Adam Robbins Education

How we improve teachers in a sustainable way is something that is incredibly important to me.

There has been a lot of work done on adaptive expertise, metal models and coaching in recent months. Brilliant minds like Sarah Cottinghat and Neil Gilbride have worked hard to create awareness of the way a teacher perceives situations and the decisions they make. This often draws parallels with sports coaching. This makes sense because like sports, a large proportion of the mechanics of teaching is procedural in nature. There is also somewhat of a consensus over which techniques are better than others, eg naming the student at the end of a question is objectively better than putting the name at the front. While this is nowhere near the consensus of closed skills in sports, mainly due to the delayed and fuzzy feedback loops that exist, it is a big improvement from where we were a decade ago. 

Then this tweet got me thinking about this link in more detail. 

https://twitter.com/Caroline_Alice_/status/1843739588025864560

I think this is a genuine barrier, how do we get teachers ready to deploy new ideas in the complex world of a classroom when we are not there to give them hints and pointers. It is one thing that is hugely different to sports coaching. A sports coach can often be beside the player and has regular opportunities to communicate with them during the game. This is uncommon in teaching, although I think some people have tried using ear pieces like spies do. Deliberate practice is one tool used. This would be akin to running a drill in a training session. I used to be a basketball coach so I will use the analogy of a shooting drill. Uncontested shooting at the hoop with the player thinking about perfecting the technique is the same as deliberate practice. It exists to build fluency and prepares teachers for the real thing. This hopefully means they can increase their chance of success. It is great for novices. Just this week my PGCE student gained confidence and fluidity in their start of lesson routine by doing 10 mins of deliberate practice with me offering feedback. 

However for experts it is really lacking. In basketball there is a big difference from shooting in a drill and shooting in a game, there are defenders to put you off your timing and space might vary significantly. There are also the decision making factors of when to shoot and if this is a good shot at this time? 

These decision making issues also occur in the classroom. One of the biggest barriers that professional development has is how to support teachers to make the best decisions possible. Often we might see a teacher misapply a technique or use it correctly, but not make the most of it. For example, we might see a teacher go to miniwhiteboards to check understanding but their choices of questions are suboptimal. This is most likely due to a poor understanding of the validity conditions of what makes an effective question. Or they could do it at a suboptimal time, when another strategy might be more appropriate, like in the middle of an explanation.

I think the profession in general is doing a much better job of training novice teachers. I want to focus more on how well we develop our expert teachers. How do we turn a good teacher into a great teacher?

Some great minds have tried to come up with ways of tackling this issue. In the instruction of a new technique Adam Boxer uses WHEN,WHY,BY as a way of making the validity conditions clear. Quite simply the idea is to explicitly identify the trigger, (when you want to give students an instruction), then explain the reason (make sure it is heard by ensuring all students are listening), then finally the technique (signal, pause, insist). At the other end of the process Josh Goodrich’s responsive coaching is looking to explore the teachers’ understanding of what they did and why and provide enough guidance to change their process based on their level of expertise in the area. In this case the evaluation might be more exploratory coaching or could be quite directive as needed. Responsive coaching offers a great opportunity to improve teachers, but comes with significant opportunity costs that schools find difficult to handle. How do you ensure you have enough expert coaches? How do you ensure time is protected for the meetings?

Both of these are trying to achieve the same thing; to introduce a new thought pattern to the teacher, to adjust their mental model of what good teaching is. 

To go back to our basketball analogy they are all discussing contexts with the player and advising them of how to act differently in this context. 

However there is a different way of coaching. This is called constraints-led coaching. The essential part of constraints-led coaching is to think of athletes as problem solvers. Drills are designed to replicate a persistent problem that players encounter and reps are given to allow them to find their own solution to the problem. You can see from this description how it might not be as beneficial for novices as it is to experts. Hopefully you can also see how it ties in with the expertise reversal effect. A constraints-led shooting drill might involve trying to replicate certain things that happen in games, like catching bad passes or deciding to shoot or not based on the space available. By doing this we allow the player to develop their experience (mental model) and improve their in-game performance. 

Obvious ways teaching is not the same as sports.

It is important to acknowledge that this might appear I am saying that teachers should just be thrown into a class and try to problem solve their way out of it. That’s not what I mean. Unlike sports, in lessons we don’t have the instant feedback loops on all things (we do for behaviour management, and instructions but not on learning, for example) we also need to remember to do this effectively in sports players have a foundation of fundamentals to draw on. 

Things we can do to encourage constraint-led development.

I am keen to make sure that everything I write has practical strategies to implement. As such these are the things that I think help teach these validity conditions, this problem solving aspect that constraint-led coaching provides. 

1. All training should be focussed around solving a problem. The best ones are persistent problems. I like to start all sessions by getting teachers to discuss a particular aspect of lessons that can be problematic.
2. Scenarios. I cannot emphasise enough how important scenarios are in teacher development. While we can’t run constraint-led drills we can create scenarios that aim to illustrate key validity conditions. These can function as examples and non-examples (another often overlooked aspect of CPD) but they should go one further. They should be open ended to allow for experienced teachers to predict what they would do and offer them variations to test out their responses.

By focusing our approach around problems and solutions using scenarios, we can provide the space needed to expert teachers to test the boundaries of their current practice and recognise the benefits of the new techniques we are introducing. It’s how we can help them to stop doing good things so they can make time to do great things. 

Part 2 of this blog will give a practical example of how to build these scenarios to provide a constraints-led experience.