What really makes a good teacher?

We are sitting in a stuffy seminar room somewhere in central London, five men and nine women, picking at a few broken shards of custard creams.

It is 11am and the 14 of us are already being nibbled at by incipient boredom and claustrophobia. To be fair, this isn’t entirely the fault of the avuncular ex-head who is leading the session. Why has our miscellaneous group been summoned from the four points of the compass? We are here, as the course notes inform us, to learn about the theory and practice of lesson observation.

We have spent and will spend our day learning again what lessons need to be planned and resources prepared, that Differentiation by Task and not just by Outcome is a good idea, that there needs to be an “appropriate” range of activities, that the “transitions” between these activities have to be “effectively managed”, that questions should be open and closed (never in between), and that we ought to be seizing “Opportunities for Assessment” all the time.