Making teaching rewarding

“Teaching should be a rewarding profession where teachers are empowered and supported to be the best creative professionals they can be”

Dr Tristian Stobie in his forward to the Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review (2020)

With the start of a new school term and a return to work, I am embarking on a new endeavour leading on a working group to review the school’s Teaching and Learning Strategy. Doing one of those hostage to fortune things, I’m going to try and write a little bit about the process on this blog; producing a series of reflections on the process. One of my starting points is casting a wide net to gather the relevant research and evidence which can help to inform our deliberations.

Amongst my initial research I have been reading the Great Teaching Toolkit from Evidence Informed Education. Tristian Stobie’s forward helps to encapsulate why I think a school needs a clear teaching and learning strategy, which acts as a living document supporting colleagues. Stobie goes on to talk about the erosion of teacher autonomy and trust. While he may have been thinking more about the UK state sector, I don’t think these challenges are restricted to that context.

There is a lot of research, as Stobie refers to, which states that teacher quality is one of the most important factors in student achievement. So empowering teachers is one of the most important things which schools and school leaders need to do. Engaging teachers in a conversation about great teaching, reaching a shared, ambitious vision and then working collectively towards maintaining those high standards seems like a great activity for empowering teachers. Creating a sense of ownership should help sustain the hard work involved in teaching.

Rather than restrictive checklists, I think having a vision based around values and principles, while grounded in real-world practice, is a way of encouraging professional discussion and development. Striking a balance between consistency and autonomy is critical, even if it is more challenging to put together such a document. In an international setting which comes with more regular staff turnover, it should also help with continuity. When new staff arrive, they can have see the teaching and learning strategy and know what great teaching looks like at the school.

This is a high-stakes process, at least if we want the resulting document to be impactful. It will require engagement with evidence and research as it is drafted, but it should also involve colleagues to continue engaging with new ideas and practice to ensure the strategy remains a living document. Even in the busy lives of teachers, I think it is no bad thing for teachers to have this expectation of engaging with research. It reminds me of Alex Quigley’s writing on whether or not teaching is an intellectually rewarding profession. I think it can be so, and hopefully developing this new teaching and learning strategy can help make it so at my school.