A lot is being written and published at the moment on adaptive teaching, and particularly on how ‘checking for understanding’ happens in classrooms. It strikes me that some of the discourse risks overcomplicating what (if it is to be applied) needs to feel manageable and intuitive. I probably overcomplicated things a bit myself in this... Continue Reading →
I see a lot of explaining happening in classrooms, and I did a lot of explaining as a teacher. It’s a key aspect of instruction, which has been much theorised and written about. For what it’s worth, this is how I see the anatomy of explanation – its mechanical elements and its hugely important (but... Continue Reading →
As schools develop their teaching and learning ‘strategies’, or ‘policies’, or ‘principles’, they have to grapple with the balancing of autonomy with consistency – of teacher or subject difference with common expectations. Speaking to the Confederation of School Trusts in 2024, Sir Kevin Collins painted a bleak picture of the more extreme prescriptiveness, which he... Continue Reading →
Thoughts on what keeps pupils learning through a lesson, and why this might be difficult for the robot teachers of the future A few years ago, I wrote something about engagement, suggesting that saying pupils are ‘invested’ rather than just ‘engaged’ implies that they are more than just on task. The question ‘How will you... Continue Reading →
Schools are working very hard at the moment to make sure that ‘adaptive teaching’ is an established idea, and is a successful part of everyday practice. This post (based on work I have done with schools) offers one framework for reflecting on or auditing that practice. This has, in turn, emerged from discussions around what... Continue Reading →
This post unpacks a typical approach to reading a challenging text, in this case in a geography lesson. It also describes a number of practices associated with strong ‘adaptive teaching’. Reading challenging texts in the classroom It is notoriously difficult in secondary schools for strong disciplinary literacy practices to become established across the curriculum, for... Continue Reading →
The current focus on ‘adaptive teaching’ has meant that the craft (or art) of teacher modelling has rightly been foregrounded, as a crucial mechanism for making learning accessible. Interestingly, when I am asked after seeing a lesson to comment on how learning might have been more successful, modelling is probably the most common element I... Continue Reading →
A ‘key learning question’ is simply a way of framing the learning in a lesson or across a sequence of lessons – of setting the learning agenda for pupils. It is an alternative to the traditional ‘learning objective’, replacing a statement of what pupils will learn, or of what they will aim to learn, with... Continue Reading →
A notoriously unhelpful piece of lesson observation feedback is that there was insufficient ‘pace’. Of course, in discussion this might be teased out and made sense of, but sometimes it is left unclear, or (worse) it can reflect a misunderstanding of what the teacher was doing, or of how a subject works. The difficulty, of... Continue Reading →
Reframing ‘engagement’ in the classroom Any mention of ‘engagement’ in the education Twittersphere or blogosphere will create a flurry of emotive debate. To many, it is now a dirty word, summoning up caricatures of content-free, gimmick-laden teaching, in which the aim is simply to engage so that learning somehow follows. In fact, there is a... Continue Reading →
James Durran 