How to be Outstanding in the Classroom

Raising achievement, securing progress and making learning happen

Mike Gershon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317558408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every teacher wants to be outstanding. But what does outstanding mean? And how do we stay outstanding if the goalposts move?

In this book, bestselling author Mike Gershon presents you with everything you need to know to make outstanding learning happen in your classroom. It breaks down the nature of outstanding teaching so as to expose the underlying principles which hold true across the curriculum. Featuring advice on all the different elements that contribute to outstanding teaching and learning including assessment, differentiation, literacy, leadership and ensuring progress, it covers:

• Cultivating the habits of outstanding learning
• The role assessment plays in planning learning, securing progress and helping students to achieve great outcomes.
• Leadership and your role as a leader
• The communication that takes place in the classroom

Firmly rooted in the day-to-day experiences of being in the classroom, the book clearly explains the why, the how and what to do if things go wrong! Packed full of clear, easy-to-implement strategies and ideas, it is the text you can call upon time and again in order to cultivate and sustain the habits, actions and thoughts of outstanding teaching.

1

Introduction Getting to grips with outstanding

Welcome to How to be Outstanding in the Classroom. It’s great to have you with us.

This book is all about what it means to be an outstanding teacher, how we go about making outstanding learning happen, and what we need to do to facilitate outstanding progress for our students.

The aim is to present a set of principles – translated into practical habits – which transcend current frameworks of inspection. In so doing, they remain relevant over time.

These are the aspects of outstanding teaching which do not come and go as fashions change. They are the underlying principles which inform and structure outstanding teaching. They are the ways of thinking and acting – the pedagogical skills – that animate great teachers.

We are interested here in unlocking the path to success for every teacher, no matter who they are or what subject they are teaching.

Our aim is not to parrot what current inspection frameworks say. This would be no good because those frameworks are open to change. Instead, we will draw out the principles which underpin the frameworks – and which have underpinned frameworks of the past as well.

In short, we will provide a clear guide as to what you need to do as a teacher in order to be outstanding, to teach outstanding lessons and to make outstanding learning happen. This will be relevant to you today and well into the future.

The book as a whole retains a practical focus. This is important because teaching is, at root, a practical art. While we will make reference to theory and research, we will be sure to couch everything in practical terms.

Doing this means you will have the tools and understanding you need to make the ideas in this book a reality.

The book is a practical manual on which you can call time and again in order to cultivate and sustain the habits, actions and thoughts of outstanding teaching.

It’s going to be a good journey.

Outline of the book

Before we move on and start looking at what outstanding actually means, let us attend briefly to the contents of the book.

The remainder of this chapter will reconceptualise outstanding in the context of the classroom, drawing out the principles of outstanding teaching and connecting these to learning.

Chapter 2 will look at the habits of outstanding teaching. It will present seven of these, working through each one in turn and identifying why they constitute such an important part of what you do in the classroom. Each habit will be further explained in its own, individual chapter.

Chapter 3 will spin the focus around and ask, ‘What is outstanding learning?’ In this chapter we will look at the five habits of outstanding learning. Those things we want all our pupils to be doing, day-in and day-out. We will illustrate the vital link between outstanding teaching and outstanding learning. We need both if we want to be really successful and if we want to secure the very best outcomes for our students.

Chapter 4 takes on the first habit of outstanding teaching by looking at assessment. Here we will consider assessment in the round, thinking about the role assessment plays in planning learning, securing progress and helping students to achieve great outcomes.

Chapter 5 moves on to look at planning in more detail. It takes its lead from the things we look at in Chapter 4 and expands on these in order to present a detailed sense of what outstanding planning looks like. Needless to say, and like every chapter, there will be plenty of practical advice and guidance throughout.

Chapter 6 is all about differentiation: the things you can do to personalise learning in your classroom. The premise here is simple. If you can tailor learning so that it closely matches the needs of your students, good things will ensue. In the chapter we will consider personalisation in terms of assessment, planning, in-lesson and, also, how to help students personalise learning for themselves.

Chapter 7 turns the focus away from the pupils and on to you, the teacher. Here we examine an often over-looked habit; namely, the development of expertise. Expertise is an extremely important factor in the genesis and maintenance of outstanding teaching. And we don’t just mean subject knowledge expertise. We will also look at pedagogy, psychology and your knowledge about the students you teach.

Chapter 8 considers leadership and your role as a leader in your own classroom. Here we will examine the nature of leadership, illustrating the importance of the teacher being a leader of their students and of the learning. We will connect together the concepts of leadership and teaching, demonstrating how success in the former is very often linked to familiarity with the latter. We will make connections between leadership in the classroom and the points discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

In Chapter 9 we turn our attention to literacy, demonstrating how it underpins every subject on the curriculum and, therefore, all outstanding teaching. By breaking literacy down into its component parts – speaking, listening, reading and writing – we will reconceptualise the term, making it easier to use and apply. Following on from this, we will look at what it means to be an outstanding literacy teacher, regardless of whether you teach English or not. This will be supplemented by a section focusing on the connection between literacy and progress.

Our penultimate chapter provides a space in which we can explore the communication which takes place in the classroom, both teacher–student and student–student. We will examine the two most important aspects of this communication: explaining and questioning. Regarding the former, we will look at the importance of providing students with ways of accessing and assimilating new content. In terms of the latter, we will focus on the way in which effective questioning (by teachers and students) is central to securing significant progress across the board.

Our final chapter will be a conclusion, drawing together the themes of the book. Here we will pose the question: Who do you want to be? This will help you to reflect on what outstanding teaching means to you. It will also encourage you to positively visualise the teacher – the outstanding teacher – you want to be.

So there we have it! Outstanding teaching broken down and explained in a series of easy-to-follow, practical steps. It may be that you want to skip ahead to individual chapters which spark your interest. Please feel free.

Personally, I would suggest reading this introduction first, followed by Chapters 2 and 3. This will provide you with a clear sense of what we are trying to achieve in the book. You can then read Chapters 4 to 10 in whatever order you wish. While they are sequenced logically, they are also self-contained in the sense that they each focus on a different habit of outstanding teaching.

With all that said, let us begin.

What is outstanding?

The word ‘outstanding’ has come to be associated with great teaching due to the Ofsted school inspection grading system used to classify the quality of schools in the United Kingdom.

At the time of writing, this grading system has four categories. The top two of these are ‘Good’ and ‘Outstanding’. These grades are assigned to different aspects of a school such as quality of teaching and the achievement of pupils. The school is then given an overall grade linked to the individual grades it receives.

Traditionally, lesson observations conducted internally to a school – those done for performance management – have used the Ofsted grading categories in order to reach judgements about the quality of a lesson. As such, individual lessons come to be judged as ‘Good’, ‘Outstanding’ and so on. This often leads to situations where a teacher is assigned the epithet their lesson has received. Thus we hear of ‘good teachers’ and ‘outstanding teachers’.

We can see that the word ‘outstanding’, while having a common meaning in the English language, also has a specific meaning within the professional context of teaching. This meaning is informed by the nature of Ofsted school inspections, the past history of the inspection system and the attendant political and professional discussions which surround them.

In the first sense then, outstanding is whatever Ofsted say it is. This might be said explicitly or it might be inferred through their identification of outstanding practice.

However, this is not hugely helpful to us.

Two specific problems throw themselves up:

– What if the Ofsted framework changes?

– Isn’t there a more solid foundation for defining outstanding in the context of teaching and learning?

Fortunately, there is. And this is what we will delineate in this book.

This more solid foundation is actually predicated on the principles which underpin inspections and which guide schools and system leaders across the country in trying to secure the very best educational experiences for the millions of children who move through primary and secondary schools year after year.

In one sense, outstanding teaching is teaching which stands out. This point plays on the common definition of the word; the one with which we are all familiar and which informs our use of ‘outstanding’ when we are communicating on a day-to-day basis.

But it is important to note that to stand out does not, by necessity, imply exclusivity. In one reading it might do – the situation in which we have a stand-out candidate, for example, whose qualities are such that they prevent anybody else from securing the job.

In the context of teaching outstanding lessons and facilitating outstanding learning, exclusivity does not have any part to play. Clearly, if it did, things would be in a parlous state. Imagine the situation if judgements of outstanding were apportioned based on a system of percentages, or if they were assigned from a box containing only a limited number of top-level judgements.

Such an approach would in fact militate against outstanding teaching and learning. This is because it would send out the message that the one thing everybody wants to achieve is in fact only accessible by a pre-defined minority.

Outstanding teaching and learning can be achieved in any classroom, by any teacher, at any time and in any place. It can be found in isolated pockets within a school or it can sweep across an entire institution. There is no limit – none whatsoever – to the extent of outstanding teaching and learning.

This is because, as we will set out to show below, outstanding teaching and learning is based on underlying principles which can be understood, internalised and followed by any teacher.

The only things you need are this book, targeted effort and a belief that you can change and grow.

If you are in possession of all three – and these are three things which everybody can possess – then you are half-way towards achieving your goal of being outstanding. And, by extension, giving your pupils the very best chance possible of achieving great things.

Before we move on to describe and define these principles to which we have been referring, let me make one final point.

Superb education has existed for centuries, even thousands of years. For much of that time it has been found in tiny sections of society and has benefited exceptionally small numbers of people. The challenge today – indeed the challenge that has been with us since the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent changes to society this brought about – is to secure and embed the highest possible standards of education throughout a national system.

In short, we are seeking to give everybody who attends a school the very best education possible.

Seeing as how education, at root, is formed from the interactions which take place between teacher and student – or the interactions the teacher facilitates between different students – it seems safe to say that teaching and learning is, and always will be, at the core of what we are trying to achieve.

This fact is a central theme of the book.

Ultimately, and as you no doubt well appreciate, it is teaching and the facilitation of learning which brings results. Other measures – administration, reform of the curriculum, changes to school structures – may have some impact but, beyond all this, there is always to be found, at the heart of it all, the interplay between student and teacher.

This truth is perhaps not fashionable. Nor does it fit necessarily with the aims and intentions of politicians and leaders (though, at times it does). Yet it is one we all know instinctively through our own experiences. And it is one which history teaches us from the time of the Ancient Greeks onwards...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: getting to grips with outstanding
• 2 Cultivating the habits of outstanding teaching
• 3 Cultivating the habits of outstanding learning
• 4 Assessment in the round
• 5 Planning for progress
• 6 Personalising the journey
• 7 Understanding your own expertise
• 8 Leading your students
• 9 Unpicking literacy
• 10 Explaining ideas and questioning views
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index