This is the second 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.

In the previous post, I talked about what I think matters when teaching remotely, and how this might relate to what happens when we get back to school.  We looked at ‘the What’ of teacher education during lockdown, and I argued for four interlinked principles that should be the focus of lockdown CPD.   The second question relates to ‘the How’ of CPD:  how can we train our teachers on these principles in an effective way?

Theory of Learning

We have a real opportunity to work with our teachers on improving their knowledge and understanding of the theory of learning during lockdown.  Conversely, there is a risk that overly focusing on theory improves what our teachers know while not having much impact on what they do.  Here’s how I try to bridge this gap.

Let’s say I want to work with teachers on the importance of including regular pause points in their lessons, moments where the teacher pauses exposition and asks the students to think and do something (Doug Lemov writes about pause points here).  I could explain to teachers that attention is the gatekeeper of learning, and present research on attention spans.  The likelihood is that this would be slow to manifest a change in what teachers did in their lesson design and delivery.  Teachers might leave the session with a confident understanding of what a pause point is, and why you should use them, without a clear idea of practically how to make this work. 

To remedy this, I’ve been trying to deliver my sessions using explicit modelling. This is where the session leader models a technique in action while also teaching participants about the theory behind the technique.  In other words, teaching the theory of regular pause points to manage attention, while using lots of pause points to manage the attention of the teachers that participate in the session.  This should help teachers to “live the learning” and feel what it’s like to be a student, hopefully providing helpful mental models that the teachers can then apply to their own teaching. 

It’s really important to set this up in their right way for teachers; you need to a) explicitly point out what you are modelling,  b) why you are modelling it, c) what you hope teachers to take from this and d) what role you want teachers to adopt throughout.  For example:

In this session, I’m going to be modelling the use of pause points in a lesson, as well explaining some of what the evidence shows us about managing student attention.  Throughout this, I’ll be treating you as if you were students, in my lesson.  I’m hoping that you will see how you could use pause points in a really practical way as a result of this.”

Coaching, Feedback and Practice

The other vital step in helping teachers to embed the important principles of remote teaching in their practice is coaching, feedback and practice.  Often, teachers will completely ‘get’ the principle, have done the reading but still be falling back on old habits when they teach. Coaching is the vital link in overcoming this. 

Harry has written on instructional coaching as an excellent method to improve teacher quality, and there is an increasingly large body of evidence that this a highly effective method of improving teacher quality, brought together in Kraft et al.’s meta-analysis (2018).

Oddly, teaching remotely can make coaching quite a lot simpler.  Whether you are teaching live lessons or recorded videos, the coaching observation is simply a matter of signposting the coach to the location of the lesson recording or video stream.    When they are watching the lesson, I’ve written a series of remote teaching action steps that help coaches to set effective feedback.  These are based on ‘the What’ of remote teaching, and can be found here. 

Getting teachers to practise remotely is slightly more of a challenge, but I’ve tried to overcome this through including clear practise tasks and success criteria along with my action steps.  Here’s an example:

Action step: Position the students as effort-makers with a call to action.  Ensure that students are prepared to work and think hard: “We are just about to work and think hard, so be ready.  Let’s get going!”

Practise tasks:

  1. Pre-practise 1: Decide on a class to focus on, and script a call to action appropriate to the group.
  2. Pre-practise 2: Read through the script and discuss how to improve it, using the success criteria.
  3. Deliberate practise: Rehearse the script, using the success criteria to improve delivery.

Success criteria:

Scripting:

  • Signal importance: “These exams are the key to your futures.”
  • Set challenge: “This lesson is going to be tough.”
  • Signal belief: “But I know that we are going to smash it.”
  • Call to action: “Let’s do this.”

Delivery:

  • Authentic tone.
  • Positive tone of voice.
  • Smoothness and clarity.
  • Bright, open facial expression.

Using the practise tasks and success criteria, it’s reasonably simple to help a teacher practise their lesson planning and delivery.

Conclusion

Let’s look back to the question I posed at the start of the first post:

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

I’ve argued that we should continue to train teachers during lockdown, but that we should carefully select elements of practise that a) improve their ability to deliver remote lessons while b) making them better teachers when they get back into the classroom (the ‘What’).

Finally, I shared the methods through which I believe we can ensure that this training is impactful (the ‘How’).

The idea behind all this is that  – just like Kipchoge – teachers might emerge from the extraordinary challenges of lockdown teaching being better than they were before.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

Kraft, M., Blazar, D., Hogan, D. (2018). The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), pp.547-588.Wiliam, D. (2007).