1. Great Teaching
Informed Wisdom in the
Heat of Every Day Practice
Tom Sherrington
Headteacher, Highbury Grove School,
Islington
@headguruteacher
#educationfest
6. Teaching and Learning Priorities at
HGS 2016/7
Explicit Knowledge
Reading: a planned daily diet
Cultural Capital
Questioning
Feedback and improvement
Excellence Exhibitions
Rhetoric; oracy as pedagogy
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9. Contemporary educational ideas all
my staff should know about
Visible Learning; John Hattie
Formative Assessment; Dylan Wiliam
Cognitive science; Daniel T Willingham
Desirable Difficulties; Robert Bjork
An Ethic of Excellence; Ron Berger
‘Below the line’ learning; Guy Claxton
Growth Mindset; Carol Dweck
Pygmalion Effect; Robert Rosenthal
10. The basics matter
After millennia of battle the surviving G’Gugvuntt and Vl’hurg joined forces to
attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a
journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they
attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth.
Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed
by a small dog.
11. Key findings
The two factors with the
strongest evidence of improving
pupil attainment are
1. teachers’ content
knowledge, including their
ability to understand how
students think about a
subject and identify common
misconceptions
2. quality of instruction, which
includes using strategies like
effective questioning and the
use of assessment
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14. A few key ideas from research:
Memory: space and interleave content; test and re-test
and re-test
Metacognition – model the thinking
Grit/ Growth mindset – applied to specific strategies –
can be developed
Homework: yes it works – in specific forms and
conditions and not in others
The Pygmalion Effect happens – students rise or fall to
meet your expectations.
17. Balance: Staples and Deviations
Mode A
You Explain
You Model
They practise
Check and give
feedback
Test them. And again a
bit later.
Mode B
• Explore; Discover
• Hands-on Experience
• Inspire some AWE
• Go off piste
• Make things; do projects;
set open-ended tasks,
give choices,
80% 20%
18. Differentiation and Challenge
MUST, SHOULD, COULD learning objectives.
To a good approximation, it’s sensible to give
everyone the same diet aiming for the top but then
do THE GARDENING:
Top End,
SEND/EAL ,
Everyone else
19. Behaviour –
It’s all about motivation and habits
Stay RAMPed:
Relaxed, Alert, Motivated and Positive
Signal, pause, INSIST
Affirm and follow through:
‘You establish what you establish’
Bill Rogers
Language of Choice
Use the system; it’s there to support you
Fix the damage.
20. Literacy
Say it again but better; set standards for speech
New words: rehearse, apply, recall, reinforce
Do lots of reading in class; model reading.
Hard Work
Bursts of Glorious Silence; Time limits; Completion goals
Developing a growth mindset requires some early success;
Reward effort and perseverance over performance
Construct opportunities for students to achieve excellence.
Homework: You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for
yourself
21. Questions
Everyone answers; use think time; use pairs or names or
whiteboards; probe and probe again
Go meta – how do you know what you know?
Feedback
Mark lean; feedback early
Insist on responses.
Only do marking at the rate it can be actioned; don’t drown
Redraft via critique: simple, powerful. (Ron Berger)