School improvement is hard. Whatever your school’s starting point, pushing it forward can often feel like an uphill battle. And for good reason - schools are big, complex organisations which sometimes feel deliberately designed to resist change. I’m very blessed in that I get to work with lots of schools as they embark on this journey, and I’m often asked where schools should start if they are looking to improve.
On the one hand, it’s not really a reasonable question - without going to the school and poking around, how could I possibly know? On the other hand, there are some things that I see time and again which feel like they are widespread enough to warrant generalised advice, even without having stepped foot in the school. We can therefore say that there are reasonable questions for leaders, regardless of their context, to investigate one at a time, and in priority order.
With that in mind, our first question will be:
Is there disruption-free learning in almost every lesson across the school?
Behaviour comes first because, well, it has to come first. Nothing is possible in a school where behaviour is poor. It robs students of a staggering amount of learning time and destroys staff morale. The emotional labour of challenging students, combined with often inefficient systems and an unsupportive leadership results in a toxic and negatively reinforcing behaviour and learning culture.
Poor behaviour is a lead weight on school improvement, and there is little point focusing on anything else until it is fixed.
Unfortunately, improving behaviour isn’t an easy job, and it can take time. The quickest routes generally involve simple and clear systems and routines with a heavy emphasis on centralisation, all accompanied by training for staff in the systems. Emphasis should be placed on supporting staff in making tough decisions in fractious contexts where certainty isn’t always available. In addition, there are also simple and straightforward actions that teachers can be taught to deploy to build strong routines and to anticipate and prevent poor behaviour.
Improving behaviour should therefore be a leadership team’s relentless focus until almost every lesson is disruption free. It is the single biggest difference they can make to outcomes.
Once almost every lesson is disruption free, leaders should certainly continue to sustain their focus on behaviour, and also look to ensure that every lesson is disruption free. But having done a lot of hard word and taken the school to a much stronger position, they can start to consider the next question:
Is every student paying attention and participating in every lesson?
One of the most predictable lesson scenarios that I see involves teachers relying on students with their hands up (or calling out). There are a great many problems with this, but to me the most pressing is that a substantial number of students become habituated to not listening, participating, or having their voice heard by their teachers. There are many ways to fix this, but probably the most straightforward are two simple questioning strategies.
The first strategy is to ensure that with close to no exceptions, questions should follow the structure:
Question → pause → name
This strategy, simply called Name at End questioning, communicates that all students have to be listening to the question, as they do not know who it will go to. It serves as the first step in building classrooms where everyone is paying attention.
The second step is building a system for ensuring that teachers aren’t relying on specific students (often the most confident) to answer every question. The most obvious way to do this is to get into the habit of asking every student at least one question every lesson. This doesn’t require teachers to use a tally chart of anything like that (unless they particularly want to). Most teachers can more or less keep track across the course of a lesson, and if they go into each lesson with this aim in mind, they are almost guaranteed to ask every student across the course of at least two lessons.
It’s important to note that attention and participation are certainly closely related, but they are not the same. Of course we want all students to be listening and attentive, but we also want to ensure that they are actively participating and having their voice heard by their teachers.
As time goes on, you will want to embed other strategies aimed at achieving similar outcomes. The most powerful of these strategies is the use of mini-whiteboards, and leaders should quickly move towards a target of mini-whiteboards being used in almost every lesson (obvious exceptions including specific practical lessons like you might find in PE, D&T or science).
Before, or perhaps alongside, that roll-out, we have one final question to answer:
Does this school have a long term memory strategy?
However good your lessons are, without a long term memory strategy, they are worth very little. Humans forget things, and they forget things fast, and we need to plan out at the teacher, department and school level exactly how we are going to tackle this educationally troublesome feature of human cognition. Our long term memory strategy will almost always involve a sustained programme of retrieval practice, featuring homework and classwork working in concert. As with behaviour, this is difficult to get right but it is absolutely critical.
When all’s said and done, despite the variation between schools - their contexts, their cohorts and their colleagues - they have much in common. Fundamentally, the issues of behaviour, attention, participation and memory are shared by all schools and transcend the idiosyncrasies that make schools such varied and fascinating places to visit and work in. Let’s sort those out first, then worry about everything else.
Click here to find out more about how Carousel Teaching can support your school in working on behaviour and T&L strategies.
Click here to find out more about how Carousel Learning can support you to develop a long term memory strategy.
Such a good article!
As a school leader in the Netherlands I’ve been assigned an elementary school within a region where most families are from poor social and economical backgrounds.
Behavior is a massive influence on learning. The team members have not been trained or equipped with the right standards to actually induce the right behavior, meaning there’s little to no disruption during lessons. The whole conversation now is about a lot of the things you point out are necessary.
Not the easiest thing to do though, because it puts an enormous emphasis on the teacher - which it should - and it also impacts the way parents and children view the school as they were taught the wrong behavior was fine.
Hopefully this particular view on healthy learning schools gets widespread among our schools so there can be a collective view on how to create environments that lead students to learning.
A really interesting article - definitely the three areas which need most attention.
I do agree with the reply above that behaviour comes *with* learning as well as before it. I think it depends on the scale of the behaviour issues faced by the school. If it is impossible to teach or dangerous or toxic, then this could lead you to focusing solely on behaviour first. One thing is for sure, behaviour should never be *off* the table.
For us, we have behaviour systems working well and we’re focusing on participation at the moment. The part I’m keen to move onto is a systematic review of memory strategies, so you’ve given me lots to consider 👍