Dave Williams was my A level English teacher. He changed my life. If I hadn’t been taught by Dave, I wouldn't have chosen to study English Literature at university.
I thought of Dave yesterday, when I was at the researchED National Conference in London. I attended a number of brilliant talks, including one by Pritesh Raichura and another by Dr Raj Chande & Professor Rob Coe.
Pritesh made me think of Dave, because the techniques and qualities Pritesh claimed are essential to achieve 100% active attention from pupils, mirrored those Dave demonstrated from September 1982 to June 1984 when I was in his A Level class.
Pritesh made an utterly convincing case for:
- Explicit instruction;
- Be the expert in the room;
- Desks in rows;
- Teach rooted at the front;
- 3-2-1 SLANT (an utterly reliable and repeated cue for disciplined attention)
- High frequency questioning
- Checks for listening;
- All hands up Cold Calling;
- Participation the norm;
- Talk in pairs;
- Establish your presence by:
- Pupils’ names in examples;
- Telling it like a secret;
- Be fascinated by the work;
- Tell great stories;
- Making it fun and bringing laughter to the room.
- Assume the right to be angry if students are off-task;
- Plenty of carrot but plenty of enforced stick when necessary.
Pritesh was amazing. I had been aware of his growing presence on X and hearing him talk lived up to all my expectations. He is a charismatic expert, who is utterly committed to improving his practice. What was unusual, was that Pritesh acknowledged that you needed to learn how to have presence, how to perform in the classroom, how to vary your voice and exaggerate your facial expressions in order to make what you are teaching irresistible. He was certain you could learn to develop that elusive thing called ‘classroom presence’.
Nearly everything he said about being a great teacher was practised by Dave Williams 40 years ago. Dave was firm, fair and fearsome. He knew his stuff. He never once wandered round the room. We never did group work, or presentations. He explained every page of The Return of the Native and Mill on the Floss, every line of The General Prologue and The Wife of Bath’s Tale, every nuance of Shakespeare’s dense comedy, Love Labour’s Lost, and we dutifully made notes in our copies of the text, which still sit on my bookshelf, just to my right as I type. He marked every essay in detail, gave us fabulous, witty feedback, never once failed to return our marked essays within the week…and I still have those essays in my loft. You did the work because you wanted to reciprocate his commitment, and, frankly, if you didn't, the consequences were dire. As Pritesh said yesterday, you have the right to be angry if your students aren’t doing the work because you genuinely care about them doing the work. We cared because he cared. And Dave was the funniest teacher I was ever taught by, bar none. We laughed a lot. I am still in frequent contact with him some 42 years since he began teaching me, and if I want 30 minutes of conversation which is astrologically predestined to make me chuckle non-stop, I’ll give him a ring. Being taught by Dave Williams was a both a joy and a challenge.
So, after Pritesh, I went to see Raj and Rob. They gave a fascinating talk about attempting to find a single metric to judge the quality of an individual teacher, as the manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team did so successfully when recruiting new players – a tale made famous by the film Moneyball. Their proposed sole metric of teacher quality for the individual teacher is a single GCSE value-added score, which does make sense. In 2014 I went to Washington DC with Rob and several others, including luminaries like Professor Lee Elliott-Major, to launch the Sutton Trust’s publication, ‘What Makes Great Teaching’, in which Rob et al., defined ‘effective teaching as that which leads to improved student achievement using outcomes that matter to their future success.’ It makes sense, in the light of that sensible definition, to choose a single GCSE value-added score if you are searching for a single metric to measure the quality of teaching.
The motivation behind Raj and Rob’s work lies in the tale of the Oakland Athletics’ recruitment process. All the scouts were proposing buying superstar players who hit the ball frequently. The new measure the Oakland A’s used was how frequently a player made base. The previously unsuccessful scouts were furious; however, by focusing upon the new metric, the A’s recruited more effective run-getters, and they became famously successful. Raj and Rob want to find a metric that would eliminate the inconsistencies in the teacher recruitment process, and take a more data-focused, evidence-informed approach to estimating teacher quality.
Halfway through Raj and Rob’s talk, I embarrassed myself by blurting out that teaching is simply not for some people…when you interview them you can tell they just won’t make it in the classroom. I was mocked and booed…and to a great extent, I deserved it! But I wonder if there is a grain of truth in my comments…
Later, I had 20 minutes chatting to Rob in the Green Room. I first met Rob over a decade ago when Alex Quigley, Stuart Kime and I ran a project for the Education Endowment Foundation. We spent several afternoons in my office discussing how to set up the project; Rob made my head hurt. He genuinely transformed my professional outlook. He just kept asking the question, ‘How do you know?’ And most times, I couldn’t answer him. So, when we were chatting yesterday, I said to him that I thought they were asking the wrong question about measuring teacher quality. Even if you came up with a single metric for teacher quality, without the graduates there, keen to join the profession to fill the posts that were left vacant due to the success of the Raj-Rob single-metric recruitment and selection process, the problem of recruiting teacher quality across the system remains. Rob conceded that I might have a point, but then we had to leave swiftly to get to the last session of the day. As we hurried along, he asked me, ‘Well, what should we be doing?’
Well, Rob got me thinking…about Pritesh, about Dave Williams, about my colleagues at Huntington School where I was headteacher for 14 years, and about the hundreds of teachers I have had the privilege of watching teach these past three peripatetic consultant years. And in the next blog post, I will explore what I think makes a truly great teacher, and how you might measure them. I think the title of the post might be, ‘Be more Dave…’