Teach Like a Champion and the challenge of habitualising effective techniques for classroom management

I have to admit that when I first encountered Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov I was a bit uncomfortable about it. Too many obvious, cringey Americanisms for a start. ‘Cold Call? That’s just no hands questioning, isn’t it? Why is he giving a name for stuff we’ve already got perfectly good names for?’ It’s like when Mock Exams started being called PPEs. lBut, but, but. When I got over myself, I realised that it’s actually really absolutely tremendous, and the DfE could do a lot for teaching quality, fairly cheaply I’d imagine, by making sure every ITT student in the country has a copy in their hands. The way it distils very granular things about what expert teachers do in the classroom, and gives a shared language for things so we can talk about them more clearly, is incredibly helpful. I’m very interested to see what version 3.0 has got in store.

A few days ago I tweeted about Adam Boxer’s excellent video on Behaviour Management and relevant techniques from TLAC to support this. It truly is fantastic, and if you haven’t watched it yet, go and do that now, and I’ll see you in 22 minutes.

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Welcome back. It really struck a chord (in a good way), and hit a nerve with me (in a more uncomfortable way). It made me realise that, to be honest, I’ve not been as ‘on it’ with behaviour management as I would have liked in recent months. Behaviour’s been generally fine, in the grand scheme of things, but not as good as I believe it could have been. I think I’ve forgotten some of the things I used to do much more regularly, for example:

• Narrating the positives in the class to normalise that this is a class where we have good behaviour.
• Standing stock still, on Pastore’s Perch, to maintain a quiet working environment when it has been established.
• Being calmer and moving less when I’m speaking to the class, rather than being a bit of a jitterbug at the front of the room.

What the video also reminded me, and this is true in a number of areas, is how hard it is to make certain teacher actions habitual (or at least it is for me). We actually really need to think constantly about doing these actions, and need to sustain this for a very long time, until they become second nature. I think that the wider issue is that we do not zero in on these all-important granular elements of effective teaching sufficiently in our CPD and observation models, instead opting for loftier, and perhaps more vague, foci like ‘Questioning’ or ‘Assessment for Learning’ that often don’t lead to tangible things you can implement the next day. Perhaps it’s to do with the way the training I’ve generally received throughout my career has been delivered, rather than the topics.

A good example of this problem for me is when it comes to ‘No Opt Out’. This is a great strategy for dealing with the problem of students who say ‘I don’t know’. Take the following scenario…

TEACHER: Right then, I’d like to discuss the main features of the Nazi ‘police state’. Let’s recap the key elements of it together. Jonny, can you tell me one of the key aspects of the Nazi ‘police state’.

JONNY: Dunno, Sir.

Normally, a lot of us, myself included, would quickly want to escape the awkwardness of that by asking the same question to another, higher attaining student, so at least you can feel reassured that someone was listening to you in that lesson! What ‘No Opt Out’ does is then require you to come back to the original student and get them to repeat or rephrase what the higher attaining student said. Let’s carry on the above dialogue.

TEACHER: OK then. Alicia, can you help Jonny out please?

ALICIA: Yes sir. The Nazis used concentration camps to imprison Communists.

TEACHER: Thank you Alicia. Anyone else? Hands up please. George?

GEORGE: The SS and the Gestapo, Sir!

TEACHER: Brilliant! Right then, Jonny. Can you now, based on what Alicia and George have just said, explain some features of the Nazi Police State?

Hopefully from there Jonny should be able to give you at least one of the points mentioned. Doesn’t mean he’s going to learn or remember the things that he’s parroting from the other students, but it’s a reminder that participation in the lesson is a requirement and not an option, and hopefully makes him a bit sharper and more attentive moving forward. It’s a simple strategy, and a good way of dealing with a common problem we often face in History classrooms. I come back to it fairly regularly, but as yet haven’t properly nailed habitualising it in my classroom practice. I don’t think it’s something my students would expect me to do all the time yet, and that’s something I need to get better at.

What’s really helped is mentoring an ITT student and having really good professional dialogue about teaching and what happens in a lesson on a daily basis. Watching that video together has given me real incentive to model some of the techniques Adam described, and then Matt Burnage has also discussed in this excellent blog here. And do you know what? It’s already having a huge impact. I have two lovely, but bubbly Key Stage 3 groups that I’ve taught over the last couple of days, and immediately when I started making the deliberate decision to use Pastore’s Perch and Be Seen Looking, and to clearly define my Means of Participation, it was having immediate results in leading to a calmer and more purposeful environment. To be frank, it’s given me some accountability that we all need to give us a nudge to sharpen up in certain areas from time to time. It’s reminded me to leave the distractions of Head of Department stuff, school politics, Teacher Assessed Grades, and all the other stuff at the classroom door. It’s also reminded me that, oh yeah, I’m actually quite good at this teaching lark when I really put my mind to it. And I think I can be really very good, and want to be so all the time.

Hopefully it’s seeing that immediate impact that will give me the push to keep going and finish the job of cementing these routines in my practice. Perhaps it’s been the refresher I’ve needed just at the right time. I’m no expert on Instructional Coaching at all, which is the latest thing to meet the description of ‘all the rage’ in edu-twitter world, but it seems as though these are the sorts of things it’s driving at getting us to do more, which can only be a good thing.

I’ve got my trickiest class tomorrow. Twice. That will be a good little test of these tweaks and reinforcements to my overall practice.