly encourage many practitioners to experiment with its techniques and produce better crafted and more stimulating lessons.”
Graham Aldridge, Head Teacher, Range High School
“Teaching Backwards is another superb demystification of exactly what outstanding teaching looks like. Griffith and Burns have the clearest vision of how to describe outstanding teaching that I have yet come across and the book is littered with practical tools to use in the classroom the next day. To suggest to a teacher that they ‘start with the end in mind’ is the easy bit. The book goes on to give a step by step approach of how to do it. I particularly like the use of humour and metaphor and I will be looking for more Hobnob teachers and more black belt assessors.
“Enjoyed it and still learned things. Always a great sign.”
James Kerfoot, Principal, Childwall Sports and Science Academy
“All teachers want to improve their practice and this book is essential reading. It is Practical! Practical! Practical! And packed with ideas you can immediately implement in the classroom alongside little pearls of wisdom in the form of memorable stories. Based in evidence, Teaching Backwards will make a difference to school leaders and teachers alike. A must read.”
Carel Buxton, Executive Head Teacher, Redbridge Primary School and Snaresbrook Primary School
To Joe, Anna, Gracie May and Ruby Rose
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Andy Griffith:
First and foremost, thanks to my wife Clair for all her support. Thank you to all those who have helped us to research this book, especially Carel Buxton and Caroline Creaby.
Thanks also to Wendy Brown, Michelle Carter, Frank Lawell, Janine Lockhart, Alison Martin, and Tony McGuinness for their input and advice. Thanks also to Nick Owen for his superb editing.
Mark Burns:
Thanks go to Kerry for your support and help in testing out new ideas in the classroom for me. To the many teachers and school leaders I’ve worked with – your growth mindsets and enthusiasm for learning have been so energising. To Nick for your patience, expertise, and advice. Thanks also to all those who read over the draft of the book and gave us such useful feedback. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to my parents, and all of the other teachers in my family who inspired me so much.
To Stephanie Smith, thanks for all your hard work behind the scenes.
A FOREWORD TO BACKWARDS
BY PROFESSOR JOHN HATTIE
So many lessons start with an engaging activity, move to the explanation, and then provide practice and ‘doing’. There are many variants of this ‘tell and use’ or ‘chug and plug’ form of lesson, but they are the norm. Students are expected to work along with the teacher; in time all will be revealed and knowledge will be gained. Many students are quite happy with this approach: it is predictable – just wait and the teacher will tell you what to do next. Is it not the case, after all, that students come to school to watch the teachers teach! Certainly, by the time they get to tertiary study, the die is cast – just tell me what to do, I will do it, and then you can tell me how well I did. Indeed, many students rate lessons poorly if there are unstructured problems, if there is an expectation of creativity and initiative, and if the number of words in the assignment does not appear in bold up front.
Andy Griffith and Mark Burns ask us to turn this thinking backwards – to start by revealing the destination (‘What does success in this lesson look like?’) and then work backwards to where the students are now. They ask us to have high expectations, to plan, to watch for where students might go off route and where they may misunderstand, and to provide multiple opportunities for feedback, autonomy, challenge, and engagement. Based on Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue’s Understanding by Design,1 this book provides the methods, the meat and vegetables, for the journey and lots of practical advice about how to understand success, work backwards from success to where the students are now, and then plan how to navigate (with all the usual twists and occasional wrong turns) the route to this success.
When we were developing our assessment and reporting engine for New Zealand schools, we developed a report based on target setting. We allowed the teacher to see a progression from the students’ past assessments, which used a polynomial regression to predict into the future (the tool followed students from Year 4 to 12), and then said to teachers, ‘If you keep teaching as you are, and the student keeps learning as he or she is, then this is where they are likely to end up in three, six, or twelve months’ time.’ The tool then allowed teachers to adjust the target (hopefully up) and pointed to lesson plans and assessment items for this new target. What was fascinating is what happened next. Teachers said, ‘Aha, so this is where the student is now and this where I need to go, and I can work out how to make this link.’ They then resolved this developmental progression and helped the student along this trajectory. But the students said, ‘Aha, so this is where you want me to be, and these are items and lessons that indicate what I need to do. Let me try these items and lessons now – oh, I cannot do them. Will you, teacher, help me?’ The students’ thinking was so much more successful than the teachers’ thinking.
This understanding of what success looks like highlights four factors. First, helping students to set high expectations of what they can achieve is a powerful incentive to action if they know what success looks like. Second, allowing students to see what they do not know and cannot do up front is a powerful motivator, if they also realise that there is expertise available to help them attain success. Third, teachers’ models of development may need to be adjusted as learning rarely progress smoothly along trajectories, but is up and down – there are many wrong turns and misconceptions. But as long as the participants do not lose sight of success then we may still get there. Fourth, we need to allow teachers rather than students to set the expectations, as young people often have major difficulties in calibrating success appropriately and need professional help in setting suitably challenging targets.2
Andy Griffith and Mark Burns have a detailed section on setting high expectations for teachers and students, and they show how the various dangers on the way to success can be turned into exciting opportunities for learning (e.g. the pit of exploration, teaching resilience, stuckness routines, celebrating mistakes, deliberate practice). They note the importance of pre-assessment to discover the students’ starting points. This may seem obvious, until we recall Graham Nuthall’s finding that students already know 60% of most lessons – which is rather too much scaffolding and certainly not very challenging!3
Chapter 3 (Defining and Demystifying the Destination) is the critical chapter of this book, as it highlights such factors as clarity, exemplars and models, ‘what a good one looks like’, and emphasises that it is the teacher’s responsibility to determine what does and does not constitute high quality work. The key is to get learners to wrestle with different notions of quality in different ways, both before and during the learning process. This requires the teacher to be a teaching and learning detective to help track progress, but with the goal so clear, this is much easier to get back on track than the alternative – starting everyone off on the journey without really knowing where they are going and what the destination is.
Finally, the importance of challenge. Experts differ from experienced teachers, particularly in the degree of challenge that they present to learners and, most critically, in the depth to which learners learn to process information. Without challenge, feedback becomes less important as there are then no gaps to close!
Many computer games understand how to get young people to learn. There is no secret to what the target is – often the next level. Games designers know the Goldilocks principle of challenge – not too high and not too low. These criteria of success are known to the user and they do not change (none of this, ‘Dear, dear, you are not smart enough so I will make it easier for you; you only have to get half correct before you move on’). The game knows your prior achievement (your last level or score). Then it provides inordinate amounts of deliberate practice – that is, practice with feedback, with hints and cues, and sometimes with skill tips and lessons. Young people will spend hours (as will many of us adults) engaged in these games. When we succeed in progressing to the next success criteria, the game merely raises the level of challenge – and off we go again into the learning process. This is backwards learning in action.
John Hattie
1 Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005).
2 See Graham Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2007).
3 Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners, p. 35.
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about planning and teaching outstanding lessons. Not just once in a while but consistently. We know it’s possible because some teachers manage to achieve outstanding results year after year. These teachers are successful because they do something which we call teaching backwards.
The context in which teachers work today is unbelievably demanding; in particular, they face more scrutiny than ever before. When we both started teaching in the 1990s, the only people who came into our classrooms just wanted to borrow a bit of chalk. Now it’s common for teachers to be observed on a regular basis. In principle, of course, this is no bad thing. The problem, however, is that the observers’ judgements are sometimes deeply flawed, often reflecting nothing more than their prejudice or their interpretation of the latest Ofsted framework. Rather than creating opportunities for teachers to grow and develop their skills, the extra scrutiny has, more often than not, created unwelcome pressure and it has left many teachers confused, demoralised, and dreading the next observation.
This book is our humble attempt to relieve some of that pressure. We recognise that teachers don’t have much spare time on their hands so we’ve worked hard to make this book clear, concise, and practical. It’s packed with case studies from teachers we’ve worked with, and it’s punctuated with reflective questions that invite teachers to slow down and do some thinking about how they currently teach, so that their teaching can have an even more powerful impact on learners.
We introduced the concept of teaching backwards towards the end of our previous book, Engaging Learners.1 It was an idea that we first came across in the work of American professors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.2 Over the last seven years, our own take on this concept has deepened and taken shape as we’ve worked with thousands of teachers in our Outstanding Teaching Interventions.3 As a result of these interventions, and our introduction of the teaching backwards concept to the teachers we’ve worked with, we’ve seen a remarkable transformation in the quality of teaching and learning in numerous classrooms up and down the country as teachers switch from teaching forwards to teaching backwards.
This book contains two overriding themes: first, that different learners need to be catered for in different ways and, second, that some teachers, in our experience, make far too many assumptions when planning their lessons. Let’s explain what we mean with a couple of stories.
Imagine a family Sunday lunch. But it’s not any old Sunday lunch: it’s Aunt Ethel’s ninetieth birthday. She’s the oldest member of the family and someone has the bright idea of inviting the extended family to celebrate the occasion. It’s a far-flung family with relatives living as far away as Australia, India, and the United States. Ethel must be some woman because quite a few agree to attend. The local family decide to have a British theme – after all, that’s where the family’s roots are. And what could be more British than good old roast beef?
When the great day comes everyone’s happy to see each other, but the meal is a disaster. Nephew Brian’s wife is Hindu for whom the cow is sacred; cousin Amelia’s American husband has read in a newspaper back in Idaho about mad cow disease; grandson Richard, who lives in Australia, believes his body is a temple and doesn’t eat red meat; great granddaughter Julie is just back from university and she’s become a vegan; second cousins Rob and Josh are heavily into their rugby training and are on a carbs-only day.
If only someone hadn’t made assumptions! They could have sent out an email to find out exactly what people did and didn’t eat and what their preferences were. That way they could have catered for everyone. It would have been a little more work, but what a difference it would have made to a very special occasion.
It was great granddaughter Julie who had a bright idea and suggested they all go down to the local Chinese dim sum restaurant the next day instead. As the trolleys came round everyone chose exactly what suited them and a great time was had by all.
When teachers teach forwards, the educational equivalent of this scenario can happen all too easily. Assumptions are made and the real needs of the learners, and their starting points, are not sufficiently taken into consideration. Some years ago, we were observing a music teacher working with her class in the north of England. The bell rang to signal the end of the lesson and the learners filed out. We’d just finished videoing her lesson and from her perspective it had gone well. There was a smile on her face. She thought her learners had made good progress in developing their musical skills.
One boy lagged behind as we chatted to her. ‘Please, Miss, I use violin, OK?’ ‘This is Adnan,’ she explained to us. ‘He’s recently arrived from Albania with his parents.’ Keen to nurture a love of music in one of her learners, she took a violin from the cupboard and handed it over to him.
What happened next challenged the teacher to completely revise her assessment of how well her lesson had gone. Adnan started to play. He launched into a virtuoso performance of the theme from The Godfather, with the all the panache of Joshua Bell and the cheeky passion of Nigel Kennedy. It earned a round of applause from all of us when he finished.
The teacher was stunned. ‘I had no idea he could play like that. Had I known I’d have given him a lot more challenge in the lesson.’ She paused a moment to reflect and then her eyes opened wide. ‘I wonder if any of the others have got musical skills I don’t know about?’ At least she had a good sense of humour. She chuckled and, quoting from the movie while doing a pretty good impression of Marlon Brando, said, ‘Dat lesson of mine just now; I guess you could say it’s sleeping with da fishes.’
What do these two stories illustrate? In each case, it wasn’t the lack of time, effort, or commitment to planning that caused the problems. It was simply poor planning. It was planning based on insufficient information, unchallenged assumptions, and a one-size-fits-all mindset. In both situations, the family and the music teacher were asking themselves the wrong questions. They were planning forwards. They’d have been far better off if they’d planned backwards.
This book offers teachers a multitude of ways to become more rigorous, disciplined, and investigative in their planning and delivery of outstanding teaching and learning … by teaching backwards.
1 Andy Griffith and Mark Burns, Engaging Learners (Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing, 2012).
2 Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005).
3 We’ve worked with more than 3,500 teachers (as of September 2014) in a series of Outstanding Teaching Interventions.
WHAT IS TEACHING BACKWARDS?
The most effective teachers teach backwards. At the heart of teaching backwards is a thinking process that enables teachers to plan and teach backwards from a clear and well-defined destination. This destination could be a model of a high quality piece of work that shows learners exactly what standard they are expected to have achieved by the end of a learning module or it could be a clear and compelling description of the attitudes, skills, and habits that the class are expected to be demonstrating by the end of the school year.
Teaching backwards is a journey that starts with the end very clearly in mind. It is the destination that gives the teaching backwards process its shape, direction, and structure. The journey is supported at all times by the high expectations in which the teacher holds the learners, and his or her ability to engender and encourage the same high expectations in the learners themselves. From the destination and the high expectations everything else follows.
First, the teacher needs to establish the learners’ true starting points and then to demystify and clearly explain to them how each destination will be achieved. The next step requires the teacher to plan in advance how he or she will regularly elicit proof that learning is taking place, not generally but for each student, so that the whole class can move forward together. The planning and teaching must then take account of the appropriate levels of challenge that are required to motivate learners to address and overcome the obstacles they will undoubtedly face, and develop a real and felt sense of satisfaction from achieving results they might have previously thought difficult or impossible. Finally, the teacher needs to employ strategies that give the students quality, real-time feedback that develops their Knowledge, Attitudes, Skills, and Habits (KASH), while also training them to give quality feedback to themselves and each other.
At the heart of teaching backwards is our philosophy that great teaching and learning rely on four key ingredients. We call them the Big Four: feedback, autonomy, challenge, and engagement (for more information see the Appendix).
The structure of this book follows the sequence of the teaching backwards steps and we strongly recommend that you read it in that order. Each step is crucially important in ensuring that learners achieve their full potential, topic by topic, as well as over time. Miss out a step and we guarantee that your learning journey will end in a cul-de-sac. We’ve seen many a teacher experience a ‘Hindenburg moment’ after missing out a step. They learned the hard way as they watched their lesson crash and burn – or worse, their classes underperform over time. They realised to their cost that teaching backwards isn’t a pick-and-mix approach. It’s one that needs to be embraced wholeheartedly.
ICONS USED THROUGHOUT THE BOOK
To encourage you to go beyond thinking about change and actually take action, we’ve also included a checklist and an action plan section at the end of each chapter. It’s useful to consider what you might need to stop or start doing in order to move your class up the levels. But a word of warning: we strongly advise that you don’t pack the start section with too many new ideas at the expense of considering what you are going to stop doing. Our own experience, and that of the many committed, passionate teachers we’ve worked with over the years, confirms the wisdom of this. Teaching is a hugely demanding job and often there is little spare capacity to do much more on top of the existing workload. Consequently, we would encourage you to identify just as many things that you are going to stop doing as you are planning to start doing. As we like to remind ourselves, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So, choose quality over quantity and settle for a small number of important changes you know you can deliver rather than overstretching yourself.
We’re confident that whether you’re new to the profession or a teacher with years of experience, you’ll find ideas and inspiration in this book to make your own teaching even more effective and compelling, so that you can make even more of a difference to the learners that you teach.
We hope you enjoy the journey.
SETTING HIGH EXPECTATIONS
CHAPTER 1
SETTING HIGH EXPECTATIONS
‘I know you can do this – you just don’t know it yourselves yet’
Imagine you’re walking along the corridor of a school in a socially deprived part of the UK. Outside one classroom there’s a display proudly announcing one class’s grades. The learners in this class are getting incredible academic results: 75% of them are achieving grades A and A*. Yet these same learners are only getting grades C or D with their other teachers. This is no one-off fluke – it’s happened year after year for the learners of this particular teacher. A mystery? Not at all. This teacher expects these results and expertly leads learners to believe that they can get them too. As a result, they do!
The learners have really bought into this teacher’s high expectations. They’ve not only come to believe that they can achieve these incredible results; they also believe that they deserve them. Not only do they enjoy this teacher’s lessons, they’ve also learned from her the skills of persistence, determination, and openness that support them to succeed. These skills and attitudes have enabled them to thrive. No wonder she’s feted by learners as a great teacher. By any measure (data, learner surveys, Ofsted rating) this teacher is excellent, outstanding. She’s an educational black belt! She’s living proof that the academic studies which time and again trumpet the value of high teacher and learner expectations are actually true.
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER FOR ME?
Have you ever wondered how some teachers get their learners to expect more of themselves and take greater responsibility for their own learning?
Do you sometimes dream about working with a class that believes in themselves, believes learning is worthwhile, and believes they can overcome whatever challenges lie in their way?
How might your credibility as a teacher take off if you took steps to raise your own game, setting higher standards and expectations for yourself and those around you?
Have you ever wondered how you and your colleagues could create a high expectation, high challenge culture in your school?
If you feel engaged or intrigued by the story and these questions, this chapter offers you tools, techniques, and strategies to help you to get there yourself, taking your learners with you. We explore the widely held notion that a key foundation for success in the classroom is that the teacher has high expectations of the learners and leads them to have high expectations of themselves. Of the top one hundred teachers that we’ve seen in action, it’s their high expectations that set them apart from others. Not just the expectations that they hold of themselves but, even more importantly, the high expectations that they build with and in their learners.
WHAT’S THE THINKING BEHIND THIS CHAPTER?
This chapter addresses three key questions:
1 Why are high expectations so important?
2 How can you influence your learners to hold high expectations of themselves?
3 How can you assess whether you’re a high expectations teacher yourself?
First, we’ll explore why it’s essential to create high expectations in the classroom, and we’ll flag some of the key research that supports this claim. The evidence clearly shows that there’s a very strong link between learner achievement and the high expectations they have of themselves. It also shows that teachers have a major part to play by having high expectations of their learners too. Of course, it’s great when you inherit a class where all the learners want to set themselves big goals and push themselves to achieve. But this doesn’t happen often enough. So, what should we do when the learners don’t hold high expectations of themselves? Should we simply accept the situation or should we challenge it?
Next, we’ll take you through a wide range of practical ideas and strategies which show how a culture of high expectations can be established. High expectations teachers always challenge low expectations among their learners whenever they come across them, especially around issues such as delivering high quality work and always giving your personal best. We’ll suggest that the teacher has two principal roles to play here. The first is modelling; that is, teachers must personally demonstrate the qualities and behaviours they expect from their learners by consistently living those qualities and behaviours themselves. The second is through a process that we simply call ‘training’. What we mean by this good, old-fashioned word is supporting learners, step by step, to develop the confidence and self-belief to take on tough challenges and to adopt their teacher’s high expectations of them as if they were their own.
Throughout this chapter, we’ll also ask you to reflect on your own level of expectation, both of yourself and of your learners. You might already be a teacher with high expectations, like the teacher in the story that opened this chapter, someone who makes a massive impact on their learners. If so, we’re still confident that you’ll find some new ideas here. But we’d also like to invite you to explore whether you might have lower expectations than you think you have. We hope the tools and case studies in this chapter might challenge you to ask yourself whether your expectations are really as high as they could be.
There are many reasons why teachers are motivated to level up their expectations of themselves and others. For some, it might be a realisation they had when they were learners themselves. For others, it might be watching themselves teach on a video recording or, as in the example below, a freak incident that ends up being a blessing in disguise.
WHY ARE HIGH EXPECTATIONS SO IMPORTANT?
THE MORAL IMPERATIVE
In our opinion, Professor Mick Waters is a national treasure. His passion for wanting the best for children shines through all his work. He speaks a lot of sense about what education should be like for them: ‘Education should not simply prepare children for the future, it should also give them the best present possible – a childhood on which to build the rest of their lives.’1 But let’s get real here. The promise of ‘developing potential’ in learners is often found in school prospectuses and on mission statements but, as we all know, it can often get lost in the everyday grind of helping learners to pass tests and exams. Nevertheless, the experience of school should always be one that really tries to create confident, successful learners, as well as helping them to become mature and responsible citizens. This should be every school’s core purpose.
Moreover, most children only have one crack at education and for many it will make or break their life chances. As teachers, surely we have a duty to have high expectations of ourselves and our learners, and refuse to be limited by a learner’s target grade or how they currently ‘label’ themselves. If we don’t take up this challenge, then who else will?
In their book, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching In Every School, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan support the vital importance of challenge and high expectation in achieving quality. Those who manage and run schools, they say, have a ‘charge to improve learning and achievement for all learners, develop their well-being and character, and close the gap between those from advantaged and those from disadvantaged social backgrounds’.2
Comedian Peter Kay used to do a great routine on how certain biscuits compared when dipped in a cup of tea. Hobnobs, he quipped, were like commandos who wanted to be challenged. ‘Dip me again! Dip me again!’ On the other hand, Rich Tea biscuits were wimps. ‘One dips’, he called them, going floppy as soon as they were dunked.
Let’s develop the analogy further. It’s one thing to raise your own expectations. It’s quite another to raise the expectations of others. You might inherit a class in September who are all Hobnobs: ambitious, adventurous, open, reflective, dedicated to pushing themselves. Or you could have a class of Rich Teas: ‘But Miss, I only need to get a C to get into sixth form so I don’t need to look at A grade level.’
As we argued in our book, Engaging Learners, you really only have two choices when working with any individual or group: accept them as they are or try to change them. There is no third way – they won’t change on their own. If you want to get learners to develop higher expectations, then we will explore some strategies later in this chapter. Suffice it to say, it will take time and it will challenge you as well as your learners.
Everybody needs support and encouragement to a greater or lesser degree to learn and to overcome barriers. So, can a Rich Tea become a Hobnob? Can a wimp become a commando? Can a person lacking in confidence become a confident, autonomous learner, and an inspiration to others? Well, we work in education, so we think the answer is a resounding yes! And we’ve seen it happen time and time again in classrooms and schools around the country. We see it whenever, for example, a teacher elicits stunning results from her socially disadvantaged learners by transforming their classroom from a desert of low expectations to an oasis of high expectations. In fact, teachers who can achieve results like this will do well in any environment because they have the beliefs, skills, and strategies to know how to pull and push their learners to new heights. The fact is that, in today’s highly pressured educational environments, it’s almost impossible for teachers to be judged as effective on a consistent basis – unless they hold high expectations that learners really are capable of going beyond their perceived potential.
TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS IN TERMS OF RESULTS
Academics such as John Hattie, Robert Marzano, and Dylan Wiliam, as well as respected organisations such as the Sutton Trust, all urge us to recognise that a high expectations culture makes a huge difference to achievement in schools. According to Hattie, the number one influence on how well learners do at school is their own level of expectation.3 Hattie’s study is wide ranging, spanning over 15 years and involving millions of learners from around the world. His extensive research into what makes the difference in schools has calculated the impact of thousands of educational initiatives and types of pedagogy on learner achievement. He has developed a chart of which factors are most likely to produce learner success. Top of his chart is the learners’ own expectations of how successful they will be.4
The figure below shows how different teachers respond to targets. One teacher decides to teach to the target whereas another teacher, with higher expectations of the potential of her learners, makes the decision to teach way above it. The second teacher sees the target as something to beat.
Teachers with higher expectations challenge their learners by setting more adventurous targets. They consciously and deliberately open bigger ‘gaps’ for learners than teachers with moderate or low expectations. They have an ambitious destination in mind for them and understand that a key part of their work will be to motivate their learners to accept and even get excited about this challenging destination. In Visible Learning for Teachers, Hattie writes: ‘Our role is not to enable learners to reach their potential, or to meet their needs; our role is to find out what learners can do, and make them exceed their potential and needs.’5
Teachers with high expectations don’t teach to the target, they go beyond it. For them the target isn’t a ceiling, it’s a minimum! This results in higher grades and more progress for their learners.
TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS IN TERMS OF WHAT REALLY MATTERS
Our firmly held belief is that examination grades and test scores are not the be-all and end-all of education. We all know people who didn’t do well at school but who have gone on to be really successful in life, and others who passed lots of exams but don’t seem that successful. In his book, Why Do I Need A Teacher When I’ve Got Google?, Ian Gilbert refers to this as ‘The Great Educational Lie’: the fallacy that there’s a direct causal link between exam success and career or life success.6
Of course, it’s important to set high expectations around grades, but if teachers are to support learners to achieve high grades then something really important has to happen first. Outstanding teachers who consistently achieve great results put effort and energy into developing their learners’ KASH, which means developing their well-being, their character, their sense of personal worth, and their ability to work together. It is high quality KASH that supports and enables excellent results.
When we run training courses in schools, our focus is not only on how to develop individual teachers working in their classrooms but also how the whole school can work better together to create an educational experience for every learner, so they’ll have the chance to lead more successful lives. To achieve this, we believe that teachers have to work with the whole child, which means developing key aspects of their emotional intelligence (EQ) as well as their intellectual intelligence (IQ). EQ has nothing to do with subjects or topics of learning. It’s about being aware of and fostering the traits and dispositions that develop healthy, mature, and well-balanced individuals. These traits and dispositions include self-awareness, self-control, empathy, social skills, and personal responsibility. When teachers create the conditions for these traits to develop in their learners, they also create the conditions in which learning can flourish so that high expectations can be achieved.
