Weekly Teaching and Learning Email - Top Gun for Teachers (Thanks to David Didau)

Dear Colleagues,

The teaching and learning email borrows heavily from a recent blog post by Divad Didau, The Learning Spy (read his blog by clicking here). For those of you who have been unfortunate/fortunate enough to have never watched Top Gun, you can watch the intro on YouTube.

So, what, if anything, can we learn from Top Gun and how can this be applied to a school context? I feel a fad coming on….In his new book, Peak, Anders Ericsson suggests the Top Gun model could provide a recipe for implementing the kind of (fad alert) deliberate practice (read more about deliberate practice) routine which leads to expertise. The trick, as Ericsson see it is find out what the very best performers do and emulate them. In fields where there are clear, objective measures of success this is relatively straightforward. As we know, nothing is straightforward in teaching.

What we have probably all experienced is, look for those teachers whose students perform the best and try to observe and copy what they do. But is this enough or could this be developed further into Top Gun for teachers?

If we’re really committed to maintaining and improving our performance it is suggested that we need the following:

• Frequent, low-stakes lesson observations. Ideally, teachers would get regular intensive sessions maybe weekly or bi-weekly at a time – where observation was followed by feedback and then further practice. At Traill the PEER teaching model could be developed into a more deliberate coaching model.
• Much better feedback on learning. This would require teachers to teach lessons which allowed students to demonstrate the retention and application of content covered weeks, months, maybe even years before. As you are updating schemes of work and planning for next year, can better feedback from learners be integrated into this?
• Guided, purposeful practice. Teachers will make more progress with a mentor or coach to help them focus and pay attention to the skills they are trying to develop.
• A codified body of knowledge (ideally phase and subject specific) which would give teachers a means to objectively assess where they need to make progress, isolate skills and practise – this could result in much better mental representations of what effective teaching looks and feels like. Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion taxonomy might provide a useful starting point in designing such a body. In producing such a document you would be deepening your understanding of your subject and identifying areas for development.

Finally, all this needs to voluntary. You can’t force someone to practice purposefully.

Reading the list above you’re probably thinking; this is madness, when do you have the time etc., but what’s the alternative? If you think everything’s fine, do you have any evidence beyond the anecdotal, I personally don’t? Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that people actually decline in their profession and that experience is not directly linked to expertise. In order to improve we need to engage in purposeful, conscious practice. Ericsson provides many examples of professions where, because of the quality of the practice, people actually get worse over time. Radiologists are a case in point. In most cases, radiologists are sent X-rays to examine without ever finding out the consequences of their diagnoses. They rarely get useful feedback on the judgements. In such cases experiences may result in increasing confidence, but the judgement of experienced radiologists is, if anything, slightly worse than that of colleagues with about 3 years of experience. I’m now in my fifth year of teaching...suggesting my best days are behind me.

Have a great weekend everyone, apologies if I’ve sucked the fun out of Friday with this one.

Best regards,
Neil