Slides for my talk at the Education Festival 2016

1. Great Teaching
Informed Wisdom in the
Heat of Every Day Practice
Tom Sherrington
Headteacher, Highbury Grove School,
Islington
@headguruteacher
#educationfest

5. Most lessons I ever teach…
Via @jprofNB

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

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

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.

15. Most data
systems:

16.  Grammar =
Knowledge
 Dialectic =
Exploration
 Rhetoric =
Communication
Know, Explore, Communicate

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)

22. Per ardua
ad astra
Thank You
@headguruteacher