More tips from Harry Fletcher-Wood
Video transcript
okay what about tip number four um so the tip is work out why things work and concretely i mean be really specific about what’s happening and this this partly is on my mind because i wrote a blog post the other day about um some research that i did in with with some great colleagues about um how professional development works and what we did we looked at over 100 studies we looked we tried to pin down like what are the mechanisms of change so instead of saying like if you think about the existing guidance on professional development it’s tended to be like is the cpd collaborative does it include experts and so on and it’s like well that’s all well and good but if it includes experts what are they doing like are they practicing around the stage dancing are they giving you really specific guidance are they sharing models are they getting you to practice your next lesson and so on and so on and and what we learned was the mechanisms that we’d pinned down could explain a substantial degree of the the difference in how much of a difference cpd made to teachers um and so you know part like partly you could say we’ll just go and learn from these mechanisms but the underlying point is like can we be really really specific about what’s going on and so in the same way if you tell me like i had a great lesson with my year eight class the other day and i’m like i have a nightmare with them what do you do and you tell me like well i’ve developed a really strong culture of learning that’s like that um but if you if you can tell me when to talk habits again like well i’ve built a habit that whenever they get stuck they have to ask each other and they’re used to doing that and they always do that before they ask me and that then allows me to get around i’m like oh that is a concrete thing i can do and i will go and try and do that so so getting away from i’ve become incredibly suspicious of the abstract basically like getting away from big words and big ideas because you know it’s like motherhood not like strong culture of learning no one’s against that but if i don’t know what it means i can’t use it and so get really trying to get down to exactly what’s going on in whatever it is we’re trying to do oh this is a fascinating one miss harry so again a few things to say about this the first i love what you’re doing because these are all kind of building on on the prior things that you’ve said it’s again it’s working out what works often you’ll have to try and strip out you know maybe you did 10 things that lesson well what was what was the one or two things that you think had the biggest impact on on on how that worked and let’s communicate that that feels really powerful and secondly it’s it seems to me that this this has kind of practical applications in terms of lesson observations because that’s where you often get these kind of vague things about your pace or the culture and so on and so forth whereas again it’s the role of an observer for me to try and pinpoint what was the one or two practical things that you did that either cause things to not work quite swell or cause things to work and how can we build on that and it’s it’s a challenge though isn’t it kind of there’s all these kind of cliches and buzzwords in education it’s a challenge to to actually pinpoint the practical actionable things i mean it is but if you if you can’t say what it is you probably should be keeping your mouth closed and i complete the lesson objective observation feedback is a really good example we’ve all had it of like you know i just would have liked to see a bit more challenge it’s like well if you can’t tell you’re meant to be the smart person in the room you’re the one observing me you can’t tell me what that looks like or how you would have done it in the context of that lesson i’m like if i was smart enough to do it i’d have done it if you can’t tell me how to do it we’re stuck aren’t we and we talk about this in feedback don’t we like you know dylan william has these examples of you know like be more systematic and students being if i knew how to be more systematic i’d have done it in the first place um so yeah i think it is you know if if you are in the uh dangerous position that you and i are in that we’re asked to give advice to others it is your professional responsibility to give that advice in a way that that is comprehensible and that is unambiguous if you if you really believe it um so yeah like it’s don’t you know we can use the abstract words but no one’s gonna understand them so you have to root them in in the concrete just to put you on the spot again harry you’re too good at dealing with on the slot question so let me just ask you this one i’m just thinking about lesson observations because i think it’s fascinating both from the role of the person watching a lesson or a part lesson but also from the role of the person who’s being watched is there anything about related to this tip about working out what works that can be either put in place before the lesson is watched by by the teacher and i’m thinking along the lines of watch out for me doing this i’m going to do so you know deciding on the focus or something that can happen in in the feedback after the lesson that can really get to the nub of of what’s working or what’s not working well i’m a really huge fan of instructional coaching and this idea of pinpointing one action step that needs work now so so it’s not pace it’s not questioning it’s not culture it’s right down to like you know it let’s say it were pace be like okay let’s think about the way that you get transition from one activity to another and try and find a way that you can give your instructions for a transition in two sentences instead of ten and and that is a vibe like that’s really clear that’s also a thing that i can viably fix next week in a way that pace is going to take me years to fix um and in the same way i think uh so in a sort of an idealized instructional coaching feedback meeting you talk about one thing that’s gone really well and one thing that you’re going to work on and and as the coach that it’s sometimes you really have to narrow things down because actually you’ve got someone who wants to talk about seven things they notice they want to be better and say right you’re not going to manage all of them at once let’s but you know put that in those words but like let’s just focus on this one thing for this week because that’s achievable and then when you do it like wow it’s working i feel feel better um so yeah i think again you and i and probably most listeners have experienced like here’s 10 things that went well and 10 things you need to work on you don’t do any of them there’s no point doing it so don’t again cut everything in half and if it’s less than observation and feedback cut in half again and again and then you might have something useful fantastic