When it comes to educational research and theory, there are two big problems:
First, there is just so much of it! Where on earth is a busy teacher supposed to start? And second, theory can be thought-provoking but it’s not always clear how we can actually use it in the classroom.
Many of us teachers know that these two problems can be the very thing that makes some professional development courses frustrating. Yes, we’re talking about the courses where you come away with an intimidating amount of reading recommendations, reports and findings from the latest research but with no clear idea of how or when you’ll use any of it to change positively your own practice.
In fact, it is in response to this common cry of frustration from teachers that the Best of the Best Series was born: “Just what are the most important ideas and how do we darn well use them?” Consider the following mantras:
- Progress needs to be rapid, sustained and visible in every lesson.
- It’s impossible to make meaningful progress in a single lesson.
- Progress made needs to be reflected in the data.
- Data is unforgiving and doesn’t reflect all types of progress made.
- Book scrutinies are the best way to see progress over time.
- Comparing summative assessments shows progress most objectively.
- All inspectors care about is progress.
Do any (or all!) of these sound familiar? Who could have ever anticipated that a word such as progress could become such a hotly debated, and often divisive, one in the educational lexicon?
It would be rare to find a staff meeting, performance management document or training session that doesn’t mention progress, and it would be almost as rare to find progress in any of those circumstances viewed in the same way.
As professionals, progress is what we all want. Working out, however, what will secure the best outcomes for our learners is not always a simple task and the breadth of pedagogical choice out there can be daunting and time-consuming. It is easy to pay lip-service to the theme and the ways in which we track, monitor, and ultimately make progress, but digging more deeply into the issue and engaging in the debate is a greater challenge.
Professional research can easily be side-lined in a job where we are starved for time and our daily “to-do” list leaves little for the luxury of wider reading, especially when that wider reading feels so vast!
Enhancing the progress of your learners is inextricably linked to your own progress as a professional, and engaging in action research can be one of the most effective ways to develop.
Being able to “walk the talk” when it comes to progress is vital, but it needs to be done in a manageable way that is personal to you and your context.
There is nothing more likely to help you discover what’s most effective than actually trying the ideas on for size in your own classroom.
What kind of progress?
What kind of “progress” are you most looking to develop? Improving the “progress” in general of your learners is a fairly unbridled task, however choosing a specific aspect of progress needn’t be. For example:
- Do you have a particular group of learners whose progress you have a particular concern about? Pupil Premium? EAL? Gifted and talented? Boys? Poor attenders?
- Is there an area of learning that you are most concerned about enhancing the progress of? Literacy? Technology in the classroom? Problem-solving skills? Extended writing tasks? Embedding knowledge/facts?
- Are there any learning habits you would like to develop in your students that could have a positive impact on the progress made in your subject? Effective group working skills? Making greater use of feedback provided? Asking better questions? Engaging in wider reading/research? Setting better homework tasks?
- Are there any specific aspects of progress identified in your school’s development plan or your performance management targets? Have you had any recent training that has raised important questions around progress that you would like to pursue?
An important part of the “progress” debate, as seen in contributions to our book from Martin Robinson and Will Ord, is about rejecting traditional notions of progress and focusing instead on supporting the pursuit of learning, with progress being an organic product rather than the end goal. Could your learners benefit from a paradigm shift such as this?
Choosing a tight focus for your enquiry will not only help you to tailor your approach and interventions, but will also make it feel “do-able”. Nothing can make a person drop a project and go running back to the familiar faster than when the scope of that project feels unmanageable. Do yourself a favour: start small, so you stand a better chance of seeing significant progress.
Establish a baseline
The only true way to gauge exactly how much progress has been made is to know exactly where you have started from. Sometimes you will be able to establish this baseline easily with an empirical measure: scores on a quiz, levels on a piece of writing, grades on a practice exam.
In his contribution, James Nottingham urges teachers to use these baseline assessments as motivational starting point; to spur learners on to beat their personal best and focus on an impressive “progress score” rather than simply the numerical or qualitative score on the assessed piece.
Sometimes that starting point will be less objective. For example, establishing a starting point in “group working skills” or “use of technology in the classroom” requires a very different set of baseline data. For areas of focus like this, your own anecdotal observations and reflections on how learners have engaged with related learning activities will form the most important part of establishing your baseline. It can also be useful to gather feedback directly from your students, perhaps in the form of surveys or interviews, to gain learners’ own attitudes and perceptions about their aptitudes or needs.
Your baseline may also need to include consideration of your own professional practice. Which of your own habits, norms and routines have a direct impact on progress?
Choose an intervention
Once you have decided where you most want to develop progress for your learners and where you and your learners are currently at in relation to that, you get to engage in the most challenging and exciting part – deciding what it is you want to change about the way your students are learning and making plans accordingly.
The “Rule of Three” can be a helpful principle to keep in mind when making plans for your action research. When deciding what sort of interventions you are going to put into place, the Rule of Three is about choosing three things you want to experiment with and committing to trying each of those strategies in three different lessons or in three different ways before making a decision about their efficacy.
Your interventions may be related to your own practice, such as focusing on the way you gather feedback from a question posed to the class or perhaps changing the way you deliver instructions.
You may want to focus on the physical learning environment of your classroom, by changing the nature or availability of learning resources available to your learners. Your focus may instead be on habits or systems you want your learners to develop, such as what they do when they are “stuck” or how they ensure equity of effort in paired or group working tasks. You may focus on a combination of these three areas.
Committing to try your chosen strategies in three different ways is absolutely vital. Bear in mind that when trying out something new in the classroom for the first time, it often does not go exactly according to plan. This is a product of both you needing to refine your approach and your learners knowing how to best navigate this new and possibly unfamiliar learning technique. By ensuring that you test your strategy in three different ways, you stand a much better chance of working out the kinks and developing and refining a strategy that is a productive one for you and your learners.
Of course, the flip-side of choosing the interventions is considering how you will know that those strategies have been a success. What will your desired “progress” look like?
Have we made any progress?
Both John Hattie and Geoff Petty remind us in contributions that assessing the impact of the changes we have made is perhaps the most important part of progress. Whether you choose to track your progress through a cycle such as the Rule of Three, or place a fixed time parameter on your action research, such as a month or half-term, it is vital to evaluate whether or not the changes that have been implemented have had a positive outcome.
Return to your baseline and compare this against where you and your learners currently are. Have you realised your desired outcomes? Are the changes you have implemented worth keeping? Do they require further refining?
Action research, much like progress, is not a guaranteed linear progression toward excellent teaching. Sometimes we will make positive gains through our carefully planned interventions. Sometimes we will make different progress than expected. Sometimes our experiments will be a big old flop and we just have to go back to the drawing board and try again. Regardless of which category your findings fall into, engaging in this type of professional enquiry is always beneficial, as sometimes working out what doesn’t work is progress in itself!
Celebrate your ‘walk’
If you cut through the endless pontification on progress and actually walk the talk in your classroom, then raise the roof with your findings! Claire Gadsby encourages us in her contribution to “shout louder” about the success we have. Don’t be afraid to share your progress; sharing your findings with fellow teachers is a fantastic way to not only support your colleagues but also to open up a dialogue about further refining your approach.
Celebrating progress is also an incredible motivational tool for our learners. Share your findings with them too. As the key players in your research, their buy-in matters and what better way to show the value of their efforts than to raise the profile of the outcome?
Conclusion
We are all in the business of progress. Regardless of how we brand it or which side of the debate we sit on or what kind of progress we deem to be most important, the core purpose of our job is to help our learners make the best progress possible. If that progress is a fantastic set of GCSE results, so be it. If that progress is developing a passion for learning or a love of a given subject, that’s great.
However you choose to view it, there is little gain to be made by just pontificating about it. Sometimes, in order to make real progress we need a little less conversation and a little more action.
- Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman are authors of the best-selling teaching guides Pimp Your Lesson! and Talk-Less Teaching, and are both experienced classroom teachers, curriculum coordinators and school governors.
Best of the Best
Best of the Best: Progress by Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman (ISBN 9781785831607) is published by Crown House Publishing and available now costing £9.99.
