Finishing his nine-part series on the lessons we must never forget from our teacher training, Matt Bromley discusses how we can evaluate our curriculum planning and delivery, and the progress of our students

 

Initial teacher training programmes can provide seasoned professionals with a fresh perspective on their own practice. Certainly, this year, as I have lectured my trainee teachers, I have thought my sessions would be useful, not just for those new to the profession, but for all teachers.

As such, over the course of nine articles in SecEd, I have shared my ITT journey with you in the hope it provides some useful opportunities to reflect on your own classroom practice. This is the final instalment.

By way of a quick recap, in my first article, I set out a list of strategies that all expert teachers have in common.

In my second article, I focused on the application of theories and models of learning. In my third article, I explored a teacher’s roles and responsibilities in ensuring that learning happens. In my fourth, fifth and sixth articles, I examined in depth the process of planning learning

And in my seventh article I looked at facilitating learning – how to translate our curriculum plans into classroom practice. I shared a three-step learning process and a four-part teaching sequence.

Finally, last month, I shared my thoughts on assessing learning, exploring the five key strategies of formative assessment posited by Wiliam and Thompson (2007).

 

SecEd Series: Excellent teaching: Lessons from ITT

 

Evaluating learning

This time, then, to conclude the series, let’s turn to evaluating learning. By “evaluating learning”, I mean:

  • Evaluating the effectiveness of the way in which our curriculum is planned.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of the way in which our curriculum plans are translated into classroom practice.
  • Evaluating the pace of student progress and student outcomes including their preparedness for the next stage of their education and lives.

Let’s look at each element in turn…

 

1, Evaluating the effectiveness of our curriculum planning

A good curriculum is a living organism, forever changing in response to reality. Curriculum planning, therefore, should be a cyclical process.

A curriculum should not be planned then left to stagnate. Rather, we should plan our curriculum, teach it, evaluate it to see if it is working as well as we had hoped, then tweak it in light of the findings.

To help oil the wheel, so to speak, I think we should seek out data that answers the following questions:

 

Is our curriculum plan ambitious enough?

Does our curriculum teach the knowledge and skills students need in order to take advantage of the opportunities, responsibilities, and experiences of later life? Does our curriculum reflect our school’s local context? For example, does it address typical gaps in students’ knowledge and skills? Does it bring the local community into school and take students out into the community? Does it respond to our students’ particular life experiences?

Is our curriculum sufficiently broad to ensure students are taught as many different subject disciplines as possible for as long as possible? Is it sufficiently balanced so that each subject discipline has a fair amount of space on the timetable to deliver both breadth and depth? Are students able to study a strong academic core of subjects but also afforded a well-rounded education including in the arts?

 

Have we identified the right end-points?

Is it clear what “end-points” we are building towards as a school and in each subject discipline that we teach? Is it clear what our students need to know and be able to do at each stage to reach those end-points? Will the end-points we set all our students on course towards fully prepare them for the next stage of their education and lives?

Do we make explicit links between related end-points within and across subject disciplines? As well as subject-specific knowledge and skills, do we also identify the research and study skills – and indeed other cross-curricular skills – that our students need to succeed? Are these skills explicitly taught and reinforced? Are they taught consistently across all subjects where applicable?

 

Have we planned and sequenced our curriculum effectively?

Does our planning ensure that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards these clearly defined end-points? Is there an appropriate pace that allows for sufficient breadth and depth?

Is content taught in a logical progression, systematically and explicitly enough for all students to acquire the intended knowledge and skills? Is there an appropriate level of challenge for all?

Do we bake retrieval practice into our curriculum to ensure we activate prior knowledge as and when appropriate and keep that prior knowledge accessible to students so that they can make connections between what they learned yesterday, what they are learning today, and what they will learn tomorrow? Does this enable students to forge ever-more complex schemata in long-term memory and aide automaticity?

 

Does our curriculum help to tackle social justice issues?

 

Have we planned to teach the knowledge and cultural capital our students need to access and understand our curriculum and go on to thrive in later life? Do we identify the barriers some students face in school and within each subject discipline, including though not solely a potential vocabulary deficit, and do we plan effective support strategies to help overcome those barriers?

 

 

2, Evaluating how curriculum plans are translated into classroom practice

We should also seek out data that answers the following questions to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching.

 

Do we enable students to understand key concepts, presenting information clearly?

Are our explanations effective – for example, do we make use of dual coding? Do we also model thinking aloud for students to make the invisible visible and the implicit explicit? Do we explicitly teach the language – including Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary – that students need to understand the curriculum?

Do we articulate clear learning outcomes and make explicit what students should know and be able to do at the end of each sequence of lessons? Do we establish routines for classroom discussions so that all students contribute fairly and in order that debate deepens their understanding?

Do we make use of “live” low-stakes assessment practices such as hinge questions and exit tickets to assess students’ understanding and to identify the gaps in their knowledge and skills, as well as their misunderstandings? Do we use these assessments to inform our planning and teaching so that lesson planning is fluid and responsive, rather than something to stick to religiously?

 

Do we ensure that students embed key concepts in their long-term memory and apply them fluently?

Do we teach in a way that helps students to transfer key knowledge to long-term memory?

Do we gain the active attention of students’ working memories and make them think hard but efficiently about curriculum content? Once encoded into long-term memory, do we provide plenty of opportunities for retrieval practice to ensure the knowledge in long-term memory is brought back into the working memory so that it remains accessible, and to encourage students to apply that knowledge in different contexts? Is prior learning linked to new learning, so that what is taught today builds upon what was taught yesterday and so forth?

 

Do we use formative assessment to check students’ understanding to inform our teaching and to develop their understanding?

Do all these assessments have a clear purpose? Do they provide valid data on which we can and do act? Is the feedback garnered from assessments meaningful and motivating to students? Does it help them to close the gap between their current performance and their desired performance? Is time set aside every time feedback is given to students so that they can process it, question it if needed, and act upon it in class while we provide support, challenge, and encouragement?

 

3, Evaluating the pace of student progress and student outcomes

As well as evaluating the effectiveness of our curriculum planning and teaching, we want to measure eventual outcomes so that we can determine what students have achieved and also the extent to which our curriculum planning and the way in which we have translated those curriculum plans into classroom practice have enabled students to achieve what we intended for them to achieve and that we have not perpetuated or opened any attainment gaps.

To be clear, by “outcomes” I do not solely mean test and exam results, of course; and nor do I solely mean qualification outcomes in the sense of certification.

The purpose of education is not just certification but to genuinely prepare students for the next stage of their education and lives. So, what does this look like? What might we assess in order to make a judgement about the impact of our curriculum on student outcomes?

Here, it might be helpful to look at the “personal development” judgement in the Ofsted inspection handbook which says, among other things, that “preparedness” is about:

  • Developing students as responsible, respectful, and active citizens who can play their part and become actively involved in public life as adults.
  • Developing students’ character, which we define as a set of positive personal traits, dispositions and virtues that informs their motivation and guides their conduct so that they reflect wisely, learn eagerly, behave with integrity, and cooperate consistently well with others.
  • Developing students’ confidence, resilience, and knowledge so that they can keep themselves mentally healthy.
  • Developing students’ understanding of how to keep physically healthy, eat healthily and maintain an active lifestyle, including giving ample opportunities for students to be active during the school day and through extra-curricular activities.
  • Providing an effective careers programme (and) supporting readiness for the next phase.

Ultimately, we should evaluate learning according to the extent to which we prepare all our students for their next steps – do they make good progress through our curriculum and go on to achieve positive destinations? Do our students leave us as well-rounded, cultured, inquisitive, caring, kind, resilient, knowledgeable human beings ready to make their own way in the world? And do we, therefore, make the world a better place one student at a time – for this surely is a measure of true success?

 

Final thought

And that concludes our ITT journey – I hope you’ve found it useful and that you agree with me that we can all, no matter our career stage, benefit from revisiting our training in order to refresh our thinking and reassess our effectiveness. I like to think that we call it a “teaching practice” because we will never master it – rather we must continue to experiment and thus learn and grow.

  • Matt Bromley is an education writer and advisor with more than 20 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher, principal, FE college vice-principal, and MAT director. Currently, he is a public speaker, trainer, school improvement advisor, and primary school governor. He remains a practising teacher and is the lead lecturer on a national ITT programme. Matt is author of numerous books on education and co-hosts the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Visit www.bromleyeducation.co.uk

 

Further information & references

Wiliam & Thompson: Integrating assessment with instruction: What will it take to make it work? In The Future of Assessment: Shaping teaching and learning, Dwyer & Mahwah (eds), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007: https://bit.ly/2yOXpUP