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Ofsted

Practical differentiation: high expectations and the art of making mistakes

2014-02-03T20:18:38+00:00February 1st, 2014|Featured, learning|

Differentiation? I hate the word as I hate Hell, all ludicrous bureaucracy, and thee! Er... Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Differentiation is one of the darkest arts in teaching. The generally accepted position is that differentiation is wholly good, and this is the cause of the wracking guilt felt by harrowed teachers: it may well be good, but it's bloody hard work. My bottom line is this: any policy predicated on the idea that teachers should work harder is doomed to failure. Thankfully, teaching's enforcement arm seem, at long last, to agree: "It is unrealistic ... for inspectors to necessarily expect that [...]

The Cult of Outstanding™: the problem with 'outstanding' lessons

2014-01-16T13:26:35+00:00January 16th, 2014|learning, myths|

First of all I need to come clean. Up until pretty recently I was a fully paid up member of the Cult of Outstanding™. Last January I considered myself to be a teacher at the height of my powers. In the spirit of self-congratulation I posted a blog entitled Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson in which I detailed a lesson which I confidently supposed was the apotheosis of great teaching, and stood back to receive plaudits. And indeed they were forthcoming. I was roundly congratulated and felt myself extraordinarily clever. And then Cristina Milos got in touch to tell me that there was no [...]

Don't trust your gut: a little bit more on the problem with grading lessons

2014-01-13T11:34:37+00:00January 13th, 2014|learning|

This evening, there will be debate on the role lesson observation in England's schools with such educational luminaries as Professor Robert Coe, David Weston (the man behind the Teacher Development Trust), Lead Ofsted inspector Mary Myatt, Sam Freedman (Director of Teach First and ex-special advisor to Gove),, Dame Alison Peacock (Headteacher of The Wroxham School) and, er... me. Quite what qualifies me to participate beyond having a big gob and a stubborn streak a mile wide I'm not sure. However, I'm pretty damn excited to have been asked and, despite suffering with an appallingly debilitating cold, am sure it will be an excellent event. [...]

Get ahead of the curve: stop grading lessons

2014-06-04T20:39:29+01:00December 11th, 2013|blogging|

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead Over the past few years I’ve been articulating my objections to Ofsted in general and classroom observation specifically. Being a simple soul I was under the impression that whilst these observations may have struck a chord with some teachers, the rest of the world continued rotating in blithe indifference. Other education bloggers seem to be regularly name checked by Michael Gove or invited to meeting at the DfE, but not me. Altogether now… So imagine my [...]

What 3 things would you do to help a teacher improve?

2013-12-04T22:54:12+00:00December 3rd, 2013|training|

If there was no OfSTED, no league tables, no SLT... just you and your class. What would you choose to do to make it GREAT? Do that anyway... Tom Sherrington Every teacher needs to improve. Not because they're not good enough but because they can be even better. Dylan Wiliam It's been said before but, I think, bears repeating: Ofsted have a lot to answer for. No one wants failing schools going unchecked but the medicine is often worse than the cure. I spent the morning at a lovely primary school who have just been 'done'. And they really do feel [...]

Has lesson observation become the new Brain Gym?

2013-11-17T11:30:15+00:00November 16th, 2013|training|

I've thought a lot about lesson observation over the past couple of years and have come to the conclusion that it is broken. What is most worrying is that it is almost universally accepted as the best way to bother hold teachers accountable and to drive improvements in the quality of teaching and learning in a school. My contention is that these beliefs are, at least in the way the observations are currently enacted, wrong. Lesson observation distorts teaching, makes teachers focus on performance instead of learning and creates a system which is more interested in short term fluff than real [...]

The shocking mediation of Ofsted criteria by 'rogue' inspectors

2013-11-10T17:06:41+00:00November 10th, 2013|training|

There's a lot said and written about what Ofsted do and don't want to see in lessons, and it turns out a lot of it is nonsense. Fortunately though we have Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, saying all kinds of sensible things: 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. We should be wary of too much prescription. [...]

Anything goes: Is there a right way to teach?

2013-10-20T10:43:56+01:00October 20th, 2013|learning|

There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet I read Joe Kirby's recent post on cognitive bias with interest because I've been pursuing a very similar line of enquiry. What if we're fooling ourselves? The wonderfully entertaining You Are Not So Smart by David Mcraney deals with many different varieties of self-delusion and makes excellent reading. But even armed with all this information, self-delusion is very hard to spot. One thing that's become clear to me is that I should be suspicious of my intuition. That said, I do try to open to criticism and new information [...]

Great teaching happens in cycles – the teaching sequence for developing independence

2016-09-25T13:35:23+01:00June 24th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Last year I wrote a post called The Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson, which has become by far my most viewed post with almost 10,000 page views. Clearly teachers are hungry for this kind of thing. But it’s become increasingly obvious to me over the past few months that many of my notions about what might constitute an outstanding lesson have been turned on their head. It’s not so much that I was wrong, more that my understanding was incomplete. If we accept, as I’m sure we do, that as teachers we want to accomplish different things at different points in our schemes [...]

Independence vs independent learning

2013-09-28T20:12:33+01:00June 20th, 2013|literacy, myths, Teaching sequence|

Last weekend #SLTchat was on fostering students' independence. As you'd expect, there were lots of great suggestions shared, as well as some not so great ideas. One comment I tweeted in response to the idea that to promote independence we should get students learning independently got quite a lot of feedback: This seemed to really divide opinion; some people got upset with me, and some others agreed enthusiastically. Having read Daisy Chistodoulou's fabulously well-researched, cogently argued and clearly expressed eBook Seven Myths About Education, my thoughts on teacher talk and independent learning have started to coalesce. On Tuesday this week I [...]

So, what does 'gifted' mean anyway?

2013-06-14T21:27:59+01:00June 14th, 2013|Featured, myths|

As you may be aware, non-selective secondary schools are failing the 'most able'. How do we know? Because a brand new Ofsted report tells us so. The report's key findings include such revelations as the fact that "expectations of what the most able students should achieve are too low" and  that not enough has been done "to create a culture of scholastic excellence" which leads, unsurprisingly, to, "Many students become used to performing at a lower level than they are capable of." The problem is attributed to ineffective transition arrangements, poor Key Stage 3 curricula and early entry to GCSE exams. [...]

Deliberately difficult – why it's better to make learning harder

2013-06-10T20:24:17+01:00June 10th, 2013|Featured, learning, myths|

The most fundamental goals of education are long-term goals. As teachers and educators, we want targeted knowledge and skills to be acquired in a way that makes them durable and flexible. More specifically, we want a student’s educational experience to produce a mental representation of the knowledge or skill in question that fosters long-term access to that knowledge and the ability to generalize—that is, to draw on that knowledge in situations that may differ on some dimensions from the exact educational context in which that knowledge was acquired. Robert A Bjork, 2002 Who could argue with this? Certainly not Ofsted who [...]

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