This is The Way (Why I no Longer Hate Systems)

When I started teaching, I knew nothing. But, I had spent 4 years grinding away as a graduate tax inspector, becoming an expert in tax and case law and catching the little guy while the fat cats got away with a fortune and slapped wrist.

I’d lived in a kind of cage, and burst into the classroom with 4 years of pent up creativity and joie de vivre.

I also received zero training.

I was lucky enough to enter under the short-lived Licensed Teacher Scheme. Ofsted found that licensed teachers were poorly trained, yet were rated higher in inspections. Yes, teachers used to be rated individually back in those halcyon days of 1993 when Ofsted inspected us licensees.

The scheme was designed to plug gaps - there was a teacher shortage don’t you know - and the solution was to bring in people from industry, who knew a bit about the real world and yet still, inexplicably, were willing to take a 50% salary cut to become a teacher. Socialist fruitcakes who wanted to make a difference.

But it is interesting, isn’t it, that these mad optimists became better teachers, more quickly, than those who were properly trained? I don’t think it is because we were inherently more suited to teaching, though mad optimism certainly helped.

I think it is because we were launched into a pool of children and told to swim. Either you learned fast, or the little buggers held your head under water until you crawled to the shallow end, jumped out and cried into your towel.

We learned fast. We had full time tables, so there was no time to regroup. What we learned in lesson 1, we acted on in lesson 2. By lesson 3, even when each class had been brilliant, sweat sprouted in blooms, front and back of my shirt. I washed and changed every lunchtime.

Creativity and joie de vivre are exhausting.

Group work, performance, drama, the entertaining sage on the stage, the discussions, the resource preparation, (there were no lesson plans back then, unless you wrote them yourself) the physicality of writing with chalk on a revolving board with eyes in the back of your head. Banda machines you cranked with a handle to produce copies, overhead projector machines with plastic A4 to write to on, the bulb microwaving your excited face as you demonstrated and taught.

Well, enough of the Old Man River routine. It was hot, sticky, intense and, if you survived, wonderful.

But was it sustainable?

Well, that’s where you needed The Way - or at least I did - a way to turn each mad-cap bit of creativity into a system. Systems mean your best thinking is preserved, and you don’t have to waste time reimagining it. You have spare capacity to think about a new idea, a new improvement, as the old ones are baked in - they are just The Way you do things.

The numbers below correspond - so 1 is retrieval in the list for the teacher, but also the head of department, the senior leader and the head.

That’s what I mean by a system. Thinking is joined up, so fewer things fall through the cracks that every day’s madness tries to chisel into your plans.

“This is The Way”.

Teacher Examples

1. Lessons start with knowledge retrieval, as many questions as you can. It helps to do this orally, as you get through so many more questions, but other ways are valid.

2. You work out what students need to know, and from that design an assessment which tries to measure the knowledge and skills that this involves.

3. You give students as much practice as possible in doing the things that you value. In English, what writing do you value, and how many times will students need to practise it in order to get good at it?

4. You model what success looks like with examples of standard and excellent.

5. Rather than just write your own, you look use those from students, and rewrite them where necessary. You also do live modelling with students, and rework these into your resources.

6. You have a routine for Cold Call, so that students are tested on their knowledge and understanding at random. I use lollipops.

7. You look at your assessments, or blogs, or books, and find things you are going to experiment with. You decide what measures you will use to see how well the experiment has worked.

8. Nothing works without good behaviour. You develop behaviour routines.

9. Before making any change to your behaviour routines, teaching approaches or curriculum, you ask this one question: what impact will this likely have on the progress of my students? If the answer is very little, do something else! If your head of department has made that change, ask the question again: what impact will this likely have on the progress of my students?

Department Leader Examples

1. You map the retrieval questions across the year and Key Stages to match, as precisely as you can, the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve - it’s not just recent, old and older knowledge. Work out the necessary length of gaps in spaced retrieval. If every unit doesn’t have a knowledge organiser, you have a method to select the required knowledge and make it explicit to all teachers and students.

2. You design schemes of work around the valid assessments, which test what you actually believe students should be good at (regardless of the exam). You work backwards from this so that each activity is aimed towards success with the knowledge and skills your assessments want to test. You make sure that key knowledge has a standard explanation which everyone uses - on PPT slides, in booklets, in video - so they are always high quality and the same.

3. You map the writing or other tasks across the curriculum and create simple criteria which will make this explicit to all students and teachers.

4. You make sure that models of standard and excellent exist for every assessment, and students study these before assessments, not just afterwards. Practical subjects will need video to do this effectively - source them, or make your own. YouTube is invaluable.

5. Because so much depends on the models, you ask your team to create booklets for each unit, so that you can teach from these, and students can revise from them, and easily refer back to prior learning.

6. You share good practice at department meetings, rather than admin. Cold Call is a key part of your teaching strategies. You try to find anyone who has a better system than lollipops during learning walks. (Let me know - I have never found one).

7. Experimentation, and how you will judge the results, are a regular feature of the department agenda.

8. You share good practice for your behaviour routines and use learning walks to help you find out who needs help and who can provide it.

9. Before making any change to your behaviour routines, teaching approaches or curriculum, you ask this one question: what impact will this likely have on the progress of my students? If the answer is very little, do something else! If your line manager wants to make that change, ask the question again: what impact will this likely have on the progress of my students?

Senior Leader Examples

1. You design a curriculum audit tool that asks each head of subject to create these (retrievals and knowledge organisers/etc), and map the audit across the weeks of term.

2. Ditto (with other stuff in the brackets).

3. Ditto.

4. You ask heads of department to imagine that there are no GCSEs. They have to think of tasks that they would value students being able to perform at a high level. You ask these now to be put into the curriculum, from year 7, and that students are provided with models of standard and excellent for each.

5. You make booklet design, or practical videos, a part of regular agendas, you share good practice, and you ask heads of subject to prepare a method for teaching from their standard and excellent models for their team to follow.

6. Cold Call is a focus of learning walks. You share good practice. You count the number of questions asked in a learning walk, and the percentage that go to volunteers vs cold call. You set a minimum percentage and ask heads of department to meet and exceed it.

7. You realise that department agendas, such as including experimentation as a focus, need to be influenced positively by leaders, rather than hijacked by them, draining department time. You agree a key focus every fortnight, for 12 weeks, with one weak off. That’s 13 weeks. You repeat this sequence in the same order for each of the 13 week blocks. 3 x 13 week blocks is 39 weeks, the length of the school year.

8. You decide on school-wide behaviour routines. You create a flowchart for consequences of this which is entirely predictable and, as far as you can, fair.

9. Before you ask for any change, ask this question: what impact will this likely have on the progress of my students? Invite your heads of departments to debate it. If you don’t have enough evidence to show it is a best bet, do something else or set up an experiment. If it is the head asking for this change, ask for it to be an agenda item at SLT, and ask again: what impact will this likely have on the progress of my students?

Example:

Do we line students up, or get them in as soon as possible, and begin retrieval as soon as the first student enters? There will be many articulate and competing views. So, try it out, and test it after 6 weeks with a knowledge retrieval test based on the retrieval questions.

Did starting later, but all at once, after line-up lead to greater progress than going on the B of Bang and firing questions as soon as the first kid arrives? Put a number on it!

Head Teacher Examples

1. You ask your leaders to prepare a curriculum audit tool and then show you how and when it will be used by your subject teams.

2. You ask your leaders to make sure that assessments include both knowledge tests and skills or application tests, and that these are mapped over the year irrespective of when reporting dates occur, so that marking is spread manageably across the year.

3. You ask your leaders to test the criteria and models by looking at the scores in the assessments - these will indicate whether students understand them. This needs to be an agenda item for their meetings with subject leaders.

4. You have a system for agreeing timelines with heads of department, that is sensitive to the different stages and contexts. But you ask that leaders make this explicit in the curriculum audit.

5. Ditto.

6. You ask for a narrow focus for learning walks. There are an agreed, and manageable number of teaching techniques. These must be supported by research. You ask for definitions of these to be written and very concise, at standard and excellent.

7. You ask leaders and heads of department to agree on what the key focus of your 6 fortnights will be. It is likely to be Curriculum, The Agreed Teaching Techniques, Learning Walks, Review of Books, Assessment, Homework. But it doesn’t have to be. To encourage experimentation, and measurement of this, you make this an appraisal target - (Nb. the experiment does not need to succeed - it simply needs to be tried and measured).

8. You pick particular days where the student practise these routines (and so do teachers). The first few days of each term is a very good time. You ask to see random incidents in each year group and check that the flowchart is followed, and how well it is working (as you might have to change the flowchart to improve outcomes).

9. Whenever a change is discussed, ask your leaders to estimate the impact on Progress 8. What is the average score?

If it is above 0, ask if it justifies the effort, compared to a different change, or the status quo.

10. Once you have decided on a change, map exactly how and when it will happen, and how you will check.

11. Playing the SLT a clip from The Mandalorian, “The foundlings are the future. This is the way.” is optional.

If you want to see a whole range of systems which will both reduce your workload and increase the progress of your students, you can find them in The Slightly Awesome Teacher: where edu-research meets common sense.