Associated Teachers TV series
From Good to Outstanding
‘From Good to Outstanding’: Tips for Teachers
Based on extracts from an extended interview with the series’ Inspector, Clare Gillies (CG)
An outstanding lesson
CG: “In a good lesson the majority of pupils will certainly make progress… In an outstanding lesson you would expect allpupils to have moved forward. …An accepted understanding of ‘outstanding’, compared to ‘good’, is that all pupils in a class have made at least the amount of progress you would expect in a lesson”
For Clare an outstanding lesson has “…a quality of such interest that you want to be a pupil yourself, you find yourself enjoying the lesson just as much as the pupils clearly are”
Pupils in an outstanding lesson “… have a rapport with the teacher where they are learning together. It’s exciting and there’s an ingredient that’s hard to quantify. You can feel it in the atmosphere. Whoever is in the room is carried along with the interest, the stimulus and the content of the lesson”
Clare suggests that many excellent lessons have a ‘buzz’ but that this doesn’t have to be the case. An outstanding lesson can also have a quiet, calm atmosphere. It could be a lesson around an enquiry where the teacher guides pupils and extends their thinking e.g. via effective questioning. This is usually based on very solid planning.
“During the lesson the teacher may be relaxed enough to go off at a slight tangent and then come back to steer. But underneath the calm or perhaps relaxed atmosphere of the lesson, the teacher is very clear what their or his/her pupil’s abilities are, who works well with whom - which groups work well together and which pairings work well.”
To turn a ‘good’ lesson turn into an ‘outstanding’ one, Clare looks to see how the lesson fits into what has gone before and whether pupils feel that the lesson is leading them on to the lessons to come. In other words, that that lesson feels part of a whole.
Outstanding teacher or outstanding teaching?
For Clare it is “… better to consider ‘outstanding teaching’ rather than ‘outstanding teachers’ because even a teacher who delivers many wonderful lessons is going to have the odd day when things don’t go so right. ‘Teaching’ implies it’s going with the learning and therefore we're assuming ‘outstanding teaching’ is contributing to outstanding learning - and it’s the learning that really matters.”
What Clare looks for when observing lessons
Clare makes the point that one lesson observation is just one of hundreds of lessons that a teacher will deliver in a whole school year so “it is just a tiny snapshot and no comments about teachers’ skills or abilities should be based on that one lesson.”
For Clare, key things she looks out for when observing a lesson are “…how much are the children learning - how much progress have they made during the lesson, have they enjoyed it, wanted to work hard and be involved? At the end of the lesson it’s important to reflect on how much they have learned. Have they moved forwards, from the position they started from, by the end of the lesson? And then I reflect on what it was the teacher was doing that helped them to enjoy learning.”
“Were the pupils clear what the learning objectives were and did they feel they’d achieved them?”
Clare elicits this information by, if appropriate, talking to pupils during the lesson, looking at their work as they are doing it, quietly asking them questions and generally finding out whether they have understood what is expected of them. In an ideal world she would talk to pupils after the lesson but due to pressure of time in a school day this is often not realistic.
CG: “The principles of looking at pupils’ written work, talking to them, finding out what they have understood, give a very secure base to consider whether they have learned a little or quite a lot in that lesson.”
It’s not just the teacher who makes a lesson go well or not. Pupils bring all sorts of external factors into the classroom – was it morning or afternoon, last period on a Friday? Did they have PE the lesson before, was there an argument in the class earlier on in the day which is bubbling away under the surface – did the weather have an adverse effect on pupils making them ratty in the lesson? “There are so many external factors beyond the teachers control….”
Observing a whole lesson or a brief part?
CG: “It’s an interesting argument to consider that even one lesson on its own isn’t the true picture of a teacher’s skills over all.”
Clare suggests that its much fairer to see a whole lesson whether it be 60 minutes or one and a quarter hours as you get to see the shape and structure of the whole lesson. Observing a small part of a lesson e.g. the starter doesn’t always give you the full picture.
Does age or stage matter when it comes to ‘outstanding’?
CG: “I don’t believe the criteria are different for outstanding lessons at any age. It’s quite possible to watch a sixth form lesson for example where the features of the atmosphere in the room might seem very different to a primary lesson, but the same key factors of stimulating content, clear learning objectives shared with the students if appropriate and total involvement by the pupils or students.’
Planning pays off
Clare believes that behind an outstanding lesson, although not always obvious when you are sitting in that classroom, is careful, thorough preparation by the teacher. There is a very clear understanding in the teacher’s mind – this is what we’re going to be studying/learning/thinking about and by the end of the lesson this is what I want the pupils to be able to reflect on. The pupils should be able to see how they’ve progressed by the end of the lesson.
CG: “The vast majority of outstanding lessons will have been very carefully planned, and the resources will be right for what that lesson is covering…. So a teacher’s planning and thinking through what the pupils are to learn and to get out of the lesson have to be key ingredients of an outstanding lesson”
When pupils feel that the work is at exactly the right level for them - not too difficult and not too easy - this might well reflect very subtle planning on the part of the teacher who knows exactly what will sweep the pupil’s enthusiasm and interest along.
Pupil expectations of outstanding
Pupils don’t use textbook type criteria for what an outstanding lesson would be. For them it’s about the teacher having a good rapport with them, about them enjoying the lessons, being encouraged and supported by the teacher. If they have confidence in the teacher’s subject knowledge, they can trust what the teacher knows and talks about. Their teacher will spend time explaining things when they don’t understand, without humiliating them.
CG: “[Pupils] enjoy the sort of relaxed atmosphere in a lesson where they’re often encouraged to work with their fellow pupils…perhaps have a little bit of a laugh…and feel that they are working with the teacher.
When a lesson falls short of outstanding
A lesson may have all the ingredients of outstanding in its atmosphere and level of interest and excitement but if work isn’t pitched appropriately for all ability levels then the depth of their learning will be lacking. Looking at the class as a whole, if not everyone has learned enough or made enough progress during that particular lesson, it cannot be outstanding.
Giving feedback after an observation
Giving good feedback depends a lot on the receptiveness of the teacher and how open they are to the feedback. After an observation Clare will ask teachers what they thought of the lesson first. She reflects that many good teachers are very self critical and even if their lesson went well will still come out saying “I could have done this or that”. She says teachers often welcome small points she makes and often, in this receptive mode, a very interesting discussion might follow about what the strong features of the lesson were, with the teacher giving more background and then Clare offering practical suggestions or tips which the teacher will find really helpful.
“If the teacher is not receptive to feedback and says something like the lesson didn’t go so well because the pupils weren’t behaving well, it is much harder to try and offer constructive and supportive feedback.”
‘Real life’ context to learning
Throughout all the lessons Clare observed in this series, one of the most significant things is that of the context of the lesson. How does what the pupils are doing or learning relate to real life? For example in primary mathematics, a lesson on coordinates would be much enhanced by the starter having a reference to maps generally. In a secondary English lesson, which looked at John Agard’s poem ‘Half-Caste’, Clare suggested that a discussion about the wider meaning of the word half-caste at the start would have given more context to the lesson.
Final thoughts
CG: “Having observed many lessons in many different types of schools and different ages, I’m fairly sure that one feature of outstanding lessons is that I remember them for a very long time, sometimes forever! And I feel very privileged to have been allowed to watch really exciting learning brought about by outstanding teaching.”