This is the first of two guest posts by Josh Goodrich. Josh is responsible for teacher development at Oasis Academy Southbank, and is the creator of Powerful Action Steps, which helps teachers and mentors prioritise what to improve and practice how to improve it.

Dylan Wiliam argues that when we think about CPD and teacher development, we need think about ‘The What’ and ‘The How’ (2007).  In other words, we need to pick the most impactful things to train teachers on (the ‘What’) and then think carefully about the most effective methods for ensuring that they make progress in these areas (the ‘How’).

This framing is important when we consider how to continue to develop our staff when schools are in lockdown.  In particular, it helps us to answer an important question about CPD during lockdown:

Why should I care about training teachers in elements of pedagogy that are soon to be redundant?

This is an important question, but while answering it should strongly influence how to decide on ‘the What’ and ‘the How’, it shouldn’t result in teacher educators deciding not to train teachers during lockdown.  In this post, I’ll look at answering this question in respect to ‘the What.’  The next post will look at ‘the How’.

1.1 Rationale

Remote teaching is still teaching; teachers who are teaching online are definitely not engaged in an entirely different occupation.  But, it’s teaching where some of the key elements of effective practice are hugely amplified while others are turned down, or even completely muted.  To teach effectively online, we need to focus all our attention on lesson design and pedagogy that targets the principles which are amplified.    The urgent need to train our staff to deal with disruptive behaviour in lessons is (at least to a certain extent) muted, while the need to ensure that our staff design lessons to carefully manage student attention and thought is amplified. 

I’ve been explaining CPD to the teachers in my school through using the analogy of Eliud Kipchoge.  Kipchoge is a Kenyan marathon runner, the first man to run a sub-two hour marathon, and a bit of a hero of mine.  One of the reasons that Kenya is such a dominant country at long-distance running is that Kipchoge and runners like him train at altitude; they spend so much time running in the oxygen-rare environments of their home towns that that when they get down to sea-level and run a marathon, their bodies are so much more well adapted to run efficiently. 

I think that effective remote teaching works in a similar way.  It’s just so hard to get students learning effectively online – the barriers are to this are so much more substantial – that if teachers learn to overcome these while teaching “at altitude”, then when they get back to their classrooms “at sea level”, their teaching is going to be improved.

At my school, we’ve discovered that some of our students are accessing lessons on their phones, without a desk or quiet space to work, with so many extraneous demands on their attention (Fortnite, squabbling younger siblings etc.,).  If a teacher can plan and deliver a lesson that is so clear and well-structured that these students can learn, this can only have a beneficial impact on teaching when they finally get back to school!

1.2 So, what matters?

In the eight weeks or so that I’ve been teaching remotely, it’s become clear that the following interlinked principles of effective teaching are amplified:

  1. Design lessons that carefully capture and orient student attention, because our powers to manage this remotely are so limited, and because students have so many potential extra demands on their focus.
  2. Design and deliver lessons that motivate students and help them to achieve success, because at home, students lack the normal cues and crutches that support them to navigate our lessons and complete the tasks we set successfully. 
  3. Design lessons that carefully control and manage thinking, because we need students to be successful in having the thoughts we want them to, and because there will be lots of other potential unhelpful things students could think about instead.
  4. Bake systems and processes into our lesson design that hold students accountable for thinking and completing work, because our ‘normal’ methods of holding students accountable won’t always be open to us.

It’s clear that if we help our teachers to develop in these crucial areas, not only will they be better able to deliver effective remote lessons, but when they get back to the classroom, where things are so much easier, their teaching will be supercharged.

I’ve been working to transform these four principles into a series of action steps and practise tasks that teachers can use to develop and improve.  These can be found here.

In Josh’s second post, he discusses how we can do this development.