My development as a teacher: How hard is it to change your entrenched habits or practices?

A lot of CPD sessions that teachers attend, both in school and outside, involve someone trying to persuade them to change their practice in some way. This might involve changing practice around questioning, or adapting practice to account of a particular SEN need, or around enforcing a new aspect of a behaviour or uniform policy. We are constantly being asked to make lots of changes all the time.

And yet it seems to me that getting teachers to make significant, impactful changes to their practice and sustaining them is a really hard thing to do. I might be wrong, and this might be a case of where I’m transposing what I think about myself on to the broader profession inaccurately, but hear me out.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the extent to which I teach now is different to when I was an NQT (which was in the academic year 2008/9). And broadly speaking I think I do a lot of things in a very similar way then, to what I do now.

For example:

· I am entirely wedded to Powerpoint and planning these resources is probably too time consuming than it ought to be — personally I am increasingly of the view that I need to break my Powerpoint addiction to become a more effective teacher.

· Most of my lessons involve students reading stuff and answering questions in some form, both written and orally. I probably need to do more whole class reading, although never in my entire teaching career have I had someone train me and say ‘this is the best way to do it’.

· I have a tendency to pile too much information in and need to rein it back sometimes — especially for the benefit of my LPA students who probably get a bit overwhelmed at times.

· I tend to talk a bit too much and clutter my explanations more than I’d like.

· My lessons are very subject knowledge driven and I don’t tend to do huge amounts of so-called ‘fun tasks’.

· I always tend to start my lessons with a recap of some sorts (even if it’s me just saying, ‘if you remember, in the last lesson we looked at…’) although have a few more techniques now for doing this than then. I’ve always done this — it just seemed really logical even back in 2008 to remind kids of what we did the last time and maybe ask them some questions about it.

· Marking books takes me ages, whole class feedback methods or otherwise, and I usually start to find it really hard to keep on top of it around this time of the year (although so far this year I actually think I have done the best I’ve ever managed at keeping on top of my books).

· I generally think it’s really hard to teach a mixed-ability class of 32 students without some inefficiency somewhere at the margins (either LPA students finding it too hard, or HPA students finding it too easy) and that is prevalent in a lot of my lessons.

This may seem like a somewhat self-critical picture and it probably is. Fundamentally I think I’m a good teacher (and enough of my classes have done well enough to back that statement up) although I know there are plenty out there who are better at the craft of it than I probably am. I do think however that I have changed my practice, gradually, in a number of ways, and that this might be revealing in terms of the implications for developing teachers in schools.

· The content of my lessons is more unashamedly academic especially at Key Stage 3 than it has ever been. I’ve been less afraid of ramping up the content than I might have been as a younger teacher, and my overall subject knowledge has improved over the past 12 years across a range of topics. I include historical scholarship in lessons whereas I would never have done that 10 years ago below A-level. I think this is, broadly speaking, a good thing although again getting the pitch of this right for all learners is a challenge.

· I do zero group work at all, whereas I did do some from time to time as a younger teacher. I do paired discussions with students but they overwhelmingly produce their own individual work (I’m not saying that’s necessarily a ‘good thing’). I don’t really do any hugely creative tasks at all (I’ll leave that to the Art teachers out there) — although I reserve the right to bust out Religious Rollercoasters for Y7s on the Tudors at some point this time!

· I’ve never felt like ‘differentiation’ has been a strength of my teaching (particularly in the days when it meant producing different work for LPA kids) but I do have more ways of trying to make the work we do more accessible. I’ll flag up the paragraphs and page numbers for information if students are trying to make notes. I’ll live-model example paragraphs for essays on the board (especially for fiddly questions like source questions). I pay a lot more attention to tricky vocabulary and have some strategies for making discussion of this a more central part of the lesson — for example text marking and Frayer Models. It’s not perfect at all and some kids do still really struggle in my lessons, but I am trying to pay more attention to this.

· Retrieval practice is definitely much more an explicit part of my lessons than before using little knowledge tests and things like that, although I do think in History we’ve always made links between different lessons because we have to due to the nature of our subject.

· I definitely do more whole-class reading with my groups than I did, but as said above I definitely need to do even more of this.

I think when I reflect on this that the following points need to be made about teacher improvement…

1. It takes a while — improving practice takes time to bed down and become an established, natural part of your routine. It may not be noticeable that you’ve improved in an area for a year or more.

2. Making big changes at once is hard and can be quite jarring for the students as well as the teacher if lots of unfamiliar routines are introduced at once.

3. I think as an external observer you’d have to be really familiar with a teacher’s body of work to notice some of the improvements they may make, which is one of the reasons why I think whole-school observation processes can feel quite disempowering for staff.

4. A lot of changes I’ve made have been a product of the subject community and the national discussion around teaching perhaps moreso than internal CPD agendas in the schools I’ve worked in. In school CPD programmes need to actively promote the importance of subject teams looking outward to their subject community a lot more than they often do currently.

5. There are lots of aspects of the craft of the classroom that we don’t focus enough on in teacher development. I think instead of talking about ‘questioning’ or ‘assessment’ as big general topics which to me don’t tend to have a huge impact on day-to-day practice, we need to burrow down into the micro-features of good teaching a lot more — for example, how to do whole-class reading, how to teach taking notes in a lesson, how to end a lesson, how to set up the 20-minutes silent work in a lesson, and establish whole school routines for this that provide consistency for students while respecting the variations between subjects as appropriate. I think Doug Lemov’s work has come the closest to doing this but I think we can go even more granular than that.

6. I really think it would help if staff had more opportunities to visit other teachers in other schools. I think this would facilitate more teacher-led self-improvement than a lot of current in-house CPD programmes do.

7. We need to be a lot more open and honest in terms of speaking about our misfires as well as our successes. We’ve all had them. Don’t hide them, but own them and celebrate them because in the story of those misfires is probably the germ of improvement, and probably unless students were hanging off the ceiling you probably did some good stuff in that lesson regardless!

8. Fundamentally, there isn’t a magic bullet that will dramatically improve your teaching at a stroke — instead it’s likely to be a few smaller tweaks and changes that will, over time, make a bit of a difference but may not be all that noticeable.

The development of teachers is something I’m dead interested in and will hopefully return to some other time.