‘Too much variation” and “lack of consistency” in the quality of teaching and learning are phrases that jumped out of the Ofsted report on my school back in the spring of 2019.
No doubt the underlying issues contributed significantly to the “requires improvement” verdict of the inspectors. How we, as a whole school, tackled this challenge is the focus of these two articles. Here, we will explore the approach we developed in terms of the challenge we faced and the underpinning rationale of our proposed solution – The South Wirral Way of Excellence in Teaching .
And the second article (which has now been published here) will address the process we adopted for implementation and its impact – not least the follow-up Ofsted inspection in November 2022.
The challenges
The original Ofsted inspection highlighted issues we were already working to overcome within the science faculty, but which clearly had not been fully addressed by the inspection date.
The variation in teaching and learning, and therefore student outcomes, was greatest in both the science and mathematics faculties but for different reasons.
The mathematics faculty comprised of an experienced leadership team alongside less experienced colleagues, mainly NQTs. As a result these teachers needed support in developing the craft of teaching and building their repertoire of teaching techniques.
The science faculty, however, was well established, with almost all staff having been in the classroom for more than 10 years. During the previous few years there had been some changes to leadership of the faculty and teachers were planning lessons independently of one another.
The challenge for both faculties was to increase communication and collaboration in order to improve the experience for all students. Furthermore, we wanted to increase our collective understanding of the evidence from educational neuroscience research and what it tells us about learning and appropriate teaching strategies.
There were a number of whole school areas of focus which had been in place prior to the inspection. First, a working party created an Excellent Teacher Framework as part of the revamp of the appraisal process, which was strongly grounded in research including Barak Rosenshine’s 2012 Principles of Instruction.
Second, there has been a considerable amount of work done on making the intent of the curriculum clear and explicit.
And finally, there was and continues to be a strong focus on literacy across the curriculum and ensuring that all students are supported in all subjects to develop these skills.
A focus on science
Our work in these areas were helping to make some improvements in science, but for me the first step was to identify the specific concerns and areas of variation within science lessons through in-depth quality assurance – using learning walks, book-looks, student, and staff voice.
This work highlighted a number of areas for development, but the biggest issue was the lack of independent tasks in some lessons, which meant that the majority of students had become passive learners and were not being challenged in their thinking.
We started to address this by sharing ideas for challenging tasks and updating schemes of work and the variation began to reduce; staff were sharing resources and discussing ideas for lessons during subject meetings and starting to have ad hoc conversations about teaching and learning.
In particular, the other members of the science leadership team became enthused and engaged more readily with educational research. So far so good.
The next challenge to arise within lessons was that of cognitive overload. We had introduced more challenging tasks, but many students struggled to access them, which led to low-level disruption in lessons. It was then I started to read more around the application of educational neuroscience and in particular was struck by the simplicity, yet power, of both Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction and the “I do, we do, you do” model of teaching, otherwise known as the Gradual Release of Responsibility approach (Fisher & Frey, 2013).
Through discussions with the science leadership team and the headteacher we realised that these two things could be brought together to develop a framework for teaching which would not only improve the experience for students but also provide teachers with further insights into the process of learning. This would complement our Excellent Teacher Framework and empower teachers to increase the effectiveness of learning episodes.
The South Wirral Way
The faculty leader for mathematics was working on a very similar project and so, in collaboration with the school’s teaching and learning lead, we established the key principles and the rationale behind The South Wirral Way.
We started by considering which of Rosenshine’s principles fitted in each section of the model we were considering:
- I do: Present new material in small steps (with student practice after each step).
- We do: Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students. Provide models. Guide student practice. Check for student understanding.
- You do: Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step. Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks. Require and monitor independent practice. Obtain a high success rate.
The following principles were missing from the model:
- Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
- Engage students in weekly and monthly review.
To incorporate the first of these we added a retrieval practice activity to the start of every lesson and agreed that reviews should be built into our assessment activities.
Once this framework was in place we considered the specific needs of our students and the development of our curriculum and added our own principles to the relevant sections. For example, in science we added being explicit and discussing the etymology of key vocabulary during the “I do” section.
This approach to structuring the learning episodes was trialled in science and mathematics lessons with the impact, both positive and negative, being discussed regularly within and between the faculties.
This development work involved exploring key theories including the Working Memory Model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) – you might also consider Willingham’s Simple Model of Memory (Willingham, 2009) – and Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 2017) alongside a range of both subject-specific and more generalised education research.
Through these discussions we realised that there needed to be a clarity of understanding regarding the reasons for each phase and the types of activities which could be utilised to achieve the aims. This produced an agreed set of core principles (figure 1) and an agreed rationale (figure 2) along with subject-specific examples which we could share with teaching teams and continue to develop.
Fig 1: The Core Principles of the South Wirral Way (top image)
Fig 2: The Rationale for the South Wirral Way
Through development with the teaching teams in both the science and mathematics faculties we refined the principles and rationale and explored the pitfalls and possible solutions until we had developed a collective understanding of The South Wirral Way.
We believed that this could work to not only reduce the variation and lack of consistency which had been identified by Ofsted, but also to improve the overall quality of education for all students in the school.
We had a plan, and the next step was to implement it across the whole school – and then Covid-19 hit. My second article will explore the process of implementing a whole school curriculum change against the backdrop of the pandemic-induced challenges (and opportunities) that colleagues will remember all too well.
- Dr Helen Darlington is the faculty leader for science at South Wirral High School in Merseyside.
Further information & resources
- Baddeley & Hitch: Working memory. In The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in research and theory (8), Bower (ed), Academic Press, 1974.
- Fisher & Frey: Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility, ASCD, 2013; http://bit.ly/4128gmw
- Rosenshine: Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know, American Educator, Spring 2012: http://bit.ly/2ZpbIqW
- See also from SecEd: I do–we do–you do: Learning more with metacognition, 2023: https://bit.ly/405vXdp
- See also from SecEd: A teacher’s guide to retrieval practice: Let’s make some memories (stick), 2022: https://bit.ly/seced-RP
- Sweller: Cognitive Load Theory: Without an understanding of human cognitive architecture, instruction is blind, ResearchEd, Melbourne, 2017: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOLPfi9Ls-w
- Willingham: Why Don’t Students Like School? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom, Jossey-Bass, 2009.