More tips from Charlie Burkitt
Video transcript
okay charlie fifth and final tip please sure um so my final one it was a huge one for me actually improving my teaching it’s to study the teachers you respect now what i mean by that is in quite a practical sense um in the i’m sure so in michaela it’s the case that i am constantly and i’m so lucky for this surrounded by world-class teachers that i can go and watch at any time and learn from and i’m so so lucky for that and in the early days that i joined the school i used to walk around the building just kind of laughing at how ridiculous it was that i would get to see these kind of you know best in the world teaching moments happening everywhere and you can walk into any classroom and just the standard is so high it’s ridiculous and you could study anyone in the building and you would get better at teaching now i think it is the case that in any school that you go to you will also have sort of at least pockets of brilliance happening and i’m sure that anyone listening will be able to think in their school of of the teachers that they really respect and the teachers who they think really teach lessons brilliantly now what you need to do and this is so so important you need to get into those teachers rooms and you need to just study every little detail of what it is they’re doing i used to go into teachers rooms and we do it over email we have a sort of feedback system um i would open up you know an email and i’d just be writing down almost a transcript of the lesson of everything that’s happening i’d be saying okay said this said this said this did this with their body did this with their voice looked at this kid in this way um tried to portray this emotion explain this thing in this way use this little memory device um and i would just write the transcript down of what i was seeing in front of me and that really focuses the mind on how is this person producing this magic in this room because you can walk into a classroom and you know catherine talks about watching federer play tennis you know it can look like federer playing tennis or messi playing football and you just think well they’re just kind of a genius and this is just sort of this god-given uh ability they have but but the thing we’re teaching and this is probably true of sport as well is that if you study it if you really think to yourself what exactly is this person doing to create this atmosphere in this room to get what they’re getting out of the kids right now you can’t actually boil it down to a kind of set of almost rules and principles uh or of kind of tips that you can follow in your own classroom and then you go back to your own classroom and you try and embody some of that now of course in the beginning you’re going to be doing a little bit of a mimicking act as you kind of find your feet and what style works for you and then what you find is over time you kind of settle into what version of you fits in with all the things you’ve seen now of course you can’t be messy you can’t be federer you’re not trying to be that person you’re just trying to take some of the essence of what they do brilliantly and convert that into how can you produce that into brilliant teaching and and just the final thing i’ll say on that is that then a huge part of that is to try and get those people if you can to come and watch you teaching and to give you feedback on how you’re doing that and whether you’re getting it right because um it’s very hard to see yourself through through your own eyes you know you can film yourself that’s a great thing to do we film ourselves off and we get other people to film us and you know i remember in the early days of me teaching here i was shown footage of myself teaching that was so painful to watch that was so important in showing me you know what i was getting wrong and and what could i do differently and i’m very grateful for that now and um it is so important it’s brilliant this charlie just three points on that so we’ll start with the video because that was one of the things i was going to ask you um so would this be a regular part of kind of cpd and stuff at michaela watching clips of other teachers doing things well or is it more kind of on a more kind of ad hoc basis if if you happen to be focusing on something what role does does video play yeah so video does sometimes play a role i would say it’s not uh constant it often depends on what we’re talking about as a whole school cpd but it will sometimes be the case that uh if one of the members of the senior team is presenting on a particular piece of a particular aspect of teaching that they would have gone around and filmed some of the staff who do that really really well and then we’ll watch it through and we’ll talk about it and that’s obviously really useful cpd as well as as i mentioned before filming yourself and seeing what’s happening with yourself and you know what we do a little bit of is just filming of each of each other and then you might run it through with the person that filmed it and just say oh yeah i really liked how you did this bit maybe that bit could have been better and obviously you know that can be a bit difficult to watch yourself in the beginning but if if fundamentally you want to improve yourself as a teacher then it’s going to be worth it in the end and the one of the really wonderful things we have at mckayla is just kind of a kind of low stakes feedback loop that’s always going on where you know it’s a very open door policy and people are popping in and out and and you know you get friends and colleagues and also sometimes of course your line manager popping in and saying yeah really like that part this bit could have been a bit different what do you think about this um and that kind of constant feedback just keeps you open to your again your kind of teaching blind spots and um makes you better it’s great that um yeah i’ve i’ve had myself filmed numerous times and it’s painful isn’t it charlie flipping it you think you’re doing a good job till you watch yourself on film and second second question on this um one of the things i often find that goes wrong with lesson observations from an observer’s point of view is if you don’t go in with a focus whereas if a teacher says to me i want you to come and watch me and i want you to watch how i do whole class assessment or i want you to watch how i model and then i’ve got a specific focus but it sounds to me like what you’re doing is more of a general thing are you going in there just almost not expect not having this focus and just trying to just see what you can see or do you sometimes go in looking for something specific if that makes sense yeah totally it really depends on what it is that the the position you’re in in the development of yourself as a teacher because i would say that if if you’re not working on anything in particular it’s always brilliant to just walk in and see what’s happening and then note the general and i’d say particularly in the early days of uh for me working at michaela but for anyone listening maybe just their teaching career in general you do want to be quite general in your view of what is really good teaching because you’re not at the stage yet to be very very specific now having said that of course if a line manager or someone you respect has been telling you this particular element of your teaching isn’t going so well at the moment then of course you want to go and you want to focus on that thing so for me in the early days it’s that i was very wood when i was teaching i wasn’t showing a kind of range of emotion and it was all a bit robotic i went into full kind of robot charlie mode and that you know it wasn’t good and it was kind of boring and you know that’s what the video was painful to watch now um i then was obviously going to members of staff who i really respected i thought were doing a brilliant job and i was kind of watching them and thinking right how are they avoiding being robotic what is it what is it that they’re doing that means that they’re not wooden and i’m being wooden um so obviously yes it’s a good idea to be specific as well but the general can also help brilliant final question on this and it relates to that charlie so what would be like a concrete thing that from one of these lesson observations you watched the teacher do that you thought all right okay you made a note of it and then that was something you could enact now whether that’s something to do with stopping being wooden as you say or something else what would be an example of something that you got from one of these observations yeah it’s it’s almost hard to describe to you because it is essentially my entire teaching persona that i i have taken from other people so it’s difficult for me to boil it down into atoms when it is all of what makes me up over kind of the four or five years that i’ve been at michaela watching other brilliant teachers uh learning as much as i can from them now i’ll just give you a small example of something that you know i just thought of the other day and when i was talking to this teacher um i i once saw you know a really excellent member of staff there was a kid who tried it was it was a lower ability kid tried to say something to the uh to the teacher and you’ve probably had this experience it just came out garbled you know they were trying their best and it came out garbled and the teacher said uh i i know what it is that you’re trying to say sort of i know what’s happening in your head but we’re not quite there yet some you know and then and then moved on to someone else and i just thought that was a lovely way to in a really warm loving way say to people you’re not quite there but i get what you’re saying and you know i these days i teach a bottom set class and i find myself using a phrase similar to that all the time you know and that that’s just a tiny nugget of something i saw happen in a lesson i thought yeah i like that i’m taking that and i’ve kind of been using it ever since and as i say all of what i do in michaela classrooms are atoms of that lovely that’s fantastic