John Tomsett Keynote at AHDS Leading Edge2017 Conference - Being A Teacher Leader Building A Positive Culture

1. John Tomsett
Head teacher
Huntington School, York
Being a Teacher-Leader:
Building a positive culture

3. Humility
The noble choice to forgo your status,
deploy your resources or use your
influence for the good of others before
yourself.
John Dickson

7. This much I know…
• I hardly remember a single lesson from my own school days;
• You need to know your core purpose, what it is that gets you out of
bed each day to come to work;
• Education is about relationships;
• Our values are respect, honesty and kindness;
• I understand what Wilshaw and Gove are on about when they say
context is irrelevant;
• The Coalition’s educational emphasis is encapsulated in the fact that
Grade 6 in the Flute…;
• Without being idealistically naïve, stick to what you believe in;
• I have to create the conditions for students and staff to thrive;
• Target your resources on what matters most and just make do with
everything else;
• When I admitted I couldn’t be a perfect Headteacher, I became better
at my job;
• Keep things simple;
• To some extent, I missed my eldest son growing up.
I have to create
the conditions for
students and staff
to thrive.

9. Just look after people!
Too much of sport operates under the tyranny of
the result…the core principle at Saracens is that
we gather talented people together, treat them
unbelievably well and in return they try
unbelievably hard. That is it. Everything else –
winning or losing matches, winning or losing
Cups – are just outcomes. They are not the
primary aim. We exist to have a positive impact
on as many people as possible.
- Edward Griffiths, CEO, Saracens RFC

14. Roland S Barth
Show me a school where
instructional leaders constantly
examine the school's culture and
work to transform it into one
hospitable to sustained human
learning, and I'll show you students
who do just fine on those
standardized tests.

18. The more leaders focus
their relationships, their
work, and their learning
upon the core business of
teaching and learning, the
greater will be their
influence on student
outcomes.
Viviane Robinson

20. The main job of the school leader is to
improve the work performance of
those they lead.

21. Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain, 2005
There appear to be important gains
in teaching quality in the first year
of experience and smaller gains
over the next few career years.
However, there is little evidence
that improvements continue after
the first three years.

25. The Big Question?
When was the last time you, as a
leader of teacher learning, learnt
something about teaching &
learning which inspired you to
change what you do in the
classroom and, having made that
change, your pupils’ outcomes
improved?

27. Philippa Cordingley
Reading across these reviews it is possible to
identify a number of core characteristics of effective
professional learning that it is therefore important
to bring to bear on support for closing the gaps for
vulnerable students. Key factors here are:
• the enabling of sustained peer support and
reciprocal vulnerability which increases
ownership, commitment and a willingness to take
risks and to unlearn established assumptions and
habits and to develop new understandings and
practices.

33. Better – Atul Gawande
“Arriving at meaningful solutions is an
inevitably slow and difficult process.
Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is
possible. It does not take genius. It
takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It
takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes
a willingness to try.”

34. Tomsett fear 1

36. Tomsett fear 2

38. Giving away the answer 1

40. Giving away the answer 2

42. EEF/IEE Research Schools

44. Sir John Dunford
We know from the Sutton Trust’s 2011
report that the quality of teaching
disproportionately affects disadvantaged
learners. Poor teaching holds them back six
months more each year than their more
fortunate peers, while excellent teaching
benefits them more than it benefits learners
from better-off families.

45. PP/PEF Best Practice
• Excellent collection, analysis and use of data
relating to individual pupils and groups.
• Unerring focus on the quality of teaching.
• Identification of the main barriers to learning for
PEF-eligible pupils.
• Frequent monitoring of the progress of every
PEF-eligible pupil.
• If poor attendance is an issue, this is addressed
as a priority.
• Evidence (especially the Education Endowment
Foundation Toolkit) is used to decide on which
strategies are likely to be most effective in
overcoming PEF students’ barriers to learning.

47. The Magic of Metacognition

48. What is metacognition?
Metacognition is the ability to use
prior knowledge to plan a strategy
for approaching a learning task,
take necessary steps to problem
solve, reflect on and evaluate
results, and modify one’s approach
as needed.

49. What is metacognition?
Flavell (1976), who first used the
term, offers the following example:
“I am engaging in metacognition if
I notice that I am having more
trouble learning A than B; if it
strikes me that I should double
check C before accepting it as fact”.

50. Cognitive Apprenticeship
Cognitive Apprenticeship is a theory
that attempts to bring tacit processes
into the open. It assumes that people
learn from one another through
observation, imitation and modelling.
(Collins, Newman and Brown, 1989)

51. Cognitive Apprenticeship
In traditional apprenticeship, much of the
learning occurs as apprentices watch
others at work. In schooling, the
processes of thinking are often invisible to
both the students and the teacher.
Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of
instruction that works to make thinking
visible.
(Collins, Newman and Brown, 1989)

52. working memory
mental flexibility
self-control

54. working memory
mental flexibility
self-control

55. We need to model
explicitly the mental
processes integral to
learning which we, as
teachers, can often take
for granted.

57. Modelling Metacognitive Processes

66. Test Conditions Metacognition
• Modelling the thinking as you complete the
question.
• Checklists for completing certain styles of
question.
• If…then... for certain command words.
• Real-time answers “written aloud” with the
pen until your hand hurts…
• Plan something to use after half-term and
then evaluate its impact at the end of the year.

67. Philippa Cordingley
[In schools where effective professional learning
takes place we found] modelling of this kind of
deep and sustained, enquiry oriented learning
by school leaders who provide time for
collaborative analysis and evidence-informed
reflection and who specifically encourage risk-
taking.

69. 11Fr1

70. 11Fr1…Unit 1

71. 11De4

72. 11De4…Unit 1

73. Why the difference?
• The French class were able to practise right up
until the day before the examination;
• The German class had their examination
immediately after the May/June half-term
holiday; there was a ten day gap between
their final practice paper and the real
examination;
• What is the relationship between
metacognitive processes and academic
starting points?

74. Consider the bigger picture. What progress
in understanding/skill do you hope to see?
How do you intend to space this over a
series of lessons?
What is your objective for a single lesson?
What are the most appropriate metacognitive
strategies to support that objective?
How will you measure any positive
impact??

75. Further reading
• Pearson do a literature review of
metacognition that tells you all you need to
know about research:
http://images.pearsonassessments.com/i
mages/tmrs/metacognition_literature_review
_final.pdf.

76. Further reading
• There is a good series of blogs by Josie Mingay
on the RISE website on metacognition:
http://www.riseresearchproject.com/meta
cognition-series-3-of-6/.

77. Further reading
• This is a good chapter on Metacognition from
Stanford University. It has some good quotes
and I like some of the questions and extras at
the end:
https://www.learner.org/courses/learningclassr
oom/support/09_metacog.pdf.

78. Further reading
• This is great on 'Reading Philosophy with
Background Knowledge and Metacognition'.
It explicitly teaches reading
strategies: https://www.pdcnet.org/8525737F
00588478/file/C125737F0061DCC6C125756D
0060B335/$FILE/teachphil_2004_0027_0004_
0055_0072.pdf. Creating such a guide for any
subject area would be a useful task.

80. “If you’re not using
evidence, you must be
using prejudice…”
Sir Kevan Collins, CEO,
Education Endowment Foundation

81. “Our strategy should
therefore be to make
the best choices we
can from the best
evidence available, to
try it out, with an
open mind, and see if
it works. If it does, we
can keep doing it; if
not, we will learn from
that experience and
try something else.”
Professor Rob Coe

82. “Teachers need to
integrate evidence
from research
with evidence
about pupils in their
classrooms for
research to have a
real impact on pupil
progress.”
Philippa Cordingley

85. "It is so easy to be
wrong — and to
persist in being
wrong — when the
costs of being wrong
are paid by others."
Thomas Sowell,
US Economist

87. A research team at the University of Oxford is looking for secondary schools to take part in a
national research project called MYRIAD: “My Resilience in Adolescence”.
MYRIAD is asking questions around how schools prepare young people to manage their
emotional health and improve resilience to the challenges of adolescence. We will carry out
a comparison of social and emotional learning, which is already being taught in schools, with
a class-based mindfulness programme.
We would like to hear from you if you are a headteacher/SLT at a mainstream secondary
school that is interested in the question of how to promote emotional health and wellbeing
in your pupils.
Email: myriad@psych.ox.ac.uk Phone: 01865 613 164 Website:
myriadproject.org

89. Unfettered teaching and learning
Those of us who learn at Huntington
do so in a culture of the possible. We
do not believe that anyone can achieve
anything; rather, we believe that with
dedication, industry and know-how
individuals – both students and
teachers – can make progress beyond
what anyone, including themselves,
could have imagined.

93. John Tomsett
@johntomsett
www.johntomsett.com
j.tomsett@huntington-ed.org.uk
Being a Teacher-Leader:
Building a positive culture