Improving Pedagogy

Teaching
Our knowledge of how people learn has increased exponentially in recent years, yet this knowledge is struggling to make its way into classrooms. If I were to summarise my goals for teaching it would be “less us, more them.” Best practice activities in education are student-centred, experiential, reflective, collaborative, and constructivist, yet in any given period a walk around a school will reveal the vast majority of teachers standing at the front of their classes talking to students. Research continually demonstrates that most students spend the majority of their time in classrooms sitting and listening, instead of thinking. One of our problems is that our teachers are too professional, and often do the thinking for the students, chewing up the text and producing notes for them, instead of creating situations where students have to think their way through the content.

Innovation
The reasons for this are complex. New teachers fall back on their 16 year ‘apprenticeship of observation’, and doing things the way they have always been done has been the modus operandi of schools for centuries. Schools are essentially conserving institutions based around control and stability. This itself is a central problem. Innovation, change and continuous growth is difficult in an environment where the demand appears to be for more of the same. Doing things as they were done in the past is not a recipe for future success.

Collaboration
While most other professions (engineers, doctors, pilots) have transferred to collaborative, team structures, teaching remains an unusually individualised profession. This individual isolation is the major obstacle to improving schools. At my school we have successfully prised classrooms open, and teachers and students are extraordinarily comfortable with observers coming and going during lessons. The next step for us is to open subject department meetings in the same way that we have successfully prised open classrooms for observations. If we can improve the way that departments work together as teams, we will be building a platform for educational growth and success. High levels of collaboration are likely to exist when the leadership marks it as a priority, when common time and physical space are set aside for collaboration, and when teaching and learning is seen as a team responsibility, rather than an individual responsibility. The focus on the TEAM is the key. Teachers are desperately short of collaboration time, and time to reflect and prepare.

Bureaucracy
Schools and school systems that are regarded as model case studies around the world are the ones that are devolving power and decision-making to the coal-face – the classroom teachers. This requires a significant PD investment in order to raise the skills of the teachers in the frontline. We are already seeing this as our best teachers now expect to have opportunities to continually update their knowledge and skills.

Networking
‘Best practice’ school systems are now developing complex internal networking abilities.

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