Reflective teaching

Good teaching is not about sticking to the script, says Andrew Pollard. It’s about continually reflecting on your pupils’ changing needs and the ways in which you meet them...

This autumn’s Cabinet reshuffle has brought new ministers into the middle and lower echelons of the Department for Education. One of their tasks will be to pick up the threads of the national curriculum review set in motion by their predecessor, Nick Gibb, who is now consigned to the back benches. Mr Gibb, along with secretary of state Michael Gove, believes in the ideas of the American educationist ED Hirsch, who argued that opportunities for all could be made more equal by filling in the missing cultural capital of the less privileged. His influential 1987 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, appended long lists of facts and tapped a strong current of concern about US education. It was followed by the Core Knowledge Sequence: year-onyear subject-based prescriptions for school children aged up to 14.

Michael Gove’s instructions to the Expert Panel appointed to draft guidance for the national curriculum review were to trawl the curricula of the world’s highest performing countries, collect core knowledge and put it in the right order. This would produce a world-class curriculum.

As I wrote in the IOE London blog (IOELondonblog. wordpress.com) when publicly announcing that I had resigned from this panel, the problem was that Gove had forgotten about the actual children who would be learning (not just being taught) under this regime. In setting out year-on-year specifications of extremely detailed subject knowledge in his draft primary curriculum proposals, Gove made it clear that he had rejected the Panel’s advice on building in flexibility and teacher judgement.

As we said in our 2011 report, education must be seen as “the product of interaction between knowledge and individual development”. Curriculum structures must enable teachers to use their expertise to manage this interaction beneficially. This is the real lesson of international evidence.

My blog touched a nerve amongst teachers and other educationists. It has had more than 6,000 views and the story made the home page of Guardian.co.uk, garnering more than 700 (overwhelmingly positive) comments.

So what can teachers do? On the one hand, the Coalition came in insisting there would be less prescription. On the other, it has drafted a highly prescriptive core curriculum (though academies and free schools do not have to teach it). Obviously we must all work to convince the new ministers, Liberal Democrat David Laws and Conservative Liz Truss, that there is a better way.

On reflection

Meanwhile, teachers have a chance to show what they are made of and to demonstrate what ‘professionalism’ in teaching really means.

The essence of teacher professionalism can be seen as the exercise of skills, knowledge and judgement. It feels instinctive, but in fact good teachers are engaging in ‘reflective practice’ when they tackle a routine classroom problem. The notion of reflective thinking goes back to Dewey who, in the 1930s, contrasted it with routinised thinking. Since then, the idea has been developed by many others. For me, it has been the main focus of a long career.

Say the students are unsettled and don’t seem able to grasp a particular point. When analysed, there are invariably deeper issues. Perhaps the content of the lesson is not interesting enough, an explanation has been rushed or the teacher is uncertain about some aspect of subject knowledge. Such possibilities must be evaluated, sometimes almost instantaneously, and potential courses of action then present themselves. What to do?

These are the dilemmas every teacher faces in the classroom – and to resolve them on the spot, one has to exercise judgement.

The quality of such judgements grows with experience, but it can also be developed, deliberately and systematically, through Inset and other reflective activities.

This is the value of reflective activity and its contribution to professional expertise. Teachers can investigate commonly recurring issues together, in a collaborative inquiry. Such inquiries are sometimes called ‘action research’ or ‘lesson study’ and are tried and tested ways of improving pedagogic awareness. Evidence is introduced and used to stimulate reflective analysis of the issues. This evidence can come from many sources – from reading published research, from comparing experiences with colleagues, from external measures of pupil performance, from undertaking empirical research in one’s own classroom.

The important thing, though, is to use such evidence to improve the quality of professional judgement.

Two years ago, I got together with colleagues from the General Teaching Council (since closed in the so-called ‘bonfire of the quangos’) to develop a ‘conceptual framework’ for teacher expertise. The aim was both to explain how professional expertise works – more important than ever as the national curriculum rewrite continues – but also to help teachers and schools to keep growing their own.

Building the framework was not easy and we by no means claim that we have got it absolutely right. But we when we examined the evidence, patterns began to emerge. In one way or another, teachers inevitably face issues concerning educational aims, learning contexts, classroom processes and learning outcomes (the rows) and they do so in relation to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (the columns).

The questions in each cell demonstrate the high levels of expertise which teachers need and use every day in the classroom (the full table can be found online: teachprimary.com /reflectiveteaching). The framework is simply a tool for thinking and for discussion. It builds on nine ‘enduring issues’:

EDUCATIONAL AIMS

1.Society’s educational goals

What vision of ‘education’ is the provision designed to achieve?

2.Elements of learning

What knowledge, concepts, skills, values and attitudes are to be learned in formal education?

LEARNING CONTEXTS

3.Community context

Is the educational experience valued and endorsed by parents, community, employers and civil society?

4.Institutional context

Does the school promote a common vision to extend educational experiences and inspire learners?

Becoming an individual

TO GET AN IDEA OF HOW IT MIGHT WORK, HERE IS A CASE STUDY TO ILLUSTRATE “PROCESSES FOR LEARNERS’ EMOTIONAL NEEDS”.

Hazel had a vivid imagination and considerable artistic skills. When she started primary school, she was also very determined and somewhat egocentric. Her school learning in Reception and Y1 was disappointing and she tended to reject the curriculum tasks offered by her teachers in favour of the richness and independence of her own imaginative world. For Hazel, school offered little that was meaningful.

In Y2 there were three important developments. First, Hazel was taught by a teacher who really worked to develop a close relationship. The teacher described the result as ‘like opening Pandora’s Box’. Second, Hazel began to be aware of her younger sister’s progress. Affection and support from parents was now mixed with sibling rivalry, and this focused Hazel’s attention on learning to read. Third, Hazel’s parents worked closely with her teacher. They read to Hazel, supported her attempts to read and talked to her about her approach to books.

After one bath-time chat about what to do if ‘stuck’ on a word, Hazel finally began to believe in herself. Her father said, ‘Well, you’re good at teaching yourself…You’re the one that’s learning and picking these things up’. Tucked up in bed and with books around her, she found that it was true. She could work things out, and she began, bit by bit, to read. Moving from concern and support, her parents and teacher then had to manage her pride and enthusiasm.

Hazel was one of a group of children whose learning was tracked by researchers from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme from reception through their entire school careers. The researchers sought to understand the social influences on the children as they learned and developed as individuals.

For Hazel, there was a supplementary discovery – that she could express her imagination through writing. This gave her a medium for success within the core curriculum, and in this respect, the curriculum and the person began to connect. Hazel’s learning needs fascinated many of her successive teachers and, when engaged, Hazel was able to realise much of her potential. Sadly, there were no similar developments in mathematics; and performance testing passed her by as ‘something done to her’.

In primary school, Hazel formed a strong friendship with Harriet. They shared similar perspectives, independence and humour. By 11, their culture was distinct, their self confidence had developed and their individual identities were assured as they moved into secondary education.

Factors such as the school’s curriculum plans, Hazel’s national test results, her teachers’ subject knowledge and pedagogic skill, Ofsted findings and the market position of the school were all relevant to this story. But they are wholly inadequate as a way of understanding what was going on as Hazel learned and developed as a person. In her early 20s, Hazel studied and worked as an artist.

More ideas and an in-depth look at reflective teaching and the framework appears in the new website for reflective teaching at reflectiveteaching.co.uk