Best Practice

The 4Ps of high-quality teaching: Pitch

Quality First Teaching Pedagogy Lesson planning
The 4Ps offer a shared language for consistent high quality teaching. In this five-part series, Matt Bromley breaks down each one and offers practical strategies for teachers. In part three, he breaks down the second P – pitch
Image: MA Education/Lucie Carlier

My 4Ps framework has been formulated to help one of the schools I support in its mission to improve the quality of teaching.

The idea of the framework is that we want a simple way of capturing all the key actions on the school improvement plan, a means of teachers self-evaluating their current practice to identify their professional development needs, and a shared language with which to articulate their vision and values.

As I explained last week, the Ps in question are purpose, pitch, pace, and progress.

 

Introducing pitch

As I explained in the first part of this series, there are five teacher self-evaluation criteria associated with pitch:

  1. I continually improve and update both my subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge so that I know what excellence looks like in practice and I use my knowledge to ensure I teach to the top for all students.
  2. I teach all my students an appropriate and ambitious curriculum (thus ensuring equality), but I also make sure that those with additional needs are supported through adaptive teaching strategies, such as scaffolding (thus ensuring equity).
  3. I assess my students’ starting points and identify any gaps in their prior knowledge – as well as any misunderstandings they bring with them – and use this information to stretch and challenge all my students through the level of task difficulty and in the feedback I give them.
  4. I plan frequent opportunities for retrieval practice and thus the building of schema.
  5. I support all my students to develop the research and study skills they need in lessons and to develop wider knowledge and skills beyond the curriculum.

 

Explore this SecEd series: The 4Ps of high-quality teaching

 

Pitch in practice

To pitch learning in students’ struggle zones – what will cause thinking, be hard but achievable – we need to know what excellence looks like. And this requires both subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, knowing our stuff (to use a technical term) and knowing how to teach that stuff in a way that makes sense to students.

This “dual professionalism” requires a planned programme of professional development which enables us to keep our subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge up-to-date.

The best CPD balances external expertise with internal peer-to-peer support. The best CPD balances innovation (a focus on new ideas) with mastery (providing opportunities for teachers to deepen their knowledge and understanding of existing ideas and to practice existing strategies).

And the best CPD is sustained over the long-term and is evaluated to ensure it is having a demonstrable impact in the classroom.

As well as CPD, knowing what excellence looks like also requires networking – both internally in the form of subject teams peer-assessing students’ work to moderate judgements – and externally in the form of working with other schools and indeed subject associations to benchmark standards beyond the school gates.

 

Teaching to the top

Once we know what excellence looks like, we need to teach to the top for all students. Why? Because knowledge in long-term memory is essential in helping students to make sense of new information. Among other things, it improves reading comprehension and critical thinking...

Knowledge in long-term memory is essential for reading comprehension because, although the ability to decode words is transferable to different texts, students are more likely to understand a text if they have prior knowledge about the topic.

Put simply, the more you know about a topic, the more effectively you can read a text on that topic and understand it. If I asked you to read a text on, say, nuclear physics or macro-economics, you’d probably struggle to make full sense of it because some of the words would be unfamiliar and many of the concepts certainly would be.

However, if I asked you to read an article on teaching strategies, you’d probably fare well, bringing your prior knowledge to bear on the words and meanings.

Knowledge in long-term memory is also essential for critical thinking. Critical thinking cannot occur if a student does not have sufficient foundational knowledge on the topic being discussed.

In history, for example, for students to be able to reason effectively about chronology and cause and effect, they must know enough curriculum content. Teaching students about history in an abstract way doesn’t work as well as arming them with lots of knowledge with which to better understand the way the world works.

In maths, students need to be taught through worked examples rather than unstructured problems. And in science, students need to be taught the knowledge gained through scientific discovery not necessarily how science discovered that knowledge. Facts matter. Put simply, you cannot be critical about something of which you are ignorant.

But not only is factual knowledge essential to reading comprehension and critical thinking, it is also a means of closing the gap between the attainment of disadvantaged students and their non-disadvantaged peers, and this is the reason we should teach to the top for all students.

Educational disadvantage starts early – certainly before a child enters formal education. One of the reasons for this is that children born into families who read books, newspapers, and magazines, visit museums, art galleries, and zoos, take regular holidays, watch the nightly news and documentaries, and talk around the dinner table or in the car about what they are reading or doing or watching develop “cultural capital”.

In other words, they acquire an awareness of the world around them, an understanding of how life works, and – crucially – a language with which to explain it. All of this provides a solid foundation on which these children can build further knowledge, skills, and understanding.

Those children not born and raised in such knowledge-rich environments don’t do as well in school because new knowledge and skills have nothing to “stick” to or build upon. Put simply, the more you know, the easier it is to know more and so the culturally rich will always stay ahead of the impoverished, and the gap between rich and poor will continue to grow as children travel through school.

Once we accept the need to teach to the top for all, we need to know where “the top” is…

 

Identifying the struggle zone

Teaching to the top is about pitching learning at what the highest performing students in a class will be able to do with time, effort, and support.

One of the main problems with teaching to the top is that some students fear hard work. We therefore need to eliminate – or at least mitigate – students’ feelings of fear and hesitation by creating a classroom environment which encourages the making of mistakes as a sign of learning, and which explicitly says (through our choice of language, our modelling and thinking aloud, and the routines we engage in) that there is nothing to fear by trying your best and pushing yourself to do hard work.

To promote challenge in the classroom, therefore, we need to reduce the threat level, we need to ensure that no-one feels humiliated if they fall short of a challenge. Rather, they need to know that they will learn from the experience and perform better next time.

What else can we do to ensure the pitch is appropriate?

  • We can put blocks in the way of students’ initial learning (or encoding) – what Robert Bjork (2011) calls “desirable difficulties” – to bolster their subsequent storage and retrieval strength.
  • We can “chunk” information, ensuring we teach knowledge before skill. And we can link new learning with prior learning so that students can cheat their limited working memories.
  • We can provide opportunities for our students to engage in deliberate practice, repeating learning at least three times but doing so in a different way each time, allowing students to do something new with the learning every time they encounter it to forge myriad connections and improve “transfer”.

Of course, to set the right level of pitch, we also need to identify (perhaps using low-stakes quizzes, hinge questions, exit tickets, etc.) students’ struggle zones…

 

Zoning in on challenge

One way to pitch learning appropriately is to activate prior knowledge which enables us to uncover and unpack any gaps in students’ knowledge as well as any misconceptions they may have. We can then ensure all the class are “on the same page” and are following the same steps.

What is more, activating prior knowledge helps join-up the curriculum in students’ minds because they can see how they use and expand the knowledge and skills they learnt previously as they progress through school, and this provides intrinsic motivation because they can see the purpose of what they learn and can begin to understand the usefulness of curriculum content (thus, it helps achieve the first of our 4Ps: Purpose).

There are several ways in which we can assess students’ prior knowledge as they travel through our curriculum. For example, we could begin each new topic with a KWL chart (Know, Want to know, Learned) which is a diagnostic technique and a means of acquiring data on students’ starting points by asking them at the beginning of a lesson or new topic to identify what they already know (or think they know) about what they are about to study, what they want to learn about the topic, and, as the unit unfolds, the knowledge and skills that they begin to acquire.

An alternative to this is to begin a topic with an initial assessment, perhaps a low-stakes multiple-choice quiz. The results of these pre-tests can yield invaluable evidence about students’ prior knowledge and misconceptions and, when repeated at various stages of the teaching sequence, can provide evidence of students’ growing knowledge and understanding.

Regardless of the approach taken, information from diagnostic assessments can help us ensure that lessons are more responsive to students’ needs and their existing knowledge-base, and so that knowledge builds upon knowledge.

 

When in doubt, aim high

Pitch is about having high expectations of all students, it’s about establishing a set of clear rules and routines. As well as having high expectations of our students, we should insist that our students have high expectations of themselves, because only by believing in yourself and in your own ability to get better will you do so. So, what does this look like?

  • First, students should have a growth mindset and believe that they can get better at anything if they work hard. This means having a thirst for knowledge; accepting that work needs to be drafted and redrafted. This also means setting aspirational goals for themselves and expecting to achieve them.
  • Second, students should embrace challenge and enjoy hard work because they know it will help them to learn. This means actively engaging in lessons and readily accepting any new challenges that are presented. It also means exerting a lot of effort and engaging in deliberate practice. It means pushing themselves in lessons, practising something repeatedly, and regarding additional study opportunities such as homework as an important way of consolidating and deepening their learning.
  • Third, students should seek out and welcome feedback. They should value other people’s opinions and advice and use it to help them improve their work. Feedback should be given and received with kindness in a manner that is helpful and not unduly critical, and yet it should be constructive and specific about what needs to be improved.
  • Fourth, students should be resilient. By being resilient – not giving up easily – they will overcome obstacles. Moreover, they will be happy to make mistakes because they know they will learn from them. In practice, this means that students ask good questions in order to further their learning; this means students always try and solve problems for themselves before asking for help.
  • Fifth, students should be inspired by other people’s success. They should seek out examples of great work, discovering what makes it great and then using this knowledge to inform their own work. They should take collective responsibility for the work of the class and have a vested interest in everyone’s success. This means that students support each other and encourage each other to succeed. This means that students work well in groups and are confident expressing their views and sharing their ideas. This means that students are good at giving each other feedback that is kind, specific and helpful.

 

  • Matt Bromley is an education journalist, author, and advisor with 25 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher. He remains a practising teacher. Matt is the author of numerous books on education and co-host of the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Find him on X @mj_bromley. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/matt-bromley

 

Further information & resources

  • Bjork & Bjork: Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Psychology and the Real World: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society, Gernsbacher et al (eds), Worth Publishers, 2011.