What Makes a Good Primary School Teacher?

Expert classroom strategies

Caroline Gipps, Eleanore Hargreaves, Bet McCallum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317301899
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

We know that successful teachers need to use a range of teaching strategies, but what are they?

Bringing together fascinating, first-hand accounts of teaching, assessment and feedback strategies used by 'expert' teachers, this Routledge Classic Edition is an indispensable guide for teachers and trainee teachers looking to extend their skills and improve their practice.

With a brand new foreword from Margaret Brown to contextualise the book within the field today, this accessible and concise text illustrates good teaching practice, offering a range of rich case studies and first-hand narratives. Chapters investigate a number of key areas, including the most common lesson patterns and when to use them, how teaching strategies are varied according to subject, and how assessment and feedback can encourage pupils to learn.

Based on extensive fieldwork by highly respected researchers and authors, What Makes a Good Primary School Teacher? is essential reading for trainee and practising teachers, and will be particularly useful for those seeking fresh inspiration for successful approaches to assessment.

Chapter 1

Setting the scene

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-eight seven-year-olds were sitting at the feet of their teacher, looking up expectantly. She had a tray of objects on her lap and was picking them up one at a time and examining them carefully without a word – a Victorian doll, a Brownie camera, a green glass bottle stopper, a locket, a watch, a fossil.

She posed a question … ‘What is history?’. A voice from the floor suggested ‘in the past’. ‘How long ago is in the past?’ asked the teacher. Answers ranged from ‘The Romans’ to ‘when my granny lived’ to ‘a minute ago’. All the contributions were accepted and the teacher used them to explain that people’s memories can be used to find out about the past and objects can be carefully examined because they contain clues about the past. Picking up the Brownie, she pointed it at individuals, looking through the viewfinder and making them smile. She modelled how to examine an object, giving a running commentary on her conclusions about the characteristics of the Brownie, the materials it was made of, whether there was a date anywhere and how it was different from the class’s new Olympus camera.

‘The other day I was digging in my garden and I found something interesting …’ reported the teacher. She paused just long enough to sustain attention … and then from her pocket produced a shard of patterned blue and white pottery.

‘So I thought to myself – What had it come from? Who had it belonged to? I was very interested in this. So what did I do? I looked in a book and I found some examples with very similar designs. They were made by a man called Josiah Wedgwood…’

Before long the children set to work. In pairs they chose an object, described it in writing, drawing or diagram, looked for clues as to whether it was just ‘old’ or ‘very old’, and guessed at its use. There were plenty of objects to go round and many of them were of great interest to the children – some of whom collected magnifiers from a resource cupboard to help them in their investigations.

During this part of the lesson, the teacher circulated, listening in to the conversation of pairs and joining in, often repeating some of her earlier questions – ‘Well what is that made of do you think?’ – ‘Who do you think may have owned it?’

The teacher paced the lesson so that there was time at the end for the class to come together. She invited some children to make a presentation on their theories: everyone listened and commented, and the teacher gave praise to all concerned.

This is a real example of an experienced primary teacher giving a ‘lesson’. In this, although it may not seem so to an outsider, she starts off with ‘teaching’, while during the middle of the lesson she is making assessments, giving feedback to individuals or groups. In the plenary at the end she is recapping, making connections, encouraging the children to explain and present, again making assessments and feeding back to the class as a whole.

Take another example.

At the other end of the school, 30 Y6 children came filing back into the classroom after break. They quickly settled into their groups of four. They were not arranged by ability but the teacher often moved particular children to work in certain groups – especially children who were good at explaining things to others. This did not happen today as it was to be a whole class lesson with everyone facing the board. Their science books were already stacked in the middle of the table and they quickly found their own and looked towards the teacher.

From the start the teacher explained that this would be a short, 30-minute lesson. She wanted to teach them something they would all need to know and use: that science often involves recording information on a chart and that she would show them one type of chart they could use over and over again.

The teacher instructed the children to look in their books and find reports they had done previously on ‘properties of materials’; they were to refer to this as the lesson proceeded. The teacher invited contributions to help recap the work on materials – ‘What kinds of things were we considering in that lesson?’ – and the children explained that they had taken an object and had been considering how well the materials it was made of fitted its purpose. The teacher received all answers as valid and praised them. As part of the recap, the teacher sometimes used ‘nonsense’ scenarios to draw out children’s understanding of appropriateness of materials – ‘Why is a skipping rope not made of wood?’. Children were encouraged to theorise and talk freely and there was a lot of humour in the lesson.

Ten minutes into the lesson, the teacher repeated the purpose of the session: ‘to draw up a clear chart in order to use it to make comparisons of different materials’.

The teacher demonstrated the idea of a chart or grid by drawing an empty grid on the board. She asked one individual to imagine a saucepan and asked what it might mostly be made of. Taking the child’s answer (‘metal’) she invited contributions from the class – ‘What can we say about metal?’. All answers were then accepted: ‘hard’; ‘inflammable’; ‘opaque’. The teacher explained that not all the objects they had studied were hard, inflammable or opaque and to compare and contrast them they would need a format. She quizzed them for the opposites of ‘hard’; ‘inflammable’; ‘opaque’. Hands shot up and children were keen to answer.

The teacher illustrated the idea of column heading by writing up as headings: ‘hard’, ‘soft’, ‘inflammable’, ‘does not catch fire’, ‘opaque’, ‘transparent’. Down the side of the chart, she wrote the names of materials: ‘metal’, ‘plastic’, ‘rubber’, ‘glass’, and then asked the children whether each was ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, ‘opaque’ or ‘transparent’ and so on. She put ticks and crosses in the columns according to the answers to these questions.

The teacher tested out the children’s understanding by asking about other objects in the room such as tables, pencils and books. Individuals made a few mistakes and the teacher’s way of dealing with this was to tell them when they were wrong, ask them to think again or move on to ask another child.

Before ending the lesson, the teacher repeated that they should have a go at drawing up grids and use them regularly to display information they discovered.

Books were closed and it was time for music.

These two rather different examples offer us an insight into the range of activity that makes up good primary teaching practice. Teaching is a diverse, complex activity with no clear ‘rules’ except that the teacher should teach and the child should learn. So how do we make sense of such a diverse activity – how do we ‘unpack’ it? What advice do we give to new teachers to help them become good classroom teachers?

This book attempts to give good practical advice to teachers by unpacking and explaining some of the strategies used by experienced ‘expert’ teachers. In it we look at some of the key questions about primary school teaching. How do good teachers teach? What are the teaching strategies they use? How do they build assessment and feedback into the teaching/learning cycle? How does their teaching relate to how children learn? What are the differences between teaching seven-year-olds and teaching eleven-year-olds?

The book is based on research which we carried out with primary teachers in the late 1990s.¹ The 1990s saw a range of reports and advice to primary teachers about how to teach. The first of these, the ‘Three Wise Men’ Report on primary education urged teachers to operate in terms of a repertoire of approaches:

These include: explaining, instructing, questioning, observing, assessing, diagnosing and providing feedback.

(Alexander, Rose and Woodhead, 1992 p. 35)

The effective teacher has a range of

organisational strategies and teaching techniques … [and] selects from this pedagogical repertoire according to the unique practical needs and circumstances of his or her professional situation rather than the dictates of educational fashion, ideology or habit.

(Alexander, 1995 p. 2)

In 1997 the advice was to spend time on whole-class teaching (Reynolds, TES 26 June 1997) with the Chief Inspector proposing that whole-class teaching should be used for 50 per cent of teaching time, and more in mathematics. The statutory requirements for primary teacher training (Circular 4/98) states that trainees must demonstrate that they:

ensure effective teaching of whole classes, and of groups and individuals within the whole class setting, so that teaching objectives are met, and best use is made of available teaching time.

As we wrote this book, schools were introducing the literacy hour and the numeracy hour. These involve structured teaching of literacy and numeracy using various teaching strategies and prepared materials. So, primary teachers have received, through the 1990s, a considerable amount of exhortation and advice, but unfortunately, until recently not so much practical guidance.

We know from research that teachers tend to operate with a broad range of teaching approaches but we have little understanding of what range of strategies individual teachers use; how they know or decide which technique to bring into play and when; while assessment and feedback, which are key aspects of teaching, are rarely looked at as an integral part of the teaching process. It seemed to us that urging teachers to use a range of approaches with no guidance on what might be appropriate in different circumstances was not particularly helpful, so we developed a research project that would allow us to provide some of this advice, by studying the teaching, assessment and feedback practice of good primary teachers.

In this book we have tried to present what we found in a clear and meaningful way. We have grouped and categorised the various teaching, assessment and feedback strategies, given examples and used teachers’ own words as far as possible. What we hope is that the examples and explanations in these pages will help student teachers and beginning teachers to develop their practice, and more experienced teachers to reflect on teaching and learning, and perhaps to try new approaches.

But first let us go back, to see what research can tell us about the key issues that we shall address in this book: teaching and learning, assessment and feedback. This will provide a frame for the picture we shall paint.

ASSESSMENT AND FEEDBACK

As the quote from the ‘Three Wise Men’ Report makes clear, assessing and providing feedback are key elements of teachers’ practice. And yet, in many research studies, as in guidance to teachers, the three aspects (teaching, assessment and feedback) are kept separate. In our earlier research looking at the introduction of national assessment into primary schools (Gipps, Brown, McCallum and McAlister, 1995)² we became more and more convinced of the importance of teachers’ informal assessment in the teaching process. What we mean by informal teacher assessment is when the teacher poses questions, observes children in activities, and evaluates pupils’ work in a planned and systematic, or ad hoc, way. Repeating assessment of this sort, over a period of time, and in a range of contexts allows the teacher to build up a solid and broad-based understanding of what pupils have learned and can do. This sort of assessment is often called formative assessment. Formative assessment involves using assessment information to feed back into the teaching/learning process; some observers believe that assessment is only truly formative if it involves the pupil, although the more general understanding has been that the process mainly involves the teacher who uses the information to feed back into her planning. In teaching terms this means teachers using assessment information to feed back into the teaching process, and to determine for individuals or groups whether to explain the task again, to give further practice on it, or move onto the next stage.

But, in formative assessment teachers’ judgements about children’s learning and understanding can also be used to improve the learning process (rather than to provide grades or marks) by giving feedback to the learner directly; feedback about what is going well or done well, what is not right and how it can be improved. Without this sort of feedback the learner does not know what he or she needs to do to improve or get to the next stage. If teachers do not provide this sort of feedback then the learner is operating on a trial-and-error basis. As an Australian researcher Royce Sadler put it:

Formative assessment is concerned with how judgements about the quality of student responses … can be used to shape and improve the student’s competence by short-circuiting the randomness and inefficiency of trial-and-error learning.

(Sadler, 1989 p. 120)

We found Sadler’s work on formative assessment particularly valuable as it helped us to locate informal assessment in the teaching/learning cycle. Sadler’s work on formative assessment stems from the ‘common but puzzling’ observation that, even when teachers give learners valid and reliable judgements or grades about their work, improvement does not necessarily follow. But the point is that the learner needs more than grades or marks to improve. In order for the learner to improve she must have a notion of the performance, standard or goal the teacher has in mind in order to be able to compare her actual performance with the desired performance, and to engage in appropriate action to ‘close the gap’ between the two. Feedback from the teacher which helps the learner needs to be of the kind and detail which tells the student what to do to improve; the use of grades alone or ‘good, 7/10’ marking cannot do this. Grades may in fact shift attention away from learning and improvement, and be counter-productive for formative purposes (Black and Wiliam, 1998).

In our earlier research on teacher feedback³ we developed a classification, or typology, of teacher feedback in Year 1 and Year 2 classes that was grounded in classroom practice (Tunstall and Gipps, 1996). Briefly, apart from feedback used for socialisation purposes, feedback from assessment can be classified as broadly evaluative (aimed at maintaining motivation and self-esteem) or descriptive (making specific reference to achievement or competence in relation to the task at hand or more general goals). This descriptive feedback often follows formative assessment and offers pupils the information needed to ‘close the gap’ between actual performance and desired performance. It is thus a crucial element of any teaching repertoire.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

We also looked to see what research on learning theory could tell us about teaching. We found that a significant shift has occurred over the last 15 years in understanding how learning takes place. The traditional view of learning is that learners ‘absorb’ new material in some way. This has supported a traditional view of teaching in which the teacher transmits information (as new material or facts) and the learner absorbs it. This approach is caricatured as a ‘transmission’ model with the learner as an empty vessel or blank slate ready to receive information, the speed with which they absorb it being determined by their intelligence. Here, learning is seen essentially as a passive process on the part of the learner. This is of course a caricature, as even the most traditional of teachers and the most passive of learners will engage in question and answer to clarify material when the learner clearly does not understand.

However, research in cognitive psychology has shown learning as a more active process. This work suggests that we see learning in terms of developin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Margaret Brown
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 Lesson patterns
• 3 Teaching strategies
• 4 Assessment
• 5 Feedback
• 6 Learning and teaching: teachers’ and pupils’ views
• 7 Synthesis
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Index