Making Every Lesson Count: Six pedagogical principles

I recently started teaching at Orchard Mead Academy – a secondary school in Leicester that has a higher than average proportion of disadvantaged students and students with English as an additional language.

One strategy that has contributed to rapid school improvement has been to use Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby’s book Making Every Lesson Count (2015) to inform our teaching and learning model. The book describes six interconnected pedagogical principles that provide a framework for great teaching: challenge, explanation, modelling, deliberate practice, questioning, and feedback.

Adopting this clear framework has given staff a common language to use when planning and delivering lessons and provided a focus when assessing and monitoring the quality of teaching and learning. Ultimately our teaching and learning model attempts to create a schema in the minds of our teachers about effective learning environments. This article offers practical ideas inspired by these six principles and our teaching and learning model.