The overwhelming body of research is clear that the most important factor in improving pupil outcomes and their experience in school is great teaching. During the last two years, we have been focused on developing a consistent and systematic approach to professional development to secure improvements in teaching provision and provide a meaningful developmental programme for all of our practitioners.
We have engaged with recommendations from research, such as Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’, and shared guidance reports from organisations, like the Education Endowment Foundation.
Great Teaching Toolkit
It was important for us to establish a clear framework that would support our development and so we selected Evidence Based Education’s ‘Great Teaching Toolkit’. This recognises the complexities of teaching and learning, bringing together vast amounts of research and condensing it into four domains:
- Understanding the content of what we are teaching and how it is learnt
- Creating a supportive environment for learning
- Managing the classroom to maximise every opportunity to learn
- Presenting content, activities and interactions that activate pupils’ thinking
We have been using this framework to implement evidence-based strategies in our lessons.
For example, we have explored the importance of retrieval practice (making links between what we already know and new learning) and we have built this into our lesson structure.
To ensure that our children develop their independence as learners, we use an established scaffolding framework from the ‘Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants’ research and this is helping them to identify the level of support they need to be successful in a lesson.
Our teachers work with colleagues in other schools and organisations to develop their knowledge and understanding, whilst also sharing effective practice that will benefit children in all of our schools. As part of this, we are now supporting other schools in implementing this framework as the impact on improving teaching and learning at Honeybourne has been recognised.
This is just a small sample of the work we have been doing in implementing the framework and during the parent workshops we run, you will get to see some of the strategies that we have been exploring.
We will also be sharing the framework with the children so they can see what the teachers are putting in place, helping them to understand how this will help them with their learning and to ensure we are ‘turning potential into success’.
The graphics below show how the framework is organised, and the elements we are developing
within each domain. Click each graphic to view PDF.
