Should all teachers be teaching the same thing at the same time in a department?
The new OFSTED framework has, it is fair to say, divided the crowd. There are some who rejoice at the fact that the curriculum is finally getting the attention it deserves, that we are paying much more attention to what children are being taught rather than how they are being taught. There are others who have fears that it is impossible to properly determine the effectiveness of a school’s curriculum in a two-day inspection by a small team of inspectors. That to boil down a school’s curriculum to a single grade is far too simplistic, no matter the appeal it might have to parents and other external stakeholders.
As a History teacher, it would probably come as no surprise to learn that I largely agree with both positions (we love a bit of fence-sitting). I am delighted that we are finally realising that ‘knowledge is power’ and that while knowledge and curriculum has never been entirely absent from discussions about the teaching and learning of different subjects, it has hardly been front and centre in staff meetings and T+L working groups in schools until recently — although I think it’s probably been a livelier part of the discourse in the History community than in most others. On the other hand, I also share concerns about the possibility of unfair or invalid judgements being made about a curriculum on the basis of short visits — despite the (in my view at any rate) largely positive intentions of the Chief Inspector on this.
Whatever your position, I am sure we all as teachers are aware that a new OFSTED framework always leads to gossip spreading like wildfire about ‘what OFSTED want to see’. This is where potentially good ideas of one school that are then picked up in inspection get warped and mis-shapen into clumsy whole school policies in another with perverse unintended consequences. The brilliant blog by Sarah Barker about ‘annotated seating plans’ highlights this problem magnificently and should be required reading.
One thing that I have seen homing into view recently is the idea that, when conducting a Deep Dive, OFSTED inspectors are going to expect to see high levels of consistency in terms of what is being taught and at what time within a department. If one teacher is working through a lesson on the reasons for the First Crusade with one Year 7 class, then another teacher in the same History department with a different Year 7 class should also be teaching much the same lesson on the reasons for the First Crusade. If they are not, then questions should be asked of the Head of Department about this apparent ‘inconsistency’. In a work scrutiny, an inspector may compare exercise books of different Year 10 History classes that had lessons on 23rd November — but if one class was doing ‘the Nazi lean years 1924–1928’ while another was on ‘the impact of the Great Depression in Germany 1929–1933’ then this could lead the non-History specialist inspector (or senior leader) to raise awkward questions about why different teachers are working at different speeds through the content and the self-doubt that my perfectly reasonable answer may not be ‘good enough’.
I have some concerns that we are going to see a new monitoring regime develop in schools that will lead to the policing of departments to ensure that we are all teaching the same thing at the same time. That Heads of Department will be required to write down ‘long-term lesson-by-lesson’ plans (or ‘learning journeys’ if anybody remembers those) mapping out exactly where everybody should be and when, and that ‘tough conversations’ will be had if deviation is found to be present. I know many of us are working on ‘road maps’ for Year 11 classes in our departments as we draw closer to the exam period — should these be identical for every class?
That being said — clearly consistency IS important and children across a school within a subject should be being taught, roughly speaking, the same knowledge. It also makes sense if that knowledge is sequenced by teachers in a consistent way within a department. All children have an entitlement to access the best that has been thought and said and as teachers we have an obligation to ensure this is realised. As a Head of Department, it is absolutely reasonable that I should have oversight of where each teacher as at with each year group with a logical rationale if there is some degree of variation. I produce a half-termly overview for my department with a lesson-by-lesson overview for each year group — although I’m always keen to stress this is a rough guide as I’m not always sure how long certain things will take to teach until I’ve taught it. Common-sense suggests in subjects like Maths and English which tend to have the whole year group being taught that subject at the same time in attainment-based sets, that I wouldn’t expect to see, say, Macbeth being taught in one English lesson while next door another teacher is working on the creative writing aspect of the Language paper (but I may be wrong here?).
So, what should consistency within a department look like, and what are the things I think we need to be wary of moving forward? Here are some questions that have occurred to me with possible answers. They are questions that have ambiguous and nuanced answers — this unfortunately does not sit well with the desire of teachers and leaders to find the One True Solution to Getting Good Exam Results and an Outstanding OFSTED Grade™. Hopefully people think most of what I’m saying seems fairly commonsense or reasonable — unfortunately as we know commonsense can be in short supply when the ‘O’ word is being bandied around in education…
Should an external visitor expect to see the same lessons/content being taught at exactly the same time within a department?
· Probably not. There are all sorts of perfectly good reasons why you might not see exact consistency on one particular day. One teacher might have been absent for a period of time and has to catch up work that was not completed properly during cover lessons, therefore they are behind the teacher with 100% attendance. In setted subjects, it might be that with a lower-attaining class a teacher might have had to go more slowly through some of the work in order to ensure that core concepts or knowledge were grasped that the higher-attaining class already knew before starting the topic. Even in mixed-ability classes, there can be considerable variation in the prior knowledge and abilities of one class compared to another that might mean a slightly different approach or way through the content might need to be adopted.
· However, clearly, especially in a subject like History, we all have to work within some time limitations. Given that any aspect of the course may be covered in the exam (but only a small range of that course will be assessed), I have a duty to cover all of it before the exam is set. This means that I may need to move on from one aspect of content that a class is struggling with to get on to the next bit. Learning in History at least can be quite messy and intangible. It may be that moving the story on might help students to get a better sense of an earlier part of the course (I find this happens with the Weimar and Nazi Germany GCSE course — the students find the first bit on Weimar really hard but then it starts to make a bit more sense once you get to the 1929–1933 bit). Additionally, as a department we clearly need to agree on a logical sequence through the content and the different topics that means one class shouldn’t be too far away from another in terms of curriculum coverage.
Should all teachers teach from the exact same resources or powerpoint?
· This is a tricky one. Earlier in my career I would have said absolutely no way. I, as a teacher, valued my autonomy and freedom to teach particular things in ways I wanted. It made me feel like a respected and valued professional that I would prepare my own resources to suit the ways that work for me as a teacher. Additionally, planning the lessons, especially at A-level, helped me to understand the content and possible assessment questions in ways that I might not have done had I been using someone else’s resources. Furthermore, I felt that every teacher was ‘unique’ and that what one person might use successfully might fall flat on its’ face with another teacher with different preferences and modes of delivery. Collective planning might help here but in small departments with limited time this can feel like an enormous task. History teachers in particular are, in my experience, notoriously precious and particular (in the nicest possible way) about their resources and the way they teach particular topics.
· However, as a Curriculum Leader working largely autonomously, I now feel that I would benefit from accessing really good ‘road-tested’ resources that others schools had used successfully, so I could focus on learning the content. I want to see what other schools do that get blinding GCSE History results to see if there are things I’m missing.
· It might also be desirable to have consistency of resourcing where there are non-specialist or inexperienced teachers in a department — to give them that support in resource development so they can focus on mastering the required subject knowledge.
· Unfortunately, there are barriers to this. Cost is one — buying resources is expensive, whether it’s a set of high quality textbooks or good powerpoints from an online provider. Also, education is competitive — some schools and MATs are not always so keen to share their formula for success with everyone else given that we have a zero-sum game in exam results (as outlined by the likes of Tom Sherrington in his seminal ‘bell curve’ blogs). Additionally, some schools’ resources work in their contexts but might not be as effective in others. It seems to me that schools doing the full knowledge-rich ‘trad’ approach have most success when behaviour is exemplary and student attitudes to learning have been developed. Importing those curriculum resources to another school where behaviour for learning is not ‘sorted’ therefore might not be as effective. Those approaches require students to do a lot of thinking — but if you’re battling to keep order then regrettably a teacher may be looking for approaches, rightly or wrongly, that reduce the thinking demands on students in order to navigate their way through that one-hour lesson (clearly that’s wrong but it happens a lot I’d say).
· Additionally — to be really effective I need to see the creators of these resources deliver lessons to see exactly how it should work (ideally I suppose I might be able to ‘have a go’ myself at delivering those materials with students familiar with the set up but that is, for lots of reasons, probably too much to ask) — but in cash-strapped schools the cover implications alone of sending teachers out to learn from other schools may be too much to bear and deter this kind of collaborative practice from taking place.
· In History I’m also not sure we have agreed a ‘best way’ of teaching ‘the Nazi rise to power’ or ‘Plots against Elizabeth I’. In a subject like Maths, where everybody in the country is teaching, let’s say, simultaneous equations, I imagine that there probably is a lot more agreement on a ‘best way’ — although I’m not naïve and I know that debates will exist here too, quite passionately I’m sure. In History, where there is so much variation about what is taught by schools (literally one school’s GCSE could cover totally different content from another) it is hard to imagine we’ll ever establish a consensus of a ‘best way’ (or, rather, a ‘foolproof way’) of teaching a particular topic — I’d love to be wrong though.
Should all teachers be setting the same assessments within a department?
· The obvious answer here is ‘yes, of course!’ And it’s certainly true that you want some consistency in assessment coverage — particularly with regards to ‘summative’ assessments. However, formative assessment may need to vary significantly between class — here we need to have trust in the well-paid professional subject expert that they can diagnose where the learning of their class may be shaky and zero in on that through their retrieval practice and reteaching. It might be that the same commonly agreed starter task might take 5 minutes for one teacher, but half an hour for another because some misconceptions have been revealed that need addressing. Obviously in subjects there are very common areas of learning where students struggle where common approaches can be taken, but then there might be other subtle variations where one teacher’s explanation of something might be not quite as good as another’s or where there was a teacher absence or whatever which require ‘inconsistency’.
Should all schemes of work across the different departments within a school be in exactly the same format?
· To me the answer quite clearly is ‘no’. I absolutely see why this might be desirable — it is a way leaders can evidence that they are ensuring consistency across subjects and that we are all thinking about our curriculum in the same way. However, if we are serious about respecting the disciplinary difference of subjects, then we need to be prepared to accept that the documents we prepare to outline what is going to be delivered and how will likely vary from subject-to-subject. I see no good reason why a History Scheme of Work should be presented in an identical format to one for Mathematics or Design Technology. This type of thinking presents the illusion of curriculum thinking without going through the messy process of doing it and can be frustrating when you spend hours trying to re-write your plans into a box with labels that don’t fit. The document is then created but never used which seems like an utterly pointless waste of time. Clearly, there probably are similarities in what we are looking for in terms of the thought process behind curriculum design, but we need to move away from superficial signs of ‘consistency’ if we are to truly build and deliver brilliant, subject-specific curricula.
· My approach in my department this year has been to define the core knowledge for teachers to teach, with a rough timescale and key tasks to be commonly set within that (with reference to some good textbook bits or wider reading where I’ve got it), but to leave the ‘how’ to them while also making centrally produced resources available to them if they want to use that. This is Year 1 of that approach and lots of work needs to be done to improve those resources and as a team we are going to collectively evaluate what we’ve done and try to build on that in a sustainable way for next year.
· My Schemes of Work also include no reference to PLTS, SEAL, Literacy, Numeracy or any of the other things that we had to ‘evidence’ in the past in these documents which made them unwieldy and unusable.
· What is probably more interesting is to explore the level of agreement within the subject community about this sort of question (ie — does the History community agree what a scheme of work should look like for our subject?) — again I anticipate significant disagreement here to be the likeliest scenario.
What should we be looking for in work scrutinies in terms of curriculum coverage?
· I generally think work scrutinies have done more harm than good in teaching over the years. They have led to the development of nonsensical marking policies that require teachers to evidence various things — whether it be that students are acting on feedback (so as a teacher make sure there’s loads of red pen in the books to evidence that, even if they’ve just re-written the same bad answer that they did before); that we are giving feedback (so make sure there’s lots of a different coloured pen with my handwriting to show that I’m doing that — even if my feedback is really average at least I’m meeting the policy so I can’t be told off — of course the infamous ‘verbal feedback given’ stamps were the worst manifestation of this); and so on.
· The danger now is that work scrutiny, in terms of looking for ‘consistent curriculum coverage’ is going to be fixated on ‘task completion’ rather than learning. Over the years I have had many students complete tasks very well — it doesn’t mean that their GCSE History grade was a fair reflection of this (and the opposite — I’ve had some students who are abysmal at completing tasks and their GCSE grade was surprisingly good). Work in books provides a ‘proxy’ for curriculum coverage but we have to be extremely careful that we don’t infer too much. Evidence that there’s retrieval practice going on in books does not mean that the retrieval practice is effective — but how do you suss that out (especially, as an inspector, in a two-day visit)? A chat with four kids for 20 minutes in the school conference room might also not be a very good indicator of this either given how problematic student voice exercises can be. I’ve taught enough interview lessons to know that students can respond in all sorts of unpredictable ways to a ‘new voice’ in front of them with a different way of speaking or asking questions or whatever. That’s not to say work scrutiny or ‘book looks’ (awful phrase) shouldn’t happen and clearly there should be a degree of similarity in what is being covered within different groups in the same subject — but that they need to be considered in the round against a host of other evidence as I’m sure they are in many schools.
My overall message is that leaders and inspectors will need to be prepared to grapple with nuance — something that the tick-box world of education does not cope very well with — despite the fact we’ve known for a long time how difficult educating children actually is. We’re going to have to deal with the fact that a Head of Department’s reasoned explanation for inconsistency is a fair point rather than ‘excuse making’ or ‘weak leadership’. What some may call ‘inconsistency’ may in fact be unavoidable or indeed desirable. Crucial here is going to be schools (at secondary level at any rate — I don’t presume to speak for primary colleagues here) prioritising and investing in the development of their heads of department — you are only going to go as far as they take you because of how central they are to your curriculum development and, in practice, your response to the OFSTED framework. That means ensuring your Heads of Department are looking outwards at their subject communities, where they will likely learn more than by looking inwardly at other heads of department in your own school (it goes without saying for History teachers that the magnificent Historical Association should be something you are a member of, if affordable). It means ensuring in local areas that subject networks are invested in and prioritised so that all the best thinking across a subject is shared as widely as possible. Working hard on ensuring behaviour is consistently good across a school will also facilitate consistent and high quality curriculum coverage and development. Fundamentally it means that ensuring your Heads of Department have access to excellent CPD and time is going to be crucial in moving your school forward.
In my opinion, anyway.
