Unlocking excellent teaching and learning at SCA: developing efficiency
In terms unlocking excellent Teaching and Learning, our vision is simple: to develop efficiency, draw upon evidence and celebrate our subject expertise.
I want to unpack the idea of developing efficiency and consider the practical implications in the classroom.
Why is efficiency important?
Investigating the most efficient way to teach has a number of significant benefits to a school. Firstly, it makes an important contribution to teacher retention. Quite simply, if we work teachers into the ground, they will leave the profession. The latest statistics reveal that 1 in 3 teachers leave the profession within 5 years of qualifying! Secondly, we know that if we work inefficiently, spending time undertaking activities that don’t benefit student learning, we quickly will become tired and less motivated in the classroom. Spending 3 hours marking on a Monday night seldom leads to effective teaching on a Tuesday morning!
Both the DfE and Ofsted have undertaken work surrounding reducing teacher workload, in fact it is even a criteria on the 2019 Inspection Framework. All of us working in schools should investigate ways to make teaching more efficient and so a good place to start might be to ask the question, if it doesn’t benefit learning, why are we doing it?!
We know that high quality teaching produces the greatest impact on student outcomes and so collectively it makes sense to build the capacity for teaching where we can all flourish.
The effort to impact ratio
When thinking about efficiency, it is essential to consider the effort to impact ratio. A well-established idea within the corporate sector, the effort to impact ratio translates perfectly to the classroom and encourages us to consider how much effort we are putting into teaching activities and what the impact will ultimately be within the classroom. In his blog on reducing workload, Joe Kirby introduces us to hornets (initiatives that are high effort and low impact) and butterflies (low-effort, high-impact). So, how can we eradicate hornets and seek out butterflies?!
Simplify, streamline or cut?
A great place to begin might be to consider how we can work more simply. Are there systems that we can streamline or activities that we can cut entirely?
Marking: marking has the potential to be one of the biggest hornets of all! After all, spending time marking individual students’ books takes a great deal of effort when, more often than not, students tend to make similar mistakes. Worse still, marking is often undertaken to provide evidence rather than help a student to improve. Our efforts would be far better invested in simple, immediate feedback strategies that improve students’ knowledge, skill or behaviour. Marking can take up hours every week and so we should spend time exploring the highest impact alternatives to feedback that require less effort.
Teaching style: depending on when we were trained to teach, many of us were encouraged to adopt the latest fads in the name of raising student engagement. Running around a room with post-it notes, game shows and lollipop stick questioning! When we are thinking up ways to make our lessons entertaining or engaging, we risk undermining our subject expertise and waste precious time. A simpler approach to teaching rooted in clear explanations, modelling and guided practice requires less planning and allows us to invest more time and energy to consider the content and the most effective means of transmission. As subject experts, we know that the subject matter we teach is engaging in itself, we don’t require whizz-bang activities which can often distract and undermine the core of what we teach.
Resources: associated with teaching style is lesson resources. Spending hours designing an elegant PowerPoint or laminating multicoloured cards for a 5 minute card sort activity takes time. Instead, might our time be better spent seeking out the high-quality existing resources or working in partnership with colleagues? Many hands make light work!
Differentiation: within-lesson differentiation has the potential to create a huge burden for teachers which is problematic since the approach lacks a foundation in evidence. Creating 3 separate tasks within a lesson with varying degrees of complexity effectively requires the teacher to plan the same lesson 3 times. Instead of planning an array of tasks that deliver the content in different ways, adaptive teaching has been shown to be far more effective for student progress. This allows us to plan ambitious lessons that challenge the highest ability student, creating an environment where all learners have the potential to achieve the highest outcomes. The ‘differentiation’ is provided by varying levels of scaffolded support at a point of need basis.
Next steps…
Ultimately, we know that subject specialists are best placed to understand the activities that bring value in the classroom and also those that get in the way. There are no silver bullet initiatives and so we want to scrutinise inefficient practice to make space for genuinely enjoyable and effective teaching. If efficiency is essential for great teaching, what can we do differently?
