Back in January I wrote a post about a new role I had begun looking at my school’s teaching and learning policy. Despite my best intentions, I haven’t provided the regular updates that I thought I might. The work has happened though, so I reckon reflections, of which a few may be more distant now, might be just as useful.
Although I haven’t been posting, the work has very much been happening and a few weeks ago we launched our new Teaching & Learning Framework at our new school year INSET (yes, at the beginning of August – one of the joys of working in a US international school). The new framework reflects half a year of work by a staff working group which I co-ordinated. The working group drew upon the best evidence available as well as the cumulative wisdom that we had within the school already.
One of the many advantages of producing this framework by committee was the opportunity to thoroughly discuss every. Even the choice of name – a framework – is very deliberate. A lot of the structure around principles and elements is borrowed from Evidence Based Education’s Great Teaching Toolkit, however we wanted to take our approach to grouping (with the three principles, rather than four groups in the GTT). We also made sure that the elements reflected our experience and priorities in an international through-school. The idea of core techniques initially came from Tom Sherrington.
Reading and research
I’ve always enjoyed edu-books and blogs, however having the clear purpose of leading the school’s working group made it quite enjoyable to have to read and engage with research more. I may well return to the working group’s reading and research for a more detailed reflection, but for now I’ll just highlight a few of the most useful sources of knowledge I came across:
- Coming across Nick Hart’s post ‘Do we need a teaching and learning policy?’ offered one of those wonderful moments you get while reading when you think that it is as though the post was written with you and your needs in mind. Nick’s post got me thinking about how the working group should conduct its work and also signposted me towards many other useful sources, including…
- Mary Kennedy’s ‘Parsing the Practice of Teaching‘, which is one of those rare articles which takes something so vast and complex, such as teaching, and distils it with phenomenal clarity. As my pile of reading as amassed through the year, it has come as no surprise how many other texts refer back to Kennedy’s work.
- Nick Hart also talks about the Evidence Based Education’s Great Teaching Toolkit. Their evidence review saved me so much work in providing a thorough literature review.
- Tom Sherrington has written many great articles about teaching and learning policy. Before we started to pursue a framework-based approach for teaching & learning policy, Tom’s post on first principles offered food for thought. While we diverged a little from Tom’s first principles, we did take inspiration from the his writing on core techniques. Tom also suggests that colleagues should have a shared model of the learning process to help underpin understanding and dialogue around teaching and learning. You might also find Tom’s list of research summaries useful.
- I was aware of Durrington Research School’s weekly research round-up, however I have followed it that little more closely this year and it is a fabulous newsletter, well worth a subscription.
Implementation
We are now at the implementation stage of the new framework and I’ll try to return with more posts about this. The Education Endowment Foundation’s implementation guidance is proving very useful.
Commonplace 