So hello, everyone, and welcome. I think there are still few people coming that we'll kick off anyhow.
It's quite a trick from the front gates we know. So we'll leave everything open for a few minutes and other people can arrive.
So my name is Diane Meier, professor of teacher education here at the University of Oxford,
and it's my very great pleasure to chair this evening's Oxford Education Society annual lecture.
We're delighted this year that Professor Jenny Gore,
who is a visiting professor here within the Department of Education and also laureate professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia,
has agreed to give the lecture titled The Quest for Better Teaching.
After Jenny delivers her lecture,
we'll have three respondents who are going to take about five minutes each to comment on issues raised in the lecture.
They've got Professor Dame Alison Peacock from the Chartered College of Teaching,
Professor Mark Mills from University College London, and Associate Professor Trevor Martin from the University of Oxford.
And I'll say a little bit more about each of them after Jenny's lecture before they make their comments.
Then I'll open the floor for your questions. And after that, hopefully by about 6:30, you're all invited to join us for drinks reception in the foyer,
and we can continue our discussions in a more informal setting then.
But before we begin, I'd like to remind you that the proceedings this evening are public and the lecture will be recorded.
To start, I'd like to introduce Professor Joanne Baird, the director of Oxford's Department of Education,
to welcome you and say a few words about the Oxford Education Society and the department's one hundredth anniversary.
Thanks, Joanne. Well,
thank you for coming in this lovely and sunny evening always feels like summer has arrived and we are
expecting quite a few more people and we're just wondering if the weather has distracted them along the way.
But it is fabulous to have you here. This Oxford Education Society annual lecture.
It's great to have alumni and friends of the department gathered here this evening to consider this important matter of quality and teaching.
In fact, there's no consensus internationally. If you want to improve education systems, that's where you start.
It's with the quality of teaching and schools. As Diane said, this is a special year for the department.
We're celebrating her 100th anniversary as a Department of Education.
We did, of course, have humble beginnings in the university. Indeed, at the beginning there was dispute about whether it was even a discipline.
So much has changed. In 1919, the purpose of the department was actually to prepare teachers for elementary and secondary schools.
We've come a long way. Last year, we were rated first in the UK for degrees by the Times Higher Education World University Subject Rankings,
and we were rated first in the last UK Research Excellence Framework.
Now, of course, nobody puts too much faith in these ranking systems, but it's really churlish to just ignore them.
Excellence in teacher education remains a core part of the department today,
as demonstrated through the recently received outstanding Ofsted rating of our PGC programmes.
And today we have seven postgraduate programmes, nine research groups, four research centres, over 590 postgraduate students and more than 160 staff.
The department takes particular pride in the diversity of our students,
which adds to the intellectual environment of the university, and only 33 percent of our students come from the UK and the EU.
And research in the department continues to grow, especially this century,
we see in 2018, the number of researchers in the department increased by over two thirds.
And the research income exceeded departmental records.
The number of doctor applications also increased by 20 percent. So things are going quite well.
A research and teaching extends beyond schooling ranging from the air,
the years through higher education, further education and into the labour market.
And we have a keen interest in educational technology, all of those stages of schooling.
We're interdisciplinary with anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, statisticians and even some mathematicians.
And there's mainly a respectful interchange of ideas between these disciplines.
But it is fitting that this evening's lecture in the centennial year will return to the topic of our origins of quality and teacher education.
Since that was the founding objective of the department and it's been a central feature of our research and practise ever since our handover,
noted Diane, who's going to introduce our speaker. Thanks, John.
So now to our lecture and to introduce Jenny.
Jenny Gold is the Laureate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle in Australia,
where she was dean of education and head of school for six years from 2008 to 2013.
She's currently director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre and has just completed a four
year term as co-editor of the prestigious international journal Teaching and Teacher Education.
In 2017, Jenny was named the University of Newcastle's first female laureate, professor and the first laureate in the humanities and social sciences.
She's won more than twenty three point six million Australian dollars in research funding about 13 million pounds,
including 10 grants awarded by the Australian Research Council.
Her most recent grant from the philanthropic Paul Ramsay Foundation totalled
sixteen point four million dollars Australian and it's over the next five years.
Widely published and cited more than 10000 times,
her research consistently centres on quality and equity rates ranging across such topics as teacher development,
pedagogical reform and enhancing student outcomes from schooling.
The current research agenda focuses on the impact of quality teaching rounds on teachers and students
using randomised controlled trials and also the formation of educational aspirations during schooling.
Using longitudinal and cross sectional analysis. She's come a long way since completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
which was a faculty and critique of critical and feminist pedagogy discourses as rigid regimes of truth.
In 2018, she was proudly awarded the Paul Brock Memorial Medal for outstanding contributions to social justice and evidence informed policy,
practise and research. Please join me in welcoming Jenny.
Thanks very much, Diane, and thank you all for coming on a beautiful Friday evening.
It's an absolute honour to have been asked to deliver this lecture,
and particularly in this the 100th year of celebrations for Oxford Department of Education.
So thank you.
I need to do a couple of technical things here because you wouldn't otherwise be able to see the slides and I can't see anything without my glasses,
so we need to stand clear of the doors because they're about to shut and proceed.
It's high tech. Look at that.
We don't have anything like this where I come from, and that doesn't actually help a great deal, except for perhaps noise.
But now the blinds closed and I might wait till they finish before I start because it's a little distracting.
So your eyes will have to adjust slowly to the darkening feel a little bit like we're in a cinema shortly.
I think. Just a little bit slow.
So the quest for better teaching the title I've chosen, I think, reflects my own life's work as an academic in education,
but it's obviously something much larger than any individual's quest.
It's something that it seems we're all concerned about.
And Joanne made the same point really about Oxford's origins and concerns for the quality of teaching here.
I have a lot that I want to try and cover in the next 45 or so minutes, so just to give you a bit of a signpost as to where I'm heading.
I plan to start talking a little bit about this global push for better teaching to
talk about why it's so hard to achieve real change in in the quality of teaching.
Tony Bright talks about the glacial pace of change, and I think we feel that sometimes and especially the longer we've been around in this,
this game, I start to feel very old now because I I feel the frustration with the lack of change.
I'm going to then talk about teacher professional development. Most of my work at the moment is focussed on continuing professional development,
but it really has strong implications for the work we do with pre-service teachers as well.
I'm going to talk about why that seems to be so difficult.
Also, I'm then going to turn to be talk turned to talking about my own work of code as a promising alternative.
I hope that I demonstrate and don't just assert that point. Recognising, of course, that there are still no guarantees,
even when we have the weight of evidence and even some good resources behind the initiative and leave.
If you're not already feeling provoked by a number of things I've said with a couple of other provocations at the end.
If we look around the world at the moment and think about what's going on in efforts to improve teaching,
I think there's four main strategies in play.
The first is this push to recruit better quality teachers, and we have this slippage between teachers and teaching, of course.
This is pretty big in Australia. There's a decree that teachers should come from the top 30 per cent of the population, however, that's determined.
Of course, we want good people to be working with our young people, but it's a long term solution at best.
By the time we identify, recruit, train, get them into schools and they become a critical mass in schools.
We're talking a decade. So in terms of a solution to solving any problem with the quality of teaching, it's a long term solution.
And it's also one that I think is a bit disrespectful of the current teaching workforce.
When we say we need to get better people in teaching, we're effectively saying the people in teaching are not good enough.
There's a lot of work on trying to improve teacher education programmes and rethink and reconceptualize what we're doing in teacher education.
Again, it's a really important pathway to think about in the in the UK.
And I guess in England in particular, a lot of energy seems to have gone into thinking about how we deliver teacher education.
The diversification of pathways seems to be greater here than I've seen anywhere else in the world,
and yet we're still struggling to get results in the US in particular.
There's a lot of energy going into measuring and evaluating the quality of teaching.
We see value added measures being used to even higher and more, and particularly to fire teachers in some instances.
Now, measurement problems aside, and there are many with using value-added measures in the kind of blunt ways that they sometimes get used.
We all know that we can measure or evaluate something as much as we like, and it doesn't change it.
It doesn't make it better. So from my perspective,
the most promising strategy and perhaps the most critical one is to be thinking about how we enhance the professional learning of all teachers.
In Australia, we're talking about 250000 teachers in England.
I believe it's more like four hundred and fifty or five hundred thousand teachers
working all day every day with our children and our young people making a difference.
If we can be better supporting those teachers,
I think it's a really powerful strategy for for change and it's something that we need to continue to explore.
I'm not going to spend much time talking about the challenges to wide scale improvements are familiar to all of us.
You know, we're dealing with structural issues and systemic and political issues.
There are policies, resourcing constraints there are in Australia, for instance,
there are state jurisdictions that are kind of in competition with each other, even though they say they're not.
And so they don't like to borrow from one state to another because everyone has to invent their own pedagogical framework or whatever.
So there's all of that that gets in the way of improvement. We're talking about social and cultural issues.
The status of teaching remains a huge challenge in most of our sort of western nations, at least with issues of social capital.
You know who's got the ear of the government who is seen to be the latest big thing in education makes a difference.
Issues of leadership and interpersonal relations amongst teachers in schools also impact on how much change is possible.
And then we confront these kind of massive paradigmatic differences in academia that mean that we're working sometimes against each other.
In a lecture I was asked to deliver by the Australian Association for Research in Education a couple of years ago,
which I called reconciling educational research traditions,
I argued about how these paradigmatic differences really have slowed down the pace of change when
we end up aligning ourselves and identifying ourselves as being a certain kind of academic,
which means we read in a certain field.
We go to conferences only in a certain field, and we tend to already frame most of what we do within a certain field.
There's just a reference there to the lecture and to the the actual YouTube clip, as well as to the written lecture.
This is how professional development is meant to work, and it's a very simple graphic, but we design professional development.
We put in place certain processes and it's meant to have an impact on teacher learning, on teaching practise and therefore on student outcomes.
It's a tidy logic. It's why we have billions of dollars invested every year in teacher professional learning,
and I've got a question mark here because there's actually very little empirical evidence that shows
the impact of teacher professional development on particularly teaching practise and student outcomes.
And when it does, it tends to be this skill. This class, this teacher or this topic or this part of the curriculum, it's not wide scale change,
and it's the wide scale change that I think most nations are seeking and most departments are seeking.
Most systems of education are seeking.
Professional development itself confronts a whole lot of challenges, and it's a bit blunt and not pulling any punches with the first point,
I guess that in professional development field it is a crowded space filled with some charlatans and showmen and people are selling their wares.
And some of it's very seductive, but a lot of it has very weak evidence base.
And I think there are some important and very big questions that need to be asked about some of what we were investing in.
I have to grab my glasses, I can't see.
There's a lot of professional development that has historically, if not so much now treated teachers quite condescendingly and patronisingly,
you know, teachers have education degrees, they have experience, they have wisdom that's accumulated through years of practise.
When we bring teachers together and we teach treat, treat teaching productively,
for instance, with programmes like five tips to successful classroom management,
it's not what's going to resonate with teachers, and it's certainly not going to make a difference on a wide scale to their practise.
There has been a real turn in recent years from the kind of one off sage on the stage professional
development style of things to more collaborative forms of school based professional development.
I think that's a really positive turn.
But one of the things that I think happens with a lot of the collaborative PPG is that the emphasis tends to be on processes rather than substance.
I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute. And I think that in emphasising process, however, that we're not doing teachers justice.
We're not providing them with the kind of guidance that they really are seeking in order to do the best possible job that they can.
So we still have this problem that we're not empowering teachers with a lot of the
professional development that's done and we're not producing wide scale change.
I just want to share with you a slide from some of our own research.
On the vertical axis is a whole coding scale for quality teaching, and I'm going to explain that in a minute.
On a one to five scale and across the horizontal axis, we have years of teaching experience from zero to twenty four plus.
The dots represent lessons. They're all over the place.
And the main pattern that's evident here, apart from a little bit of convergence, perhaps towards the later end of the spectrum, is a flat line.
No difference in the quality of teaching as measured by our model between the beginning and experienced teachers.
That's quite a confronting image. How can it be? How can it be?
We know teachers get better with time, surely. I think there are two main explanations of explain this image.
One is that we in teacher education are doing a great job of preparing graduates ready to hit the ground running,
and I do believe there's some merit in that argument.
On the other hand, one of my passions is the reform of teacher education, and I still believe we can be doing more and better in teacher education.
The second main explanation is that most teachers are not getting professional development that fundamentally impacts on how they teach,
and I actually think that's the more powerful explanation. Teachers are doing lots of professional development in Australia on assessment,
curriculum reporting, technology, cyber bullying, health and safety, wellness, all of which matter.
But they are getting very little professional development on pedagogy, certainly not of the kind that fundamentally changes what it means to teach.
I'll come back to that argument that point shortly. It would be easy to do a critique of some of the rubbish that's out there.
But what I want to focus on for a few minutes is actually some of our favourite approaches to continuing professional development or in fact,
pre-service teacher development. These are the for now.
I think all of these offers a great deal. And we've learnt a lot through these kinds of processes.
But I want to push a little bit and say, what are some of the limitations?
What are some of the ways in which they might actually be contributing to the slow pace of change?
If we think about clinical practise and this is a term that's used in the literature so broadly
to mean everything from school based placements through to what some call bug in ear coaching,
where teachers have a microphone in the ear and someone gives them like live feedback on what they should be doing differently in the classroom.
But if we think about the best of clinical practise, these premises to me seem to be fundamental.
That is that teachers can become more skilful with deliberate practise and with the help of experienced or expert coaches,
mentors, experience colleagues,
and that it's really useful to break teaching down into its parts and work on perfecting those patterns that that becomes powerful,
professional learning.
I think we can all say that there was some merit in that, you know, it's important to practise how to ask questions or give feedback and so on.
But I think the challenge is that in relying heavily on the expert for feedback,
it can leave teachers lacking confidence in their own capacities to make good decisions and to solve
problems of practise and in need of that kind of external validation that they are doing the right thing.
A kind of external validation that's actually not readily available in most schools, mostly despite all of our efforts,
teachers are still working fairly independently in classrooms and not getting a whole lot of feedback.
Certainly through the research I've been doing, I've come to see that so many teachers have no idea how good they are.
Now, some of them are not so good, and we need to accept that.
But those who are fabulous, they don't have any touchstone for reassuring them that they are fabulous.
They think they're pretty good. Occasionally, a parent thanks them for the wonderful work they've done with their child.
Occasionally, a child says that was a great lesson. Miss. Thank you.
And occasionally colleagues come into their rooms and say, you're doing a great job, but mostly they don't get feedback.
And I think by treating teaching as a set of discrete skills, we're not reflecting the realities of classroom practise.
Of course, the skills are there, but how do they come together? Philip Jackson years ago.
So the classrooms are characterised by multi dimensionality, unpredictability and simultaneity.
You know, it's all happening at once.
So how do we help teachers to go from the discrete skills to the whole picture and to cope with all of that stuff, the chaos that is the classroom?
If we looked briefly at research informed practise, most of you would be familiar with the RSA, the Bureau RSA report that came out in 2014,
that teachers need to engage more fully with research being the fundamental premise so that we have disciplined
innovation and collaborative enquiry embedded in the professional culture and working as the established way of teaching.
Again, of course, we want teachers to be informed by research. However.
I think. That in many ways, we're asking teachers to do something they don't know how to do because in teacher education,
we can provide so little guidance in reading and conducting research, so little of the curriculum can be devoted to research.
Secondly, most teachers don't have time to do research or engage fully with research because they're
so overworked and overburdened with some of the bureaucratic processes that are in place.
Certainly in Australia, we hear about high levels of stress. We hear about mental illness with teachers who are trying to cope with all of that stuff.
So how do they fit research in? And I think the reality is that most of us in universities can't even come to terms with all the
research in a field to determine what it is that someone ought to be doing in the classroom.
Because again, we have these different paradigms. We have so much information, we have different methodologies.
We don't trust certain methodologies, both on multiple sides of the spectrum.
And so we're asking teachers sometimes to do stuff that we can't even do in the academy.
Again, I'm not suggesting that we don't engage teachers in research,
but I think imploring teachers to be research informed can leave them feeling stretched incompetent because they don't know enough about how to
interpret and read research or how to conduct research uncertain about what to trust when it comes to what practises they should be following.
Even when you have something like the ETF investing so heavily in trying to identify what works and still struggling to come up with,
you know, clear advice for teachers and it can move teachers feeling frustrated.
So I'm trying to think here about how these approaches position teachers.
If we go to the more specific, enquiry oriented practise where teachers are seen to be learners and producers of knowledge in their own right,
and we value practitioner knowledge,
and we try and encourage the development of strong professional voice and identity and engage teachers in authentic reflection.
Again, of course, we want to encourage teachers to be enquiring into their practise and in fact, teachers do that anyway.
It's a normal part of working, you know, we reflect on what we're doing.
However, I think with enquiry or into practise,
we have to accept the fact that teacher enquiries often have very limited currency in the broader
field because people claim that they don't meet the evidentiary standards to warrant epistemic merit.
And so what happens is, although we respect your practitioner knowledge,
teachers can end up feeling that their efforts are simply local, partial and personal.
Even when they do that, working groups and even when it's published in practitioner journals because we value practitioner knowledge,
but it doesn't make it to the policymakers very often. As one example?
Well, I'm feeling the weight of the room, you're all going, Oh, she's she's tearing apart everything we've done.
If we then look finally at what's happened to the collective collaborative conversations,
this is certainly a big push now in Australia and New Zealand. The idea that we need teachers.
Teachers need time to talk. They need time to ask questions. To examine evidence to interrogate that and to work through processes together.
Because if we can give teachers enough time to talk through problems in practise or to think about how to improve their practise,
it's going to improve. Now it may well, and we know that collaborative conversations can be powerful.
But of course, on the other hand, conversations can be highly idiosyncratic.
Depending on the group of people who come together. They can be substantively quite weak because it relies on what people bring to the conversation,
and they can really be hit and miss in terms of any professional learning that might occur
as a result of the conversation based on who it is that's coming into the conversation.
What insight, what knowledge, what experience and so on that they bring to the work.
So to kind of summarise some of where I've been to so far, some of the major concerns, I think in general,
these kinds of approaches, even the best of them tend to position teachers as inadequate in expert or uninformed.
And that that has consequences for teachers willingness to engage and commit and and work as hard as they possibly can,
but also and particularly it has real consequences for their confidence and their sense of knowing that they're doing a good job.
Part of the problem is that all of our approaches are imbued with power, knowledge relations.
A little bit of my Vicodin history coming in here that act in really quite contradictory ways.
You know, we we value practitioner knowledge, but maybe not really.
We provide teachers with expert mentors in order to help them.
But in the end,
there's the risk that it can mean that the teachers don't feel empowered because they don't have confidence in their own capacity to sort things out.
And I think this focus on one skill, one teacher, one problem of practise at a time is also part of the reason that change is slow and small scale.
Now, there's certainly evidence of all of these sorts of approaches making a difference for teachers, for a group of teachers.
And that's fantastic. But how do we multiply that? How do we make it happen on a grand scale?
And again, that's where I think some of my work is positioned.
So if I talk about this alternative, what is it that I can bring to this kind of conversation in the quest for better teaching?
And as I say, I hope this is not simply an assertion, at least by the end of it.
First of all, I want to be very clear that our approach quality teaching grounds builds on these earlier approaches that I've been talking about.
It is a form of clinical practise, but at its heart it treats teaching holistically rather than domestically.
We have components to the quality teaching pedagogical models that we use,
but we always ask teachers to think about the whole lesson and all of the aspects of classroom practise that are part of our model simultaneously.
Rather than working on one thing a week or one thing thing a year or one thing a term or whatever the approach is, research informed.
It's very much building on a whole body of research about good pedagogy.
And by being research informed and helping teachers to become informed about that research,
it helps to both guide their work, but also to authorise their work.
So teachers feel that, in fact, they have some reason to try certain things because they believe that there's some,
some certainty, some truth, at least some hope behind them.
The work is enquiry oriented. We are asking teachers to enquire into their practise, but they're not starting from scratch.
They're guided by this thing we call the quality teaching model, which I'm about to share with you,
and it values both practitioner knowledge and scientific knowledge if we can briefly make that distinction.
And it's very collaborative, but it attends deeply to power relations.
And so it's not just about bringing people to work together, but being really mindful of the way in which hierarchies within schools,
for instance, can get in the way of powerful professional learning.
Elizabeth City and Richard oaMot have done a lot of work on what they call instructional rounds,
and this is a statement that they made some years ago now a decade ago,
that we can have 10 educators from the same district watching a 15 minute video and coming up with everything from high praise to excoriation.
They conclude that gaining an explicit and widely held view of what constitutes
good teaching and learning in a setting is the first step to scaling up quality.
And this has been a real, I guess, starting point for a lot of the work that we've been doing.
How do we help teachers to gain an explicit and widely held view of what constitutes good teaching and learning?
The quality teaching model is our tentative answer to that question.
Now this has been around in New South Wales since 2003.
It's its intellectual antecedents lie with the authentic pedagogy work that Fred Newman did in the United
States in the mid 1990s and the work we did on productive pedagogy for the state of Queensland in Australia.
A little time after that.
Effectively, the quality teaching model is a refinement of the productive pedagogy model, which is an expansion of the authentic pedagogy model.
They all have the same intellectual lineage.
Newman was actually concerned about Constructivism and the lack of intellectual vigour that can occur when Constructivism was for foregrounded,
and so all of these approaches addressed the fact that historically we've tended
to look at intellectual rigour at the expense of relevance or vice versa.
We've really worked on fabulous, experiential learning.
But sometimes the intellectual rigour has dropped away.
The model here suggests that all three of the dimensions I'm about to show you need to be held at a high level.
Always. I think it's also really important to understand that this pedagogical model is not a set of teaching
skills or teaching practises that we can just pick a couple from and work on this one and that one.
It's more about a representation of teaching.
It's more the practise of teaching as we might think about the practise of law or the practise of medicine.
The big idea is to guide practise. One of my favourite quotes from all the interviews I've done with teachers over recent years
comes from a deputy principal in a primary school who's about 40 probably teaching 20 years,
and he'd been working with our model for just a little while.
And he said to me, this is the first time in my career I feel I'm actually teaching students.
Until now, I've just been giving them work to do.
It's really quite a poignant statement of the difference that this conception of teaching this conception of the
practise of teaching had made to the way that he thought about his work and he was already a successful teacher.
The other thing about the model that's important to note is that it's applicable across all year levels and all subject areas.
And so in terms of scalability, to have kindergarten and year six teachers or physical education,
maths and art teachers working together on pedagogy helps to make this potentially powerful for widespread change.
So here's the model has three dimensions that in every learning experience,
there needs to be high intellectual quality or rigour or demands placed on students at the appropriate level.
There needs to be a quality learning environment, so not just an environment that supports students,
but an environment that supports their learning and learning should be made significant or meaningful for students.
I'd love to go into detail about the 18 elements.
What we look for always is for high performance in every dimension, not necessarily high levels of every element in every lesson.
But maybe I could just take a minute to tell you one story of a lesson that I think helps to illustrate how this model can refine practise.
I want to talk about a lesson I watched just prior to the Sydney Olympics.
I was 20.
Some of you were probably not even born then, but I watched a year for a final year student teacher with a year six class in a primary school.
She walked into the class and she said, Today we're going to design a marathon course.
She said, Let's brainstorm, what do you need to think about in designing a marathon course?
The students came up with crowd conditions, traffic stops, sorry traffic conditions and crowds.
You drink stations when practical students said toilet stops.
Another one said running past sites of cultural significance, which I thought was pretty switched on.
She'd blown up big maps of the city of Newcastle and cut out two and a half centimetre lengths of string.
So I guess they had to use fractions and they could manipulate the string around the streets of Newcastle.
She said I want you to work in two XL threes to use pencil so that if you want to change something that's easy to do.
And she said at the end, I'll get you to come out the front and share your map with the class. Pretty nice lesson.
However, students went up to her during the lesson, and they said, as they do in Newcastle,
miss, our marathon course is thirty nine kilometres, it's not OK.
And she said yes. Now a marathon is forty two point two kilometres.
Marathon runners would love to stop at thirty nine kilometres in terms of intellectual quality if thirty nine is good enough.
What's happening here? It's not even a measurement activity.
Most of the students had the event running up to 10 kilometres along a beach, whether it's an Olympic event or a fun run.
You wouldn't put it on the sandy surface. Of course, it's hard to teach world things we don't know well.
Most of the students said the event finishing at a lighthouse that juts out into the ocean on a narrow strip of land in Newcastle.
If the finish line was there, there would have been complete chaos with crowds and traffic.
There was no discussion of that.
Listen, finish with students coming out the front holding up their maps, and I still remember the first group of boys, the spokesman said.
We go past my dad's house over the Stockton Bridge along Maitland Road and we finish at the lighthouse.
And the teacher effectively said something like, Well done. Next group.
My question is, what did the students learn in the 40 minutes that I watched that lesson?
It was a nice activity. But what did they learn? What were the big ideas that the teacher wanted the students to grasp?
What were the key concepts of the lesson in terms of explicit quality criteria?
They had none.
Teachers are really good at telling kids what to do, that's what we do most of the day, but we're not so good at telling students what counts as good.
If she'd said to them 10 minutes before the end of the lesson, you can swap maps.
No one would have asked if thirty nine was good enough because they would have been trying to measure the forty two point two if she'd say,
When you come out the front, I want you to talk about how your group handled one of the things we brainstormed.
Then there might have been a discussion about why all these kids who live across
the harbour from the city of Newcastle and the lighthouse chose the lighthouse,
perhaps as a sign of cultural significance. And if we talk about significance and I just pick up connectedness,
those kids were running the school athletics carnival two weeks after I visited the classroom.
A more connected task might have been to design something for the school athletics carnival rather than for the abstract marathon course that,
after all, most of us will never run or never even aspire to running.
So hopefully you can see how attention to these elements and the relationships between them can lead to.
Some tweaking of practise doesn't have to change everything,
just tweaking practise to make it more powerful in terms of student life in terms of student learning.
For each of the elements, we actually have a description of the element. And we have a key question we ask and then a coding scale one to five.
So from all knowledge and the lesson is shallow because it's not dealing with any big ideas or concepts through to a sustained focus.
In as researchers, we use this to make our judgements of practise,
so when I talked about the one to five scale earlier in that flat line graph, this is what we were using for each of the elements.
Teachers use this themselves in quality teaching rounds.
I know some of you will already be feeling nervous about numbers because this looks like a scoring system,
but it's not how it works, and there are very strict guidelines around how we do quality teaching rounds.
It's only to be used for teacher professional development, not for performance assessment.
Our unions, our systems all subscribed to that approach.
Having a model can only take us so far.
We had to think about how do we use this model in powerful ways, and this is where the idea of quality teaching grounds came from.
We trolled through the educational research literature on professional development.
We were convinced that professional learning communities have a lot to offer working in situ over time on practise, thinking about students learning.
We liked Elmo's work on instructional grounds, gathering evidence in different contexts and interrogating that evidence.
But the trouble with both of these, we would argue again, is that the substance is left up to the group to figure out what did you notice?
What do you want to say about what you observed?
And again, we're back to some often, you know, polite things about that went well, the kids seem really engaged.
You had nice rapport. You perhaps could have done some little tweak.
So what we thought is if we added the quality teaching model to these kinds of processes,
we might have a very powerful form of professional development.
Quality teaching grounds basically involves a group of teachers coming together, they discuss something that they've all read or watched.
It can be a YouTube clip, a TED talk, it can be a policy statement doesn't matter.
But just a chance for teachers to talk about, practise to talk about education in a way that really,
if you like, leaves out this commitment to being a professional learning community.
So it's about building community. Next, they all go and watch.
One of the members of the group teach a lesson that everyone goes away encodes it on all 18 elements, including the teacher who taught the lesson.
This is a really important part of it. We don't have to worry about giving a teacher coding cultural knowledge a one on our
one to five scale because chances are the teacher quoted him or herself as one.
So it changes the kind of power dynamics of the discussion.
And then the group comes together to discuss, to share their codes to justify why they coded the lesson.
Each element, the way they did, what evidence were they drawing on? How are they interpreting the ideas?
But the discussion always goes beyond the lesson.
If the group work, for instance, didn't go so well, then there might be a discussion about what isn't this?
How we all do group work. If it's not producing the quality of work we expect from kids, what can we all try differently?
So it's not just giving that teacher feedback, it's about using the opportunity to be in each other's classrooms to think and talk about practise and
are working towards a shared view about the elements are trying to come to a common code of school.
But it's not about the number. The number is a means to the powerful professional conversation.
The numbers in the end, don't matter. They are important now the essential features of quality teaching grounds, these are our non-negotiables,
we say if you're not doing these things, you're not doing rounds and I don't have time to go into them.
But I do want to draw attention to the last one, and that is a commitment to confidentiality.
What happens in the group stays in the group, especially the numbers.
This helps to create a safe space space for teachers to do this important critical analytical work.
I want to just take you quickly through some of the history of how we've got to this approach.
Early on, I was doing some studies of power relations in pedagogy and the first study I did, I actually looked at a physical education classroom.
That's my own teaching background, a teacher education classroom.
I looked at pedagogy in a feminist reading group and in a women's kind of community learning group.
I like to describe the difference between the last two as one drink champagne and one drink herbal tea.
You can probably figure out which was which, or maybe it will surprise you. So that was some of the early stuff I was doing.
Then I was involved in the development of the quality teaching model with James.
That week, we tested how that worked in schools and teachers really embraced the approach.
It resonated with teachers about what mattered, and it was really important to do that sort of testing work.
We then tested it in new settings and started work on the quality teaching grounds approach.
See, this is a long period of time coming. We did proof of concept testing and pilot testing of quality teaching grounds over a
three year period with a Catholic diocese that invested quite a bit of money in it.
And then another state jurisdiction said to us, If that's the Rolls Royce model, we can't afford that.
Can we have a mini minor version was their request and we said we don't want to mess with our model that works.
But we ended up doing design experiments whereby we said some features cannot be modified, but a few things can.
You can work instead of a group of eight teachers, which is what happened here.
Some of them worked with a group of three teachers instead of doing it for three years.
So eight days a year, for three years, these people, some of them did three half day quality teaching rounds.
That was it. Which is a very small intervention just to give you a sense of the kind of things that teachers say,
it's good to have a professional conversation in school.
You're usually talking about this kid's done this or we've got to get that marking done or reports said you or it's your yard duty.
It's all work-related, not practise related. So it was good to have practise related conversations.
Well, this one, a very experienced teacher, the process of having the reading, the observation and the coding afterwards is very good.
You get to think about the elements and discuss them and see if your interpretation is the same as other people,
and then that enables you to reflect more on what you're doing in your classroom in every lesson.
Teachers tell us they can't go back once they understand teaching in this way, they can't not think about explicit quality criteria.
They can't not think about non-dominant cultural knowledge, for instance.
He's a male teacher driving home at the end of the day, saying my lesson was coded.
I just remember the positive feeling. Driving home, thinking, well, I didn't feel threatened.
I didn't feel any negativity. I didn't feel criticised. My lesson was critiqued, but I didn't feel criticised.
It was all very positive. When we work with schools to implement quality teaching grounds,
we asked two teachers per school to come to a two day workshop where we take them through the quality teaching model,
the quality teaching grounds process and working with colleagues in ways that are really respectful and ensure
that it is a positive experience with that that two teachers per school coming to the two day workshop.
We say that then sets them up to implement quality teaching rounds in their school with no further input from us.
And that's how we have been running quality teaching rounds.
So as you can see, his colleagues have done a good job here of making sure that he felt that this was a positive experience.
And I think I have just one more at the moment. There's no turning back. I'd never go back to the way I was teaching, says Emma.
Even though it was fine, I was getting good of good results. It's not as exciting as teaching is now.
I've been re-energized to teach you a different way. A big awakening cruising along the way.
I was getting through to them, doing the things you had to do following the syllabus and all of that,
but it wasn't exciting and now I'm excited about it. It's not humdrum.
It's great stuff all the time. Now that sounds like hyperbole, but we have so many quotes like that.
Another teacher said I was dragging myself through the school day through the school gate every day, and now I can't wait to get to school.
So we've actually I'm just trying to work on a paper that we're hoping to publish on the impact on mid and late to create late career teachers.
But they talk about renewal, re-energizing, reinvigorating and so on.
Now, with the three kind of big studies that we have done. Sorry.
The first one was simply descriptive. We weren't doing quality teaching rounds, we were describing the quality of teaching in New South Wales schools.
The second one, the grey columns, is where they were doing three years of quality teaching balance.
You'd expect to see some growth in the quality of teaching if people have been working on this stuff for three years.
In the third column, in each case, for the three dimensions of the model,
the teachers did as few as three half days of quality teaching rounds and still got that impact on the quality of teaching.
Now, of course, the critics and the sceptics will say, Yeah, but what about the methodology in the yellow bar?
We did all of the observations of lessons, and by the way, we always observe a whole lesson.
We believe it is much more respectful of teachers and of the teaching learning process to watch a whole lesson.
So in the first one, we did all the observations in the second column, we did about two thirds of the observations.
In the third column, the teachers did all of the observations themselves.
So the critics will say, well, of course, teachers are polite and kind to each other, and they just marked each other kindly.
In fact, what we find is teachers are harsher judgements of themselves than than we are as researchers who separate out.
You know how we might have done it by looking at the descriptors in the evidence and making judgements.
But because of this?
We knew that if we were going to persuade the policy makers, persuade the people in the systems, we had to turn towards experimental research.
Now some of you probably shudder at the mention of experimental research. I recently was exposed to a couple of quotes from a guy called Frederick.
Most of Stella, who in the 1970s said This is quite provocative.
I still don't know how I feel about it, but to get better schooling, we must find out how to strengthen our education system.
This will require experimentation, not let's try this and let's try that.
But large scale experiments with controls. He went on to say further a little bit later.
The haphazard approach is not experimenting with people. Instead, it's falling around with people, although they must be closely monitored.
Like all investigations involving human subjects,
randomised controlled trials are far preferable to the current practise of fooling around with people without their informed consent.
No, I'm not a devotee of the randomised controlled trial, but I can see where it has real value.
And that's why we have now done a one big, randomised controlled trial and we were about to do another.
So with this first one, we were wanting to look not only at the impact on the quality of teaching,
but also on things like teacher morale in certain places,
including here, I think accountability is so high and pressures are so high that the push can be solely to get better results.
We wanted to get better results while also making teachers feel better about themselves and about their practise.
So we did this randomised controlled trial where we observe two lessons per teacher for eight teachers in each of 24 schools
before they commenced rounds six months later when they finished rounds and six months later in the new school year.
And we also gathered a whole lot of qualitative evidence because we were interested in a range of questions,
not only whether it worked, but how for whom under what conditions and so on.
We needed 24 schools to be a part of the study, 243 expressed interest.
We divided them into primary, secondary urban, rural, the urban schools.
We split up into categories we randomly selected schools, collected our baseline measures and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups.
The control group had to wait a year before they could start rounds.
The choice group did one set of rounds, and they couldn't vary the number of teachers in their group,
and the group did two groups two sorry, two sets of rounds, meaning each teacher hosted the lesson twice and they worked in groups of four.
The teachers were quite representative of teachers in Australia.
Sorry, my. So and I suspect, you know, pretty similar to teachers in other parts of the world,
and the schools are really quite diverse in terms of their enrolment of students from a range of language and cultural backgrounds.
The number of indigenous students in schools and the last is a measure of advantage or disadvantage with a median is a thousand.
So we had quite a range there. So diverse schools, representative teachers, what did we find?
At baseline, all three groups were pretty much in the same place. No statistically significant difference between them at six months.
And by the way, our observers were blinded to group allocation.
This means they didn't know whether they were watching teachers in a control group, a set group or the choice group.
That's the pattern we found at six months with an effect size of 0.4,
which is actually quite astonishing for an instrument as multidimensional and complex as the quality teaching model.
When we went back six months later, still some growth for one of the groups, the other seemed to drop off a bit.
We then did what's called a per protocol analysis.
If some groups weren't doing quality teaching rounds, according to our protocol, it's a legitimate thing to drop them out of the statistical analysis.
When we looked at the per protocol analysis, basically the effect is stronger.
It says kind of don't mess around with the model too much because people want
to take these things and dilute them and do them their own way and so on.
So powerful effects on the quality of teaching when we looked at teacher morale using scales from Peter Hart,
and I'm just going to jump through some of this very quickly. What we found was that they started at the same point at six months.
Some interesting trends, but I note that that's the end of the school year in Australia, when teachers are notoriously worn out.
When we went back at the six month point, both of the intervention groups had significant gains in morale,
and we also looked at what Peter Hart refers to as appraisal and recognition opportunities to discuss performance, receiving encouragement and so on.
In this case, the control group actually started higher, but the pattern is the same,
so some pretty significant evidence there under the kind of rigorous conditions of a randomised controlled trial.
When we interviewed teachers, the larger the word here, the more often it was mentioned.
It was really interesting to see that the main word was changed.
Teachers said it changed how they saw their students and what they expected of them.
They changed how they saw colleagues. It changed what they were trying to do in the classroom.
It changed aspects of their practise. It changed their commitment to the profession. In some cases, it changed their career plans.
They were thinking of quitting and now we're staying on. So this might feel like the conclusion, and I just need to warn you, it's not.
And when we put quality teaching grounds in the middle here,
I think we have some pretty strong preliminary evidence that it is having an impact on teacher leading teaching practise.
We have some preliminary evidence on student outcomes,
particularly in the form of correlations and lots of anecdotal evidence where principals head teachers you call
them here are telling us that that the schools with national testing results have have gone through the roof.
But of course, we have more to do. But before going to that, I just want to touch quickly on the underlying mechanisms.
It's easy to look at something on the surface and think, Okay, we bring teachers together. They have some kind of pedagogical model.
They do this kind of work and things are going to change.
We think that there are three key mechanisms that underpin the success of quality teaching grounds its structures, the knowledge base for teaching.
Teachers have so much stuff that bombarded with when they can think about these three big ideas of intellectual quality,
quality, learning, environment and significance. It really seems to help focus.
It's not simple. There's all of that complexity underneath it, but it focuses.
It flattens power hierarchies. If you're the principal or the beginning teacher in a set of quality teaching rounds, you take your turn to teach.
In fact, if you're the principal, you go first and you borrow class and you speak, you contribute to the discussion.
The discussion is actually quite structured and it really builds relationships amongst teachers.
Teachers who haven't necessarily worked together before from different parts of the school come together to do this kind of work.
And I have again, lots of stuff to illustrate all of these statements. But I just want to share with you a couple of statements from teachers.
This one says, I got to work with people I don't normally work with.
There was this one lady.
I didn't even realise she was a teacher here before I thought she was a parent who didn't leave, which is astonishing in a primary school.
I've actually been involved in her lessons and got to know her through this and her passion.
It's been good. And in fact, her son is starting kindergarten next year.
She's talking about a kindergarten teacher,
and she's now absolutely convinced she wants her son to be in that teacher's class because she's got to see that teacher work.
And then I want to share with you also, Karen Karen didn't want to be part of this.
She was volunteered by her head teacher and she was put with a group of people she didn't really want to be with.
And so she says quite bluntly, an interview. They didn't like me and I didn't like them, but it was only on hearsay and reputation alone.
But when I was in the room with them and working with them, I respected them and I learnt to trust them and I learnt who they really were.
She's pretty powerful in terms of shifting how teachers work together in schools.
So we have all of this evidence, again, improve teaching, enhance morale, beginning teachers,
actually telling us they feel more confident and a greater sense of belonging in schools,
we've published one paper on beginning teacher impacts,
experienced teachers being re-energized and feeling affirmed in their practise or a computer given button.
Stronger relationships amongst teachers strengthen school learning culture and some preliminary evidence of impact on outcomes.
Of course, the next step is to demonstrate, if we can, the impact on outcomes.
So Diane mentioned the Ramsay Foundation having funded us to the tune of sixteen
point four million dollars to do a massive project over the next five years,
which is such an enormous opportunity. This doesn't happen in Australian educational research.
I don't know that it happens in education research in many places around the world.
But the Ramsay Foundation don't call for expressions of interest.
They basically tap people on the shoulder and say, We've heard about your work.
We think it can make a difference.
It's an organisation that's committed to change in health and education and particularly in redressing disadvantage.
So we're saying that this funding we have is going to allow us to do 20 years of research in five years.
It's also probably going to kill us.
We just in the last eight weeks before I came here conducted 16000 tests in schools with students that take an hour each.
We don't have national data of the kind that you have here that schools can provide to us.
We watched 440 lessons in eight weeks across the state of New South Wales,
just organising travel and hotels and reimbursements for research assistants and so on a massive enterprise.
But what we're doing is this randomised controlled trial right now to look at the impact on student outcomes.
We want to and we'll be able to look at the sustainability of a fixed two year post intervention, not just six months post intervention.
Does it still impact on teachers teaching? Is it true that they can't go back?
What about the kids who've been in classes of teachers who've been through violence?
Do we see them continuing to get gains greater than perhaps what might otherwise have been happening?
We're looking at the efficacy of a kind of train, the trainer model. I can't go everywhere in one two day workshops on quality teaching grounds.
So we've employed five people through this funding who are now running. They've been trained intensively to run these workshops.
Does that work? Is the quality as effective? I'm sure it will be.
We're looking at digital delivery of the whole process. We have so many small schools and remote schools in Australia.
There are schools where four teachers can't come together to do quality teaching rounds.
Can it all be done through the kind of affordances we have with new technologies?
Our preliminary trial of this has shown that it's been very successful and we're really interested in translation
to new jurisdictions the Ramsay Foundation wants to fund just to go into at least two other Australian states.
And we're interested also in exploring the possibilities in other parts of the world.
And there is some interest from other parts of the world.
And if anyone here wants to be the first to take it up in the UK, we'd be delighted to hear from you as well.
I'm almost out of time, but I just want to acknowledge that there are no guarantees even with this evidence.
With this extended programme of research, with funding, with the support of the State Department of Education and so on.
With any text, it's open to multiple forms of interpretation, so some people will look at the quality teaching model and say, Oh yes,
the neo liberal representation of teaching practise that is reductive and attempts to codify
something that's impossible to codify and besides teaching is different in every context.
So how can we possibly have something like that?
On the other hand, we have had people who've looked at the quality teaching model and seen it as some kind of leftist,
progressive ust model because it refers to an element called problematic knowledge,
which is about the social construction of knowledge, which we think is absolutely fundamental to how we teach young people.
So, you know, we work all of us within a range of complex networks of institutions, people,
policies, histories and cultures that mean that anything that we try to do is really complex.
We think we have the conditions right now in a fabulous opportunity to do something huge in Australia.
But whether it comes to pass is another question.
Right now, there's a big push in the professional development literature that we're just starting to hear about towards implementation,
science and improvement science. I don't know if these are things that you've run across.
Tony Pryke at the Carnegie Foundation is talking about improvements, science, health intervention.
People talk a lot about implementation, science, what's the science behind having things really well implemented?
I guess I want to raise a couple of questions. Are we turning to these forms of science, implementation, science and improvement science?
Because the interventions themselves, the professional development is not powerful enough, it's not about implementation,
it's actually about the forms of professional development that are not engaging teachers, for instance.
And it's our problem with professional development fundamentally, because we haven't come to terms with what is good teaching.
We're still at odds with each other about what is good teaching,
and partly because of that, we don't treat teachers with the respect that they deserve.
Teachers in the in teaching because they want to make the best possible difference that they can when we ask them to figure it out for themselves.
Too often we're doing them and our nation's your nation's children.
I think a bit of a disservice.
So some provocations, we still don't have the solution, but I think our work on quality teaching grounds is beginning to show promise.
It needs to be part of a much larger conversation, and I'm hoping that we might start that conversation right now.
So thanks very much. So thanks so much, Jenny, for your talk.
You really describe for us and provided a range of evidence, I think,
for the importance of the quality teaching around approach in the quest for better teaching and really highlighted, I think,
the importance of teachers doing this critical,
powerful and important work that enables professional learning that's designed to impact professional practise and student learning outcomes.
And for me, that's what you've done, connect up all of those dots, which I think are really, really important.
So we're delighted now to have some respondents to also share their ideas in relation to Jenny's lecture.
And then, as I said earlier, we'll open up for general questions.
So I'm going to invite the people to come and sit at the front here.
I will introduce all of them first up. So it's not lots of stops and starts and then just go from one to the other before we open up.
So first of all, we've got Professor Dame Alison Peacock.
Alison has been the chief executive of the Child College of Teaching since it was established in January 2017.
Prior to that, she was executive headteacher of the Rossum's Wroxham School in Hertfordshire.
Her career to date has spanned primary, secondary and advisory roles.
She's a member of the Royal Society Education Committee, AP,
a member of the Teaching Schools Council and a trustee of both the Chartered Institute of Educational Services and the Teach First.
We also have Professor Mark Mills.
Martin is the inaugural director of the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research at the Institute of Education at the University College London.
He researches in the area of social justice, pedagogy, social reform, teacher's work, teacher education, alternative education and gender.
Martin is the former head of School of Education at the University of Queensland, Australia,
and he's held visiting professorships at King's College London, Roehampton and Queen's Belfast.
He's a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and is a past president of the Australian Association for Research and Education.
And we also have Associate Professor Trayvon Martin. Trevor is associate professor here at Oxford in our Department of Education,
where he's director of professional programmes and the Oxford Education Deanery.
He researches in the fields of initial teacher education teacher education policy and teaches continued professional learning.
He teaches on the Modern Languages PGCE programme and also teaches and supervises on the part time must learning and teaching.
He also supervises doctoral students whose research focuses on aspects of teacher education and teaches professional learning.
And I think I'll just invite the speakers, the respondents to speak in that order.
So if you'd like to come up and there is a microphone there, or if you prefer to come up here, you can do that as well.
Let's start with your office. I knew you were going to come.
Well, I think that was amazing.
I I thought before I heard you speak that I was going to be inspired.
I am totally blown away because the work that I do at the College of Teaching is is all premised
on the fact that teachers have an inherent expertise that actually needs to be unleashed,
combined with research. That means they have the courage and the confidence to be able to try new things.
But trying new things, as we've seen from from your work and as we know from our own experience, is a very difficult thing to do.
It's there's a lot of habit that goes on in classrooms is a lot that happens when you shut the classroom dual.
That means you get on with the relationship you have with your class and you do things the same way that you probably always done them.
And there might be some tweaking around the edges, but in terms of the kinds of fundamental shift that we've seen from your work.
I don't think we have anything like that, so potentially the impact of things like lesson study,
the impact of the culture in the school, which means that there is a culture whereby teachers work together,
they listen to each other, they don't just talk about whether it's their playground duty or not,
but they are actually really thinking about teaching and learning. We know the power of that.
We've seen that through things like the Maths Mastery programme in this country,
where the maths hubs have worked in a way where they have expert groups, where you've got people who teach a lesson, you've got teachers who watch.
But what we haven't got in that and what I think is really interesting in what you're talking about is that you're giving teachers a very firm.
Basis on which to evaluate what they're doing and actually see them move forward.
So they've got a kind of they've got a rigorous framework.
But within the rigour, there's a lot of freedom, it seems to me, because there's nothing within that framework as I saw it.
And I admit, I'm only just looking at it for the first time. But there was nothing within that framework that said, you must do it this way.
Don't do it that way. You must teach it, you know, in this form, not that form.
And the expertise that you're relying on through your through your practise groups is coming from the teachers themselves.
So and the fact that you're doing several rounds, but you're not constantly doing this,
you know, you're visiting other people's classrooms, the fact that it's scalable,
that you've been able to show that it's scalable even to the point of having a digital offer whereby people are looking at each other's teaching.
This to me, shows real promise. But it shows real promise because it's framed within the expectation that to be a teacher
is to be someone who wants to learn who can improve their practise and who is excited.
You know, we saw this excited by the possibilities when all of these things come into play and there's no predetermined outcome.
So for me, I think I would just like to thank you hugely.
I want to read everything you've ever written now, and I'd love you to write for our journal.
And certainly, if there was an opportunity in England for us to do something, I for one would be very pleased.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Jenny, I really enjoyed your presentation.
When you do a response, it kind of you read somebody's chapter of it.
The benefit of reading the chapter, which is talk was based upon and gave a presentation.
It takes it down kind of lines of thought, which may the presenter may not, you know, necessarily want it to go down.
Other people may not have gone down,
but this is what my response to Jenny's presentation and what I read is I did wonder whether the quest for better teaching is ambitious enough
and whether the quest really should be to create a better education system of which creating better teaching is in part an important part,
but only part of that. I think if we are thinking about creating a better education system,
it seems that we are a point in time in England when we're having discussions about National Education Service,
the Labour Party manifesto around education that we have a chance to really think about.
What kind of education system do we want. And I think that has to be about partly the purposes of education.
I think that that we need to ensure that all students have high quality pedagogy in the classroom.
I think the work that Jenny is done is really significant around creating that.
But I think we also have to think about what else do we want as the purposes of education in western New South Wales.
The Rajouri people have a saying that's used by the university there about the importance
of education in terms of enabling people to live well in a world worth living in.
And I think sometimes when we really focus in on the classrooms, our focus is on how do we ensure that students can live well by doing well at
school without necessarily thinking about the world that is worth living in?
And I think and I was on the train up, there was a couple of things crossed my mind.
One was Lisa Delpit work. Other people's children.
In her lovely book, she talks about how very clever people can do some terrible things.
And that's the example of the Nazi concentration camps involving doctors, nurses,
teachers that the moral purposes of education are still really critical.
Also thought on the train. It was something happened that made me think this that if you are of the history English teacher,
but if you're a history teacher and you do really such a good job that kids are inspired to learn more about Gandhi,
the civil rights movement in in the US, to learn about the suffragette movement, and they're absolutely inspired by that.
And next door, they've got a fantastic science teacher who's taught them all about, you know, climate change.
And then they come to you and they say, I don't just want to read history, I want to be part of history.
If climate change is the great moral issue of our of our moment, I'm not going to do that exam tomorrow.
I'm going to the Extinction Rebellion march in the city. You know, what do you think of that, sir?
You know, how do you respond to those questions you're teaching? You've been teaching them about those issues.
And I think those are questions that we have to have conversations about as a teaching profession,
which aren't necessarily tied up with some of those issues around classroom practise.
The second point I want to make, and I'll make it quite quite quickly.
And again, I was the benefit at the benefit of reading Jenny's paper and in the paper.
She does this lovely play with clinical practise research, inform practise,
enquiry practise and collaborative conversations where she uses Lizelle words beautiful paper on why
doesn't this feel empowering and talks about each of those issues in terms of current teachers?
Why doesn't that feel empowering for them? And as I was on the train coming up again, I thought the notion of being disempowered is really,
really important to ask about teaching profession in the context of the teacher retention and attraction issues.
I think we. But we have to ask questions about how is disempowered distributed.
Which teachers in which schools feel disempowered? What is it about those I was at a school not too long ago in East London,
interviewing a teacher who was telling me that the kids at her school were saying to her and she told them where she done her degree.
She, you know, did it at a Russell Group, and they said to her, And why are you teaching him this?
Why on earth would you want to be teaching this school, you could be teaching at any other school?
I think there's issues around the distribution of disempowered teachers.
I think who is disempowered? We have to ask questions. They can't take away the teacher from the teaching.
What about what does it mean to be a black Asian minority ethnic teacher in the school?
What does it mean to be a gay teacher? How does it? How does that impact upon feeling disempowered in education?
Well, I think and what I and one of the things that I know about Jenny's work that I really love is the importance of voice and teacher's voice,
and that that has to be part of the challenge of being disempowered in school.
My, my colleague Sam Sims at UCLA has written a book.
The Teacher Gap with Becky Allen says one of the issues of retaining teachers is to pay them more and they'll get many more teachers.
What I think about that is it'll help teachers live well, you know, better pay.
But will it help create schools that are worth teaching in? And I'm not sure that's the case.
I think what Jenny's done and the putting the centrality of teachers and teacher's voice and seeing that's integral in any debate about education,
whether it's about improving classroom practise, the purposes of education or how to keep them in schools.
Even that, I think that that is really central to any discussion about education is keeping teachers as a key component of that discussion.
Thanks. OK,
you won't be surprised I'm going to begin with a little anecdote that's going to
show you about the impact of your project in ways that you wouldn't imagine.
Last summer we were at the East Conference in your Bolzano, northern Italy,
and some of us were staying in a hotel halfway up a mountain that was virtually inaccessible because it was cheap.
And that's the only piece available. On one evening, a car came managed to get up the mountain and two people came out.
They were on holiday and they were from Australia. So we said, Where are you from?
They said, We're from Newcastle. So we said, Oh, we know a colleague from as if you know, you know, Jenny Gold and this woman, we couldn't stop it.
Jenny Gold quality teaching rounds. Yes.
And she told us how she was a teacher in a school that had been engaged in these,
these and the difference that it made and how powerful it was to her and her colleagues.
So that's impact you won't know about. But I think this is an incredibly powerful model.
And in I think one of the papers I read, you said the problem is that teachers are seen as the with the problem and the solution.
I think this very much suits this in that the teachers are the solution.
I think the other key thing is that when you put up that time line,
you can see the work has being built on solid foundations and it's layered and laid.
And various iterations have been sort of logical and progressive and thoughtful,
and you've taken a really, really rigorous approach to this, and I think that's why it has such power.
Also, I think to pick up what Alison said or wrote down as you were talking,
this is using the expertise teams of teachers developed to develop teachers expertise.
And I think it is that way that it's teachers working with each other and for each other.
And that's really, really empowering. And I think it takes away the focus from, you know,
the tensions within the policy context and the way that schools are trying to work with in these particular difficult times.
It actually empowers teachers to take control of their own learning and their own development.
I think the other real value is that it's a very much like a bottom up model, and I was contrasting as you were talking with, you know,
early career framework that's being developed in this country, and that seems to be the way it's developing a very top down model.
Teachers should know this, and if they know this will be demonstrated by them doing this and they will be taught this stuff,
and then, you know, will it be expected to show it in their practise?
This is very, very different to that sort of model.
One or two things, I'm going to sort of actually answer your second provocation in a moment, but I just wonder, is there a danger of that?
How do you get new blood,
new thinking injected into the model if you need some new ideas within those groups of teachers working with each other with perhaps.
Where does the new thinking come in the, you know, a mechanism for doing that?
But in terms of your second provocation, has our professional development had limited impact because we failed to come to terms
with what is good teaching and failed to treat teachers with sufficient respect?
I think probably the problem is is in the professional development models that just.
Perhaps it's the nature of professional learning that don't take account of the teachers themselves as learners.
I think it's a learning problem, and I think it's really ironic that when the focus of,
you know, teaching and teachers is so much on the learning of the students,
they're teaching that we seem to not pay much regard to the processes of
professional learning that teachers themselves undergo their own dispositions.
The, you know, the way they approach. I suppose it's the current issue.
I think worry that for every Karen who is persuaded to be involved, there are perhaps 10 parents who fall by the wayside.
And that's perhaps because we actually don't understand well enough where teachers
are positioned and their own dispositions towards their professional learning.
But I would just conclude by reiterating what my colleagues have said and thank you very much, and that's a very powerful model.
Thanks. So invite you to come out as well.
So we've got. Great time to do the drinks and to have ongoing discussions.
But let's take a few questions here.
But. I.
So. She thought that if to.
And not many at all, but.
Is it possible for to while and in this case from the inside out of the possible war, I think one of the ways.
Natalie Thomas Typekit, the.
I think by way of response, I really like how Alison picked up on the fact that this is not scripted.
And so it's not as simple as teaching to some predefined the test.
So certainly the model is right.
There are 18 elements, but these particular girls the following elements are examples of former physical education teacher.
When I'm teaching the javelin, the element called student direction,
which is about students having some control over the lesson, should rightly code or one.
It's not. Explore the javelin. How many ways can you throw a javelin?
Its weight behind the line until I blow my whistle for you to wait for you to catch that the old PE reflexes are still there.
So. So I think that while there are certainly teachers learn from the model and and yes, it starts to shape the way they teach.
There's an awful lot of teacher judgement that has to come into them, making decisions about which elements are relevant on a particular day.
The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, which is our major major regulatory body in Australia.
When they heard about the quality teaching model, they flew me down to Melbourne and said, This is fabulous.
We've got this system now. So beginning teachers have to score between 45 and 50 for proficient teachers between 55 and 64.
Accomplished teachers, I said it cannot work like that. A lesson that adds up to being seventy three isn't necessarily better or worse than
the lesson that adds up to 68 because you have to take into account context purpose.
You know what's happening on the day and all the rest of it. So yes, there is some learning that comes through the model, but it's not narrower.
And I think that's part of it because it does value teachers own judgements about the relevance of those elements in every lesson responses.
That's fine. I should have said direct your questions to whomever you like or the whole panel.
So thanks, Jennifer.
A really cogent and inspiring toolkit was very enjoyable indeed, and there's lots of provocations in there and I just want to offer three that I was.
Three things I was provoked by very briefly. First, there's a paradox you emphasised the glacial pace of change.
I'm sorry, I haven't experienced that for the last 30 or 40 years.
I've rather experienced quite the opposite. A very fast pace of change.
Certainly an initial teacher education, perhaps less so in professional development, which is what you were more focussing on.
But you know, it's true. It's mainly been change down to the system, to the providers rather than by the providers.
Secondly, you kindly referred to the BURA RSA report when you were talking about research informed practise.
For me, the key phrase in that report is actually research literacy,
which I think does acknowledge the fact that we cannot expect every teacher in every school to become a researcher.
But we do need to see them developing understanding and access and the potential to engage in research.
And then thirdly, partly picking up something Martin said about the moral purposes of education.
I suppose I was quite surprised not hear more about the equity aims of the work that you're doing, knowing how committed you are to improving equity,
social equity in and through education in this model that you so clearly laying out and wonder whether you do want to say
something about the aspirations the scheme has to improve the outcomes for disadvantaged groups just to take each of those points.
Certainly, the pace of changes is enormous in policy and in teacher education, in professional development.
I think what's slow is change to student outcomes. We still have massive inequities.
We have countless students who are bored and disengaged from classrooms.
We have huge problems. That's the stuff that I think is slow to change. I think research literacy is right,
and I think that you're right to point out that that was really the main emphasis of the bureau, our research report.
But then I think we have to consider what are the possibilities and limitations to really
providing teachers with sufficient research literacy to still do the things we might want to do.
And in terms of the equity aims, I just couldn't do everything, but within everything that I might have wanted to do, I mean,
within this talk, but within the quality teaching model, there are elements called inclusivity, cultural knowledge, problematic knowledge.
These elements draw attention to issues of equity, everyday questions of high expectations, who's been included and so on.
What's appropriate for these kids? So it's kind of built into the model.
And in fact.
Newman's work showed that the students who benefited most from authentic pedagogy were students who traditionally weren't doing well at school,
and we have the urban, rural and serious splits in the previous city and the current AZT very explicitly so
we can look at its impact in terms of those key questions around greater equity.
But thanks. I think you probably got time for one or two more questions.
Thank you very much for your lecture. You mentioned many things that we cannot discuss about all of you,
but I consulted the way one thing our brain was created to give us the ability to deal with changes and specifically with unknown situation.
And the same, the same system approach of science.
It's to create, unify, to try to do things systematically results and so on.
It's against our the way our brain is working.
And in this case, the question is if we continue with the paradigm of science in education,
maybe we continue to fail to achieve to achieve what is the good learning and what is the good teacher and so on.
Think about the situation here. All people who are scholars and so on.
Oh, many of this audience after your lecture will change their mind a little bit.
Perhaps I'll throw in a couple more questions and then invite each of you just to say some final comments.
So any other questions because I am going to have to wind it up, so perhaps we can.
And so I've been really interested in that lecture, and I find it really refreshing to view how we might improve teacher performance.
I have the the luxury of going into schools that are in challenging circumstances and supporting teachers to improve their practise.
And quite often I come across, um, teachers who just want to know they just want a tick list.
Well, tell me what I need to do so that I can then be measured as a good teacher.
And I'm interested in whether through your research,
you've come across any of those feelings of schools that have been deemed to need to improve and whether teachers that you've worked with
have had those attitudes of just tell me what I need to do to get through this and how you've managed to overcome some of those challenges.
And more and then all of you. Yeah, my question is kind of similar actually in building on the last two.
I'm I'm tempted to ask, I know you're kind of busy over the next few years, but I'm tempted to ask for more so.
And listening. I too, was incredibly inspired by this. I'd like to have a go at this model.
And I wondered, what are the limits to this? So rather jokingly, can it be done in higher education?
I wondered. But the most serious point is what knowledge do you actually need to make this work?
And so are we actually patronising teachers if we think this could happen anywhere and have a positive effect?
So I wondered about developing countries where there's very little teaching education.
We worry about the subject knowledge and things like that.
When people come to this model and higher education, we have very little training in terms of pedagogy when people come to a model like this.
So I just wondered about what do you think the limits are?
And maybe it'd be interesting to look at critical incidents where it doesn't work or something like using a different kind of technique as well.
I invite you, Jenny, first of all, just to make some closing comments in response to those that concern justice to know of those comments,
but I really appreciate all of them. But I think we are.
We have a new Vice-Chancellor at the University of Newcastle and within two months of him arriving,
he said, Can we trawl quality teaching grounds in the academy?
And I said it's going to be so different because academics don't have necessarily backgrounds in teaching,
and many of them believe that because the profound professors that they deliver intellectual quality anyway.
But we're trialling that with starting next semester.
So in a couple of months teaches our classroom practise guide that outlines the 18 elements and has all the definitions.
And a whole lot of other information is about 50 pages long in total, with the 18 elements and a bit of preamble and so on.
And teachers have said, can't we have the one page version version, you know, we just want to simplify this.
But once they engage in the process of quality teaching rounds,
then we don't get that chick box kind of mentality or that sense that it needs to be reduced.
They want the complexity and they value it, and they value the way that it helps them without prescribing what they're supposed to be doing.
I think I better stop because I know we're out of time, but I would love to have a chat with you after, so I'll invite the respondents.
Are there any final comments or points that you would like to raise?
Alison? Thank you.
And just to say, can I in England, I've got the challenge of of trying to establish a new professional body on behalf of all teachers.
And if we were to listen to the ones who say what you've said about,
can you just give it to me in there in half a page and make it really simple with bullet points?
We wouldn't get to the depths of what needs to happen. I think that's human nature.
But I'm also inspired by by the response that we've had from Jenny that says and she wants to get to know what this is about.
They want that they want even more. And I really respect the teaching profession.
I think that's much more prevalent once you get into it. Whatever it is, he wants to know more and more and more.
So, yeah. Martin, yeah, I suppose what I was thinking just just then in relation to some of the the concepts that that some of them are very deep,
complex and I wonder whether in terms of teacher education,
when we wash out things like philosophy, sociology, psychology, history from that you get from a teacher education,
whether we're actually making this a difficult model to engage with.
I don't know. It's not a it's not a well-formed thought. It's just more of the, you know,
articulate a concern I have about seeing education reduced to to practise rather
than some of the some of the other disciplines being part of teacher education.
And to jump in and just say very quickly that I do think the questions about the transport ability of this are really important as well.
And that goes to what you were just saying. But but also whether teachers in who don't have the kind of background in education or the
background in the foundations of education can as easily run with quality teaching grounds.
You know, when they need expert extra expertise, who do they turn to?
Well, they can turn to each other in our systems, but that won't always be the case.
Sorry. Yeah.
I just think that we've got to be careful that in because we're conditioned in the way to expect a panacea to solve absolutely everything.
And that isn't the model that's going to solve every single problem in every classroom across the world.
But actually, it's not a bad direction to be going in.
So I think we mustn't expect too much of you. And but I think it's a model worth working with.
That's me. So thank you so much to Ginny, to Allison, to Martin and to Trevor, which I'm sure you'll agree is has been a very,
very interesting discussion, a very interesting lecture and a really interesting discussion.
And as I mentioned earlier, I hope we'll continue these discussions outside.
But before we do that, I just wanted to highlight for you that this lecture is part of a whole series during this
term of public seminars that we're doing on the future directions in teacher education.
And the next one is Monday evening in the Department of Education.
And it's John Furlong, Professor John Furlong,
who I'm I'm sure many of you know who will be talking about just a very long time talking about making change happen,
the reform of the initial teacher education in Wales, and there was a bit more.
But that's enough. So, so and there after most Mondays until the end of term, different speakers.
So really invite you to come along to any of those and continue these sorts of discussions.
So please join me again in thanking Jenny and our respondents and then join us for drinks outside.
Thank you.