How can we improve our teaching, and students’ learning?
Improve formative assessment: Hinge questions, closing the gap marking, lollipop stick questioning, increasing wait time, exit tickets
Improve professional development: Leverage observations/instructional coaching, practice-based teacher education, getting school-based professional development right, examining why good professional development still fails, careful design and facilitation
Use checklists: They’re transformational, cut workload and reduce stress and help students attain excellence and autonomy (and they actually promote professionalism and creativity).
See, for example, a checklist for a first lesson with a new class.
Improve policy: Preserving teacher wellbeing, changing inspections, smarter assessment, steering clear of British values
Improve history teaching: Mastery learning, knowledge-focused unit planning, collecting and addressing misconceptions, designing better trips, helping students write better essays
Seek clarity: Distinguishing between two competing definitions of learning, working out who’s responsible for student success, prioritising (and saying ‘No’), preventing cheating and taking weekends off.
And… Using social-psychological interventions, learning from psychology, recognising that teaching is akin to gambling, avoiding what Sweden has done and sharing the point of education with students.