Gains on the Train: Reflections on ResearchED National Conference 2024

[Note: I hate the phrase Gains on the Train — it’s one of those cringe sayings that are rife in education, but sometimes I then think it’s funny, at least to me, to use those terms in an ironic way. So here you go.]

I just wanted to type up a few takeaways from the ResearchEd Conference. As I start this my train back to Leeds is still at the platform at London King’s Cross. Lets see where the train gets to by the time I’m finished.

Takeaway 1: Attainment based Appraisal targets need to go

I attended a fascinating session by Dr Raj Chande and Professor Robert Coe entitled something like ‘Can We Apply the Lessons of Moneyball to teaching?’ Obviously as an American sports and stats nerd I was sold straight away. They talked about some of the research they are doing around teacher effectiveness and how incredibly hard it is to actually understand and appreciate. They showed a series of graphs as part of the presentation which basically suggested that the number of teachers who are, for want of a better phrase, statistically significantly good, is very small. They suggested that even within really excellent schools there is larger than you might think variation in the outcomes of different groups. They suggested that chance factors potentially play a greater than average part in explaining different outcomes between groups taught by different teachers. And that even if we could securely identify who was good and who wasn’t more easily, it would still be hard to identify the characteristics of those who are good vs those who aren’t. Therefore having one Appraisal target focused on the outcomes of a teacher’s individual class in one year seems…flawed, to say the least.

Takeaway 2: Our desire to gain evidence to prove our effectiveness is mucking up some good ideas.

Take scaffolding for example. Rachel Ball and Alex Fairlamb (co-editors of a pretty good back about History teaching save for one duff chapter about teaching the History of China written by some guy) spoke about scaffolding is something that we’ve essentially really over-complicated and made more difficult than it appears by requiring teachers to provide evidence of it. Some scaffolding can be as easy as, for example, giving a kid a nudge to stay focused. Obviously there are more complex things like writing a model paragraph and having it pre-deconstructed, but our desire to evidence what we do gets in the way of actually doing it far too often.

Instructional coaching is another example. Jo Facer and Grainne Hallahan’s talk included discussing how some of the principles of instructional coaching could be applied to leadership — for example running a good meeting. Some people think IC is ‘the next fad’ that will disappear in the next few years because it’s hard to evidence and it can take time to see impact. That would be a completely stupid reason for that to happen. Instead, what we need to see within IC are a series of good ideas which can be applied individually or as a collective whole and might help us advance on our journey, even if the impact takes some time to discern in an obvious numerical way. Even if your IC programme doesn’t run as the ‘purists’ might want with rehearsal and modelling and all the rest of it, getting one teacher to talk to another teacher about their teaching after having watched some of it is a better thing to do than doing nothing, I would suggest, and has lots of other possibly unintended cultural benefits for your organisation.

Takeaway 3: What would a curriculum for leadership look like?

Jo and Grainne’s talk also made me reflect on this question. If we were to implement Instructional Coaching for Leadership, we’d need to have a shared understanding of what good leadership involves. I don’t think we have that right now but I’m keen to follow the work of organisations like the National Institute of Teaching in their attempt to codify this.

My own starting point would be too look at three things.

1. Core Leadership behaviours and attributes (ie, how we behave)
2. Core Leadership knowledge (ie what all leaders need to know about schools no matter their specific role — eg all senior leaders I think need to know about higher level safeguarding, certain HR laws, laws around SEND as well, but perhaps even the basics of how to put together a timetable, principles of effective teaching and so on)
3. Specialist Leadership knowledge (that obviously tailors to specific roles — but leaders need to have more than just one specialism I would suggest in order to later be able to convincingly assume the mantle of headship. A Head doesn’t necessarily need to know everything in massive detail, but certainly some things and they should have dabbled in other areas at least a bit).

Takeaway 4: There are occasional times I wish I taught Maths (sorry, Mathematics) rather than History

I’ve got the task of supporting my daughter with her primary school Maths when it comes to the divvying up of parental roles with schoolwork. I really enjoy trying to figure out how to explain some of the ideas within the early KS2 curriculum to her. I’ve got some cuisinaire rods at home and a mini whiteboard and it’s been fun for me at least to bust those out from time to time to help her to get better. I really like the granularity of Maths — how there’s a clear process to follow and how these build up in small steps.

I attended a wonderful talk by Kris Boulton all about ‘unstoppable learning’ and ways of explaining tricky concepts successfully. He talked about four key criteria for effective explanations of Maths concepts:

1. Wording
2. Setup
3. Difference
4. Sameness (or, rather, avoiding too much sameness while staying within the boundaries of accuracy)

This was done firstly with the example of explaining what a triangle was, and then a prism. Then he moved on to look at expanding brackets and talked about how even students with poor multiplication tables knowledge can be taught to expand complex looking brackets if explained properly.

History is quite hard to break down in the same way. Some processes might be (e.g. analysing a source) but the problem is that individual sources are still highly context dependent. Just because I can explain how useful a source is for studying the Munich Putsch, doesn’t mean I can do the same for a source about the reign of Henry II if I know much less about that topic versus the former one. It’s harder to discern the fundamental knowledge without which students can’t make progress, and the ability to compare examples with non-examples is a bit harder because of the volume of information we deal with.

Anyway, I really like Mathematics sometimes.

Takeaway 5: Good teachers can be made, not just born

Pritesh Raichura’s session was an excellent example of how a teacher armed with a small number of effective strategies that they habitualise and master, along with the requisite level of subject knowledge, can probably become at the bare minimum at least a competent teacher — probably only really conditional on their capacity to learn from and act on feedback. Pritesh showed an example of his teaching at Ark Soane. He is clearly an exceptional teacher with high levels of knowledge. However I wasn’t looking at it thinking that it was beyond anyone’s compass to do it — rather it was the extent of the practice and habitualisation of a few core routines, along with an exaggeration of his own personality, that makes it work well. Maybe I’m underselling it and clearly it’s not that easy otherwise everyone would be doing it. Some of it comes down to values. I can see some people looking at Pritesh’s lesson and feeling uncomfortable about it, in the way that perhaps people up here in the north look at what trusts like Dixons do and feel a bit squeamish about it. What I can see is that he has been in an environment where he has been set up to succeed and then absolutely flown and taken some ideas given to him, made them his own and then enhanced them.

The reason I mention this is that in another session I heard a comment to the effect of ‘some people are just born to be teachers and others aren’t’. My personal view is that we are in a recruitment crisis and we can’t make our job out to be impossible for some to do. It needs to be accessible for all in the way that learning in our classrooms has to be accessible. In my school recruiting teachers is extremely difficult — we have had enough jobs with no suitable applicants over my two and a bit years. Doesn’t mean its easy (therefore with the implication that teachers can be de-professionalised) — again what Pritesh demonstrated has taken years of practice and refinement to achieve, presumably with more to come. But we have to all believe it’s possible for good teachers to be made, not just born.

Takeaway 6: Humans do not think complex thoughts in working memory

Oliver Caviglioli’s talk on Cognitive Load Theory (with no PowerPoint) was a real highlight. I have enjoyed reading his work on Dual Coding and Organising Ideas and so I was keen to attend this talk. He presented the insight above which I need to ruminate on a bit in terms of the implications for my practice, but nonetheless thought was a useful way of helping to reframe the ideas of Cognitive Load Theory.

His talk also made me reflect on something else.

I’ve moved classrooms this year. My last classroom was, to be blunt, horrible. A long, dark and narrow room, with my desk facing the wall and at 90 degrees to the students and miles away from the students. It was hard to stand at the front so they could see the board and I could see all of them. Maintaining attention was difficult. Now I’m in a much bigger, but still long and narrow room. I have a huge teacher’s desk which faces the class, and it’s made it easier for me to layout my own resources including visualiser and iPad in a way that makes them easy to access for teaching. I feel I have much better command of the classroom as a result and feel less cognitively overloaded myself when teaching as a result. Therefore I think I’m teaching a lot better and more confidently. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference. Unfashionable though it may be, it’s the job of leaders to pay attention to these issues like room layout and make them work better. So many of our buildings and classroom setups are increasing the difficulty setting of what is already a hard job.

Anyway, this is long enough and I have to do some of my actual job work now. I had some great conversations today and it was nice to properly meet some people in person and have a conversation for the first time — including Laura McInerney, Josh Goodrich, Alex Fairlamb, Jo Facer and Reuben Moore. Also Paul Cline who I saw for the first time in 15 years since he was my ‘buddy’ looking after me as an NQT at my first school in Birmingham, and fellow northerners Jo Castelino and Will Smithson.

The train is pulling into Grantham for what it’s worth.