Over the past 6 months, I’ve stumbled across some brilliant writing on curriculum, teaching, and learning. Mary Myatt’s blogs ‘What criteria for implementing the curriculum?’ and ‘Curriculum Quality Filters’ in particular, continue to be hugely influential. I have found equal inspiration in Elliot Hahn’s exploration of what autonomy really means in the classroom, the idea of allowing teachers to teach within a shared understanding of what makes effective and impactful pedagogical principles.
Another turning point has been discovering Pritesh
Raichura’s practice. The clip of him delivering direct instruction is, without
exaggeration, one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in education recently.
Rarely has something made me think, ‘This is exactly the approach we should
be exploring,’ so quickly and so decisively. It’s shaped my thinking not
just as an English teacher, but as a teaching and learning lead.
All of these voices, and more, (I need to shoutout Zach
Groshell’s Just Tell Them and Adam Boxer’s Teaching Secondary Science,
too) have pushed me to reflect on the teacher I was when I first
started out, and the teacher I’ve since become. I started out in 2013, in the
era of Nando’s peri-peri homework sheets and ‘bake a Globe Theatre cake’ activities.
At the time, these seemed like creative ways to spark engagement; now, the
thought of them makes me wince. Reflecting on the blogs and books I’ve
mentioned, I realise that in my early years of teaching there wasn’t really a
shared understanding of what makes practice impactful. There were flimsy boundaries and guidance that gave me room to explore, but little to help understand what was impactful and non-impactful (if such things can ever be
reduced to binaries). Engagement with research literacy certainly wasn't encouraged in my first school at that point, anyway and I'd only come across it in lectures and seminars during my PGCE.
I’ve been an Assistant Principal for teaching and learning
since 2022. It’s been a real learning curve, especially when you’re looking at
pedagogy from a whole school perspective instead of just one department. Much
of my energy, whilst reviewing our school’s PD curriculum, has gone into the question
of what we ask students to do. Is the task worthwhile? Meaningful?
High-leverage? Is it making them think - really think – or is it just
about filling time? That’s why Myatt’s writing has struck such a chord: she
articulates, with clarity and precision, what I’ve often struggled to explain
to colleagues around the resources we’re asking students to work from and the
activities we’re telling them to complete:
‘To help us evaluate the quality of curriculum resources
we’re using, we might ask ourselves the following:
On a scale of 1-10 how likely are these resources to make
my pupils think?
On a scale of 1-10 how likely are these resources to provoke
curiosity?
On a scale of 1-10 how likely are these resources to take
my pupils deeply into the topic?’
I’ve long argued that every student should be thinking hard
in every lesson. (In fact, my last blog on this, way back in 2022, unbelievably
- was all about that very idea.) Achieving a high think/high participation
ratio is crucial.
This means I’ve been extolling the virtues of probing
questions, sharing blogs and ideas from Tom Sherrington. Pritesh Raichura’s
influence has been huge here too. In my lessons, and our PD curriculum, I’ve
woven in strategies like ‘I say, you say,’ and ‘turn and talk,’ and thought
deeply around Groshell’s work on choral responses to encourage participation.
These small shifts have made a real, tangible difference in my classroom and
classrooms across school.
All of this can be summarised, I think, in two words Myatt
uses when talking about curriculum:
‘A great deal of work has gone into the curriculum intent.
For the most part, intent statements are in place, plans written up, and
resources prepared. Virtually every school talks about an ambitious curriculum
for every young person.
It’s just we haven’t always made the connection that an
ambitious promise deserves an ambitious delivery.’
Ambitious delivery.
When I read those words, I immediately think of Raichura’s
explicit instruction, of Sherrington’s probing questions, of Groshell’s work around
choral response to ensure that high participation and of Hahn’s views around autonomy, experimenting within that
shared understanding of what good practice actually looks like.
All of these ideas have really influenced the resources and schemes
I’ve developed over the past year.
I often share what I create on Twitter. I started this years
ago simply because I thought that if it helps even one person and saves them
some time, it’s worth posting. What’s funny is that I’ve been dutifully dumping
all these resources into a Dropbox, yet I’ve never gone back to look at the
things I made years ago. I’m constantly making new things and tweaking bits to
reflect ideas I’ve read about and PD session I’ve attended. That means that the
resources I shared years ago, resources from the beginning of my teaching
career, resources I made as a development leader of English, have stayed in
there, frozen in their own little time capsule. I don’t think I’ve revisited
anything pre-Covid at all. The Dropbox itself is a right mess, and I’m very
slowly going through it and deleting all the dross that has now accumulated in
there.
But as I’ve been deleting, I’ve been revisiting (horror
stricken, I might add) as to how far away these are from what I believe to be
good practice.
So, with Myatt’s ‘ambitious delivery’ mantra in mind, I’d
like to invite you on a majorly cringeworthy journey through my past teaching, comparing
snapshots of what I used to produce with what I do now. There are some evident
things that come to light here:
1.
We are very lucky now to be
much more research informed than we were.
2.
Teachers need to look to
other teachers to help them improve. All of these resources I’m about to share
were before I came across the likes of Chris Curtis, Jennifer Webb, Andy Tharby
and Kat Howard. Looking at what they were sharing and doing in their classrooms,
made me the teacher I am today. They improved my teaching hugely without even
realising it.
3. No one sets out to deliver a bad lesson. I look at what I was producing early in my career and everything was made with the best intentions. But, as you will see, that doesn’t mean it’s good. Feedback I received on these lessons, from observations, was really strong and positive. But again, that just calls back to mind Hahn’s words: ‘Teachers should feel ownership of their practice. But that ownership is most powerful when it’s anchored in a shared understanding of what works.’ Having a shared understanding of what works is crucial to ensuring students get the best from us, as is having a shared and accurate understanding of what doesn't.
Anyway, enough chat... let's get into some truly uninspiring, unambitious teaching and learning from years past.
Figure 1 – From lesson 1 of an ‘Introduction to Shakespeare’ unit (2016)
Straight off the bat: what on earth was this? I can only imagine my thinking at the time—probably something along the lines of, 'If I give them a bingo card, they’ll listen more closely.' The idea, I guess, was to make students hang on every word I said, while I tried to sneak those words into my delivery. Looking back, I doubt I even followed it up with any actual word instruction.
This definitely went into the same scheme as the 'make your Globe theatre' cake. Cakes, poster making, structures... is it the knowledge behind these things that students will remember, or just the activity. The fact a cake, a model, a poster was made? Scary that this was fewer than 10 years ago!
Figure 2 – Another lesson
from the same unit made in 2016
Ah, yes! Back to the days where
vocabulary 'instruction' was to put a word on the board and to copy it down along
with its definition with the assumption students had learnt it!
Figure 3 – I'll have medium spice please!
I’m sorry, everyone. Also… what were these tasks!? And why so much choice?
Figure 4 – GCSE… in Year 7
There’s A LOT going on in this
slide. And why am I talking about GCSE exams in the second unit we did for Year
7? Isn’t it scary how one can lose sight of the fact we’re meant to be spreading
a joy and love for our subject through our lessons, so quickly?
Figure 5 – The ‘diminished diet’ in action
Looking back at this now genuinely makes me want to weep. And once again, it was Mary Myatt who shifted my thinking here. This wasn’t from long ago either... around 2018, I’d guess. At the time, differentiation was everything; it was drilled into us during training, and practices like this felt almost non-negotiable. Then I heard Myatt speak at ResearchEd Birmingham (I'm sure it was one or two weeks before the first Covid lockdown, but I might be making a mistake!) where she used the phrase 'a diminished diet.' Guilty as charged here! By capping tasks according to 'ability,' I was quietly placing limits on what students could achieve.
In hindsight, I can see it for what it was: low expectations. Why shouldn’t every student attempt what I’d labelled as grade 7? And, for those already predicted grade 7, why wasn’t I challenging them to go further still? And actually... that's not grade 7 work.
Now, just to reassure you, this isn’t how I teach anymore. Anyone who has downloaded recent resources would know that and I’d hope I wouldn’t need to clarify… but just in case! For example, vocabulary instruction in my classroom looks more like this:
- ‘I
say, you say’ – so students learn how to pronounce the word correctly.
(It’s also a brilliant way to get the whole room back focused.)
- Frayer
model – to explore examples and non-examples of the word in practice.
- Turn
and talk – giving students an immediate chance to rehearse both the
word itself and their ideas around it.
- Etymology
and morphology – breaking down the word’s roots and patterns to see
connections with other vocabulary.
- Pre-reading
vocabulary – using strategies like ‘read, re-read, and read again’ (which
I’ve blogged about here) and previewing key words from an upcoming
text to connect to other contexts or texts as part of a retrieval
exercise.
Approaches like these are far more intentional, high-leverage, and, crucially, respectful of what students are truly capable of.
And still, I know I’m not 'done.' This year, I’ll learn something new that shifts how I think all over again. That’s what makes Myatt's 'ambitious delivery' mantra so powerful: it’s ambitious precisely because it’s never finished. We must always be ambitious in the way we present our subject to our students.
So, as we head into a new academic year, we might be feeling a little nervous or uncertain, but with those completely valid feelings (I always feel unsettled before a new term!), stay open minded. Be ready to try out new approaches, ready to rethink old ones, ready to learn from each other. We never quite know where those shifts will lead us but every step we take forward as teachers can only ever benefit the students in front of us.
Stuart
P.S To all the English teachers out there, the Dropbox time capsule will be sorted soon! I promise!
Further reading:
Just Tell Them by Zach Groshell, PhD
Teaching Secondary Science by Adam Boxer
Teacher Autonomy vs. Micromanagement: Reframing the Debate in Education – Always Learning by Elliot Hahn
Some curriculum quality filters - by Mary Myatt
What criteria for implementing the curriculum? by Mary Myatt