Most teachers are competent. Let’s ensure feedback to them starts there.

As teachers, one of the most stressful aspects of the job can be the process of receiving feedback on our teaching. This can, in extreme cases, form the basis of decisions around pay progression and appraisal, and even capability proceedings. It is no surprise that many of us get quite nervous when waiting for feedback.

Things have got better in this regard over the last few years. OFSTED, and subsequently, many schools, have removed formal lesson grading systems. This is helpful given the inherent difficulties in accurately grading teaching, as discussed in many places elsewhere. However, for many teachers, feedback can still be an intensely negative process, whereby criticism after criticism is piled on them. ‘You didn’t do any peer assessment’. ‘The books don’t show that they’re making much progress’. ‘There were some students talking for a brief period of time.’ ‘You didn’t do a dance and sing a song.’ Sometimes it can feel as though observers are just looking for something to say!

I think a very simple solution would be to start, in the vast majority of cases, on the basis that most teachers are competent. Most lessons feature children learning things they didn’t know at the start, or recapping and reviewing key content in order to strengthen student knowledge of prior learning. That means that the lesson, or sequence of learning taught prior to the observed lesson, features some successes. In some cases, this is in itself is a real achievement by the teacher — in amongst all the other pressures and strains of the job, competing demands of family life, etc. I know that might seem really basic but to me it is important that it isn’t forgotten in the context of then going on to provide what might be termed ‘constructive criticism’.

We need to do a lot more to celebrate the successes of taught lessons. In that way, we can enable teachers to truly listen to the feedback (or perhaps, as Rachel Ball suggests in her excellent blog, that should be guidance) that they are given. If all teachers hear are negatives about their own practice, that’s highly demoralising and probably not a reflection in most cases of the time and thought that goes into the teacher’s overall body of work.

We also need to think about why lessons tend to go badly to begin with and think about whether we, as Heads of Department or Senior Leaders in a school have done enough to mitigate against this. Some of the reasons why lessons go badly, that I have seen, include:

• Poor behaviour and work ethic of the students. This might be (emphasise, might be) triggered by, or exacerbated by, a ratty, stressed or irritable teacher at the front of the room, or it might be a new colleague inexperienced with the students and systems, or whatever. It might just be that enough of the students just don’t fancy it that day and would rather mess about than do the set work.
• Teacher lacks necessary depth of subject knowledge and perhaps lacks confidence with the material or the knowledge to ask sufficiently probing questions based on what’s being learned, or hasn’t got the students thinking about the right things (maybe, as relates to the specification content) in the lesson.
• Teacher hasn’t planned through the tasks they want the students to do and anticipated the pitfalls or difficulties — for example, the content the students are encountering is too difficult or too easy for the attainment range of the students, or the task instructions are not clear.

I think those three things broadly encapsulate the biggest, highest leverage problems that most lessons have where it goes wrong. Now, you might say that this sounds like a bit of ‘teacher blaming’ — but my general view is that each of these three crucial things can be mitigated against by good leadership at the middle and senior levels.

For example, effective behaviour policies and visible Senior Leadership can do an awful to deal with the first issue (and is, by far, the highest leverage single thing that can be done to improve the quality of learning in most schools, all other factors being equal). With the second and third problems, this can be dealt with through more collective planning and resource sharing, more use of department time to discuss curriculum rather than meaningless, made up numbers, and more whole school CPD time given over to allow for subject knowledge development rather than generic pedagogy (amongst other things). These might not fix everything, and clearly there are a very small number of people for whom the classroom is not the best place for them, but I remain profoundly optimistic that overwhelmingly most people who choose to do this job can be at least decent at it. And if every child in the country received teaching that was, at least decent, all the time, then that would be a good state of affairs to be in.

Fundamentally, are we as leaders and Heads of Department putting our teachers in a position to succeed? Are we making it as easy as possible for them to be good? Or are we putting in place unnecessary roadblocks and obstacles that make consistent competence across a potentially developing or inexperienced team, much harder to achieve?

So, if we get those three things above right, then that’s really good! If most lessons see well-behaved students, listening, learning and thinking about the right things, completing appropriate work, and where the teacher is anticipating and responding to difficulties as they arise, then that’s great! From there, we’re then tweaking and refining and improving to try to reach really lofty heights, which is a job every teacher continues to struggle with regardless of their prior level of experience because inevitably as we try and refine and focus on one thing (let’s say, asking better and more effective questions in class), we might lose sight of another thing (let’s say, developing student confidence and aptitude with writing). Trying to embed these improvements we make over time is really hard to do and we need patience with people as they try to do that (because consciously changing your teaching practice is a really very hard thing to do).

So, continuing note to self, make sure I celebrate the many many good things I see from my team in their lessons, and emphasise those, before I introduce areas for refinement and development in their practice.