Teaching and Learning

TXM

Like all skilled professionals, expert teachers constantly review and adapt their practice. The notion of the ensconced lecturer recycling their lessons year after, barely changing a thing, has long gone.

Flexibility and adaptability are crucial qualities all teachers must possess. Not only do curricula, exam specifications and subject knowledge change, but so to, and most crucially, do the pupils.

Continual professional learning needs to be at the heart of the teaching profession. Over the 2021/22 academic year, St Paul’s school trialled the adoption of a new set of professional development materials that have become increasingly popular. These are known as the Teaching WalkThrus. These deceptively simple resources are underpinned by a number of premises, including:

 Educational research, as well as our own individual and institutional experience, should inform our practice

 What constitutes classroom excellence is known, agreed upon and remembered within the profession

 The best of the profession’s practice can be compiled in one place

 That practice can be learned by anyone if it is broken down into a step-by-step linear model

 Visual representations of the models are more powerful than text alone

Each WalkThru breaks down a proven technique into five simple steps.

SPS teachers have engaged in a process known as the ‘Solve the Learning Problems’ cycle. The cycle involves reviewing pupil performance, identifying points where they can improve, considering strategies that would help them improve, choosing one of those strategies to enact, and reviewing whether it has had an impact. The overriding benefit of this approach is that it starts with the pupils rather than the teacher. For too long, teacher training has been delivered in the ether without consideration of the precise needs of the pupils. Moreover, the approach respects the teacher’s professionalism. They use their professional judgement to determine the pupils’ learning needs and what strategies may help, rather than following a decontextualized checklist of what makes, for example, ‘the perfect lesson’. No such template exists. The perfect lesson is the lesson that meets the pupils’ needs at that given time, and that will look very different from one lesson to the next. At one point a more traditional lecturing approach might be most appropriate, at another it won’t. However, this doesn’t mean that ‘anything goes’ depending on the individual teacher’s assessment of the situation. The WalkThrus advocate the use of the researchbacked proven techniques. They attempt to strike the balance between ‘a pessimistic view that teaching is an art that can’t be communicated, and the overly optimistic behavioural checklists that over-specify teacher actions’ (10). SPS will develop this approach to continual professional learning throughout the 2022/23 academic year, making maximum use of the benefits, whilst critically evaluating and reviewing its effectiveness. ❚