Top tips for teachers from experienced teacher training professionals, Prof. Barnaby Lenon CBE and Tracey Smith, University of Buckingham.
Reading government-issued teaching standards cannot make you a good teacher any more than a book about driving a car can make you a good driver.
Teachers have a crucial role to play in every society. Although some people possess innate skills that make them well suited to teaching,
great teachers are not born, they are made.
Teaching is a profession for a reason. Teachers not only need to learn how to teach effectively, they also need to be subject matter specialists in their chosen field.
In a new book by Professor Barnaby Lenon CBE, Dean of Education at the University of Buckingham, and Tracey Smith, also of the University of Buckingham, the authors take an in-depth look at teacher training and provide rigorous evidence to support their critical analysis of how to become a great teacher in the 21st century.
Lenon and Smith have given us a sneak peek at some of the key takeaways of the book and over two articles, we will be revealing some top tips from the authors.
In the first article, read the authors' thoughts on hard work, high expectations and direct instruction.
Hard Work
Most pupils and some teachers have no idea what hard work actually means. It is virtually impossible for a secondary age pupil to do well if they are not able to work reasonably hard.
How do you get pupils to work hard?
- You have to explain why hard work is going to be worthwhile – because if they work hard you promise they will achieve good results and this may well lead to a good job, a better life. You have to explain that most successful people, including footballers and musicians, have only become successful through dedicated hard work. At GCSE, the correlation between results and ability is weaker than the correlation between results and effort.
- You have to explain what hard work means. In terms of homework, if you have given them thirty verbs to memorise you need to explain how they go about doing that and that the final step in the revision process is to write out the verbs from memory. In terms of Easter holiday revision before GCSEs begin (in May) hard work means revising every GCSE subject once. That means making notes from your notes or text and then seeing if you can write them out a third time from memory. That will take 5 hours a day at least, right through the Easter holidays. That is what hard work means.
- You have to give them the experience, every day and every week, of the ways in which a bit of effort yields good results. They can do it…if they try.
High Expectations
High expectations of pupil work really comes down to two things:
- A higher than usual level of syllabus content and demand. So the highest-achieving schools often teach work to Year 7 which other schools leave to Years 8 or 9. Such schools often talk about a ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ and produce their own textbooks and knowledge organisers to raise the level of demand. On the whole, the lessons you teach and the work you set should be STRETCHING BUT ACHIEVABLE.
- Expecting all pupils to reach a good level. Many pupils are capable of reaching a much higher level than they are doing at present. The evidence for this comes from those schools which achieve high levels of value added with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds - see Lenon, B., Much Promise, 2017 which explains exactly what these schools do. The evidence also comes from countries like Japan that do not have the long tail of underachievement we find in England.
We all know what high expectations means – it means setting the bar quite high for all pupils. You expect them to work hard and do well in tests. But the key point about high expectations is what you do about a pupil who gets 9 out of 20 in a test, or even 14 out of 20.
If you have high expectations the next step is to ask the pupil to resit the test and to carry on resitting until they reach your bar. That will require time set aside to do the retest and possibly time to reteach some of the trickier work. This is the crucial step, the step which distinguishes the most dedicated teachers from the rest. It is the step which will make the difference between success and failure for weaker pupils.
Simply saying ‘teachers should have high expectations’ is not wrong in itself, but what really matters is how that aspiration works in practice. This is an example of obviousness of a tricky kind.
Direct Instruction
Direct instruction means a teacher-directed teaching method: the teacher stands in front of a classroom and presents the information. The teachers give explicit, guided instructions to the students. It is sometimes called ‘explicit instruction’.
This does not mean the teacher just lectures. Teachers will ask all pupils questions, will use good resources like websites, will make the lessons fun.
So what is NOT direct instruction?
The alternative is where pupils are left to do projects by themselves or 'discovery learning' where they are encouraged to ‘find out things for themselves’ or do group work.
The merits of Direct Instruction are that:
- there is less differentiation within the class and, although this might risk leaving weaker pupils behind, on balance it has the effect of pulling up the weaker pupils to a better standard.
- it is a faster way of conveying knowledge and teaching pupils than any alternative method.
About the Authors
Prof. Barnaby Lenon CBE
Prof. Lenon has taught in and lead some of the best schools in the UK, including Eton, Highgate and Harrow. He later helped establish the London Academy of Excellence in East London, one of the most successful state sixth form academies in the UK. Now, Prof. Lenon is Dean of Education at the University of Buckingham, where he spends his time perfecting the art of training teachers.
Tracey Smith
Tracey Smith taught at Stadhampton and St Francis primary schools in Oxfordshire and then was Headteacher at Bladon, Tower Hill and New Marston primary Schools in Oxfordshire, before becoming Head of Primary Teacher Training at the University of Buckingham. Tracey returned to Headship as Executive Headteacher of two Farringdon primary schools before continuing her work with teacher training and supervision at the University of Buckingham.
Interested in internationally recognised teacher training?
The University of Buckingham’s Faculty of Education supports over 1,300 teachers and school leaders worldwide each year and is consistently recognised for teaching quality, student support and sustained investment in learning resources.
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Visit www.bise.org to learn more.