Getting worse at teaching

We talk a lot about how teachers get better at teaching, but we don’t think enough about how teachers can get worse at teaching.

A few years ago, I visited a school for a day to work with their science department. I managed to give one-to-one feedback to everyone, and vividly remember a conversation I had with one of the teachers, who we’ll call David.

In David’s colleagues’ lessons, the questioning and discussion had been dominated by students calling out answers, and where calling out wasn’t happening the teachers were relying on students with their hands up. I also didn’t see mini-whiteboards in play at all. Taken together, this led to classrooms where disruption was fairly common, a number of students could opt out of participating, and teachers didn’t really know what the students understood or could do. The day I was there they were also having a twilight INSET about literacy and different types of vocabulary, making it a prime example of a school focusing on things unlikely to lead to it improving.

Back to David. When I saw him teach, much like his colleagues, students were calling out, but he at least made an attempt to challenge it. I often saw him rely on hands like his colleagues did, but he also sporadically asked specific students regardless of hands. About a quarter of the questions were parsed as question → pause → name, so nowhere close to the 100% target, but better than none. I didn’t see him actually use mini-whiteboards, but there was a set in his room, and they were strategically placed in plastic wallets so that students could easily get them if David wanted, indicating that they were potentially used at some point.

There was something there in David’s practice. He still had a way to go - especially in terms of consistency and a systematic approach to teaching strategies - but I was seeing some things in his lesson that I wasn’t seeing elsewhere.

In feedback, I pointed this out to him. I said I was really pleased to see that he was sometimes employing really strong questioning strategies. He said to me:

Oh, yeah. I used to work at a United Learning school, and we did stuff like that the whole time. Cold Call, mini-whiteboards, all of it.

I rarely beat around the bush, so I replied:

I’m really glad to hear that. I work in a United Learning school now, so I’m familiar with the approach to teaching and learning. But David - if you know that you should be doing this stuff, why are you barely doing it? Why aren’t you doing it the whole time?

He paused. He thought for a moment and said:

I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. I guess nobody else does it so you just sort of forget to do it.

I remember the conversation because I remember feeling sad. Visiting schools and giving feedback can often be a physical, intellectual and emotional rollercoaster, but it rarely leaves me feeling sad. Here though, we had someone who was employing good strategies in the classroom, and giving his students a good deal. And then, simply by moving school, he had got worse at teaching. He hadn’t decided to get worse at teaching. He hadn’t actively abandoned his old ways or made any conscious choice to not use those skills. They had simply…gone.

We focus a lot on how to get better at teaching. We live in a golden age of CPD, where there is now more on offer to teachers than there ever has been before, and a gradually increasing proportion of that offer is high quality.

Perhaps, though, we also need to talk about how teachers can get worse at teaching.

Teachers can get better at teaching, but they can also get worse.

David had got worse at teaching, and all it took was a change of context and social norms. He didn’t consciously decide to become worse, and nobody had given him an idea that had made him worse. But there he was, worse at teaching.

I worry that David’s experience is generalisable. I worry that there are lots of teachers out there quietly getting worse at teaching. I worry even more that we might not realise when it happens to us, and that we go about our professional lives blessedly unaware that we aren’t as skilled as we once were.

I also worry that whilst teachers getting better at teaching is normally a slow and steady process, teachers getting worse at teaching is a fast one. In his first days in a new school, with new colleagues and new students, David would have quickly dropped the habits he had become used to at his old school. He would have got worse, fast.

There are, as usual, no easy answers to this. I doubt improving David’s training at the first school would have helped sustain the changes to his pedagogy into his second. In the face of organisational indifference and structural inadequacies, one person will only be able to hold out for so long.

The only answer I can therefore suggest is a hard one: to improve every school. We need every teacher to be in a good school - to be in a social and organisational context where good teaching is the norm, and all staff have access to high quality training. And we need, relentlessly and systematically, to find the schools where this isn’t the case and support them to improve.

No teacher should ever get worse at teaching.

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