TheParagon-Education

Improving teaching and making the whole of the learning process more effective is the key to raising standards. There are at least three initiatives that are keeping good teaching at the top of the school improvement agenda. Every Child Matters is at the heart of almost everything that is happening in schools and at its centre it clearly and emphatically emphasises the importance of meeting the needs of all children. Secondly, ‘personalised learning’ - which is a new-ish term for making sure that the learning needs of all children are catered for. Finally, is the importance of successful performance management which is being modified slightly during this year. When performance management is done properly it is about understanding what successful teaching is, observing it in the classroom and improving as many skills and techniques as possible.

Making sure teaching is being improved
Your school improvement partner (SIP) will be helping you to raise standards and one of their aide memoires is Strategies for Improving Schools: A Handbook for School Improvement Partners, which can be downloaded from www.standards.dfes.gov.uk. It suggests that you have to: ‘ensure there is an unvarying focus on improving teaching and learning’.

You will also be completing your self-evaluation form (SEF). To do this properly you will have to monitor classroom performance so that you know how good the teaching is and what improvements need to be made. Section 5a (Quality of Provision) asks, ‘How good is the quality of teaching and learning’ and suggests that you consider:

how well teaching meets the needs of the full range of learners and course requirements the suitability and rigour of assessment in planning, learning and monitoring learners’ progress the diagnosis of and provision for individual learning needs the involvement of parents and carers in their children’s learning and development.

So, if you want to find out those areas of teaching you might need to improve you don’t have to look much further than the SEF. But this is too simple and it will not be very helpful if all you do on training days and at staff meetings is attempt to improve teaching by just repeating the questions from the SEF. We need to be much more specific. From Teaching Expertise (Link)

Roger Smith considers tried and tested ways of improving teaching and learning and a few new ones

So what needs to be improved?
Of course, for teachers to be able to personalise the learning of mixed-ability groups and provide work and activities that are challenging for every ability level is easier if they are able to:

- use any assessments of pupils abilities and attainments as a starting point for teaching
- provide activities of sufficient variety and depth to allow for different levels of learning to take place
- differentiate by trying to use various starting points and tasks for different ability levels
- anticipate and expect different outcomes
- acknowledge that all pupils will need varying lengths of time to complete activities
- understand that each pupil will grasp new ideas within varying timescales
- group pupils in different ways for different tasks
- use a manageable number of differentiated teaching groups. No more than four is a manageable
number
- carefully plan realistic deadlines so that all pupils have a sense of achievement
- continuously assess teaching groups and give feedback about their learning and their successes
- use assessments to set individual, group and class targets
- use marking creatively to inform pupils about their standard of achievement.

By developing these specific suggestions it is easier to recognise those areas of teaching that need to be of the highest quality. Once this has happened it is possible to monitor their effectiveness and to begin to make improvements.

A Whole-School Approach
If you are going to improve teaching the changes you make have to affect what happens in the classroom. The bullet points in the last paragraph are directly related to this. But the wider ethos or culture of your school, which is usually an amalgamation of social, moral and academic values, will influence and determine how pupils and teachers work together. The right ethos will mean that what is taught, how it is taught, what needs to be taught and what needs to improve is agreed by everyone. Inversely, an inappropriate or badly thought out ethos will mean that even teaching that is well prepared and well structured will be more difficult to implement because there are no common boundaries. Because each of our schools has its own feelings and vibrations that make it unique it is important to find as many indicators of a ‘positive’ ethos as possible. These do not have to be complex educational issues. They can be short and simple ideas such as:
- pupils are happy
- pupils are treated fairly
- bullying is a rare occurrence
- there is a lively, creative atmosphere
- teachers motivate pupils.

Many of these factors will be relatively obvious, but part of the success of your school will be built on whether such a list actually suggests areas that might need to be improved and acted on by all teachers as whole-school issues.

But what happens in the classroom?
What about the actual teaching and the repertoire of skills that you will have to focus on? They will have to involve a range of whole class, group and individual teaching as well as involving the wide use of ICT. But your strategies will also help transmit knowledge and help key learning skills as well as accommodating children with different paces of learning. You might be saying at this stage, ‘I do that already and most good teachers have been doing it for years.’ A young teacher colleague suggested to me recently ‘My training and what I try to do in the classroom has always revolved round a mixture of teaching styles that cater for all levels of ability.’ In fact, what happens in the classroom will be the key to the discussions that will take place during performance management review meetings. Both the teacher and their reviewer should be asking themselves - What is good about my teaching and what needs improving? By recognising what needs to get better it will be possible to work out strategies to actually make the necessary improvements. In fact, if you don’t know what needs improving - how can you make any positive changes?