It’s exciting to hear all the ‘back-to-school’ buzz across the nation. It feels like the right time to talk about leadership, collaboration and professional development – the magic ingredients of successful teaching so that every child succeeds.
In my second book, I identified three levers for transforming subject teaching. Evidence and experience combined convince me that these are relevant across subjects and phases. I’m keen to pressure-test my belief in these levers with a wider range of contexts. Please get in touch on twitter @drhelendrury if these ideas do – or don’t – cohere with experiences you’ve had or evidence you’ve engaged with.
Transforming subject teaching
One teacher can make a significant difference, but real transformation comes when teachers work together in collaboration. By adopting a shared approach across a school or a department you can make a real difference for every pupil. It’s been demonstrated that the school a pupil attends can have a greater influence on their progress than their background characteristics such as age, gender or socio-economic disadvantage1.
A shared approach to subject teaching can be an enormous part of making sure that your school really transforms pupils’ life chances – that every pupil succeeds and a significant proportion excels.
Change is possible
School leadership has the second-largest impact on pupil outcomes after teacher quality2. In every school I’ve worked with where a high proportion of pupils have excelled with a subject, the key to success has been down to leadership – the leadership of the school’s headteacher, of the senior team, of the subject leader (primary) or head of department (secomdary) and, in many cases, of another key individual who is championing transformative teaching and learning in that subject.
In every case of a school transforming achievement through mastery, the subject team exhibits strength across these three areas:
- Buy-in: their commitment to transforming achievement and belief in the potential of every learner.
- Clarity: their alignment around a shared vision for teaching and learning.
- Training: the high-quality professional development and learning they engage in.
In some cases, these three areas are strengths across the school. High expectations are prevalent, with a culture of discussing and experimenting with teaching approaches. The school leadership prioritises the necessary time, money and leadership to provide high-quality training. These strengths have been shown to result in schools becoming highly effective3.
You may be in the lucky position of leading a subject in a school that enjoys a universal emphasis on scholarship and a shared commitment for teachers to support one another to develop. These schools really are exciting places to work – so I hope you are!
Even if that doesn’t sound exactly like your school, you still have a real opportunity to make a difference. It’s the subject team that most closely affects what is taught and how it is taught4.
Subject leadership
Success with a mastery approach comes down to the extent to which the entire teaching team for a subject benefits from buy-in, clarity and high-quality training. In your subject leadership, you can take significant control of these three important levers – you can establish shared goals and expectations, agree on effective teaching practices and lead teacher learning and development.
To maximise the impact of any courses, conferences, articles and networks you and your team engage with, you need to think carefully about how they will cohere with and contribute to these three levers. To bring about real change, you need to form a coherent plan for developing the culture, alignment and practice of your team over time.
Viviane Robinson identified five leadership practices associated with increased learning and well-being of students, in a meta-analysis of school leadership. [While there are no hard-and-fast rules about how to interpret effect sizes in educational research, an effect of 0.2 is usually considered small, 0.4 a moderate effect and 0.6 and above a large effect.] The three practices with the largest effect size were found to be:
- establishing goals and expectations (effect size 0.42)
- having a defensible and shared theory of effective teaching that forms the basis of a coherent teaching programme with collective teacher responsibility for student learning (effect size 0.42)
- leading teacher learning and development (effect size 0.84)
These three mesh with the three levers I’ve identified – buy-in, clarity and training. Establishing goals and expectations is about buy-in. The shared theory of effective teaching translates to clarity. Leading teacher learning and development is what the third lever – training – is all about.
Buy-in, clarity and training
Over this week, I’m going to take a closer look at each of these three levers in turn.
I’ll begin with buy-in. How can you build a team-wide commitment to achievement for every single learner, no matter what their background or prior attainment?
In the next blog, I’ll look at the importance of getting all subject teachers, and all members of the senior team, on the same page regarding what they want subject teaching to look like.
The mini blog series will culminate in consideration of how to develop subject teachers’ subject knowledge and further improve their teaching. As the OECD emphasise5, no matter where in the world you’re teaching, professional development is the key to transforming achievement.
- J. MacBeath and P. Mortimore, eds, Improving School Effectiveness (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001) p. 72.
- K. Leithwood et al., Review of Research: How Leadership Influences Student Learning (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvemet, University of Minnesota, 2004). http://hdl.handle.net/11299/2035 accessed 6 September 2021.
- B. Mulford, H. Silins and K. Leithwood, Educational Leadership for Organisational Learning and Improved Student Outcomes (Dordrecht: The Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004). B. Mulford and H. Silins, ‘Revised Models and Conceptualisation of Successful School Principalship that Improves Student Outcomes’, International Journal of Educational Management 25(1) (2011): pp. 61-82.
- L.S. Siskin, Realms of Knowledge: Academic Departments in Secondary Schools (London: Falmer, 1994).
- A. Schleicher, Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2011).
Helen Drury 