In my last post I ruminated on what constitutes a great teacher, inspired by talks given at the recent National ResearchED conference by Pritesh Raichura, and Dr Raj Chande & Professor Rob Coe. Pritesh demonstrated all the teaching techniques and teacher qualities required for securing 100% attention in class, and Raj and Rob talked about their desire to identify a single metric for teacher quality, based on value-added scores at GCSE. And I reflected upon my best teacher, Dave Williams, who helped me secure a place at university to study English Literature when he taught me A Level 40 years ago.
In this post, I promised to explore what I think makes a truly great teacher, and how you might measure them. After some reflection, I thought I would profile – with her permission – an ex-colleague, Jaqueline (Jack) Bream, the only teacher I have nominated for the National Teaching Awards, where she was a Silver Winner.
Jack Bream
Profile
Jack Bream graduated with a joint honours degree in English and History in 1996 from Warwick University and has been a teacher ever since. She has taught a combination of History, English and Media, all to A-Level. Her students have attained consistently excellent results in those subjects, year after year. She is always the person head teachers send the inspector to observe during an OFSTED inspection – she has been observed teach literally dozens of times on such occasions! She genuinely loves teaching every bit as much as she did in the early years and her students genuinely love her. Jack epitomises all that we should aspire to as teachers: integrity, tolerance, kindness, professionalism and an unrelenting belief in our pupils. She represents a core of teachers who deliver great lessons, day-in, day-out; week-in, week-out; year-in, year-out.
Performance Management Review 2019
Jack is a phenomenal teacher, spreading her talent in several subjects including: English, History and Media. She retains a passion for teaching and this is one of the reasons she is such an exceptional teacher and colleague. Her results remain excellent and she takes great pleasure in the success of her students. Jack is very modest about her success; the results of GCSE and A Level Media were some of the best results in the school, with the progress of her Media Studies students measured as a 2 on ALPS, and all of them gaining an A*-C grade. She is passionate about her teaching, never complacent and always showing a determination to better herself, seek advice and embrace the school’s initiatives. She epitomises everything we strive for: thoroughly planned and engaging lessons, purposeful feedback to allow students to reflect on their learning and high expectations of every student. This was evident from the personalised examination preparation programme Jack established with the vulnerable students in her mixed attainment English group. Jack’s strength is that she never gives up on a student – and they know this. She has the gift of empowering students to want to do their very best – if only we could bottle this!
For many reasons 2018-19 was a challenging year for Jackie. New GCSE and A Level specifications to plan, develop and teach, working for the university in a new position related to teacher training, and the stress of supporting an relative. Through all these challenges Jack has never compromised her determination to provide the best education for the young people she teaches. I would like to thank her for her tremendous dedication – Huntington school would be a poorer place without her. It has been a personal and professional pleasure to work with Jack over the past PM cycle.
Form Tutor Review 2019
Jack has been a superb form tutor this year and has been an absolute dream to work with. She has a great rapport with her form and has developed caring and positive relationships with her tutees. Form time has a productive, purposeful atmosphere – her students are always engaged in homework/ revision/ online courses. Students have used this to help add substance to their UCAS personal statements. Jack has carried out a staggering number of Academic Reviews/file checks/1-2-1s throughout the year and as a result, knows her tutees extremely well. She has been brilliant supporting her ‘priority’ students (e.g. students X & Y… the list really could go on) – making sure that they use form time and study periods to revise but, more importantly, feel cared for and supported when needed. In particular, Jack has gone above and beyond for student X who is re-sitting Y12 and is facing a number of challenges. Jack’s compassion and commitment has been much appreciated by both me and her tutees.
Teaching Awards Nomination[1]
This testimony to the greatness of Jacqueline (Jack) Bream as a teacher and colleague comprises numerous extracts from other people’s tributes to her teaching. The decision to nominate her was mine alone. In 17 years of secondary school headship, I have never made a nomination; Jack is my exception because she is, as the following testimonials will illustrate, an exceptional teacher and human being. I am not alone in thinking this: John McGee, one of Jack’s previous headteachers, says, “in 37 years of teaching she is the most impressive colleague I have worked with”. Her exceptional qualities derive largely from how, as Alex Quigley notes, she “manages to be a great teacher with no grand designs or ideology and without official status or elaborate title”; he goes on to say how “every student wants to work for her and make her proud”.
Jack creates an utterly safe learning environment where established routines are, as Alex Quigley observed, “executed almost imperceptibly” and students’ “minds are kindled with interest…and soon an immersion into the world of their novel [begins]”. Year 13 student J****** feels Jack “has a natural encouraging nature about her that helps push students to be the best they can be.” K***, who has had a tough time, commented, “I’ve learnt so much from her”. Current Year 8 EAL student Y***** remarked simply, “she understands children”. And A***** finished his testimony to Jack eloquently: “I look up to you”. A******, now embarked upon a career in the media, noted how he “felt encouraged by her enthusiasm for her subject…without her confidence in me, I probably wouldn’t have realised my potential and have got to where I am today.” R*******, one of her students from the beginning of her career, wrote, “As a teacher now myself…I can only hope that I can leave such an impact on my students’ lives as she has on mine.”
There are no tricks to outstanding teaching and learning: “It is [Jack’s] conscious effort to improve that marks out her excellence” says Alex Quigley. Peppered throughout her testimonials is Jack’s combination of humanity, enthusiasm and ability to make lessons interesting. K****** recalls how NQT Jack’s “subject knowledge, imagination, delivery, feedback and style were inspiring, which I think is rare to find in a graduate teacher. She just seemed to be born to be a great teacher.” Amy remembers her “short drama productions for medicine through time” and how she learnt “Italian unification through word association games.” Jack never leaves a student behind, as her current Year 8 charge I**** observes: “When she explains the task we have to do, she will always go through it a few times to ensure that the whole class fully understands.” Her colleague Karl highlights how Jack has worked continuously hard at her teaching: “She has honed her methods over a substantial teaching career that has seen her accept the challenge of teaching subjects outside of her comfort zone.” And one mum thanks Jack, for “all the support she gave my daughter and all the other children she has taught.”
Jack uses formative assessment continually as she teaches to help students, such as Year 12 B*******, to improve on specific elements of their work: “She always motivated me with my English through her comments by focusing primarily on what I had achieved as a student, which gave me an incentive to work even harder, while also giving the detailed feedback a student needs to improve.” She assesses the context and learning needs of the individual student, like I*******, from a military background, who was struggling: “…she always makes sure I am OK. For example, she has given me a different war poem to the rest of my class as she understood what I was going through.” She stretches EAL students like Year 8 Y*********: “She taught me how to use complex words: personification, anaphora, patriotism and sibilance.” S******’s mum appreciated the individual help S******* received from Jack’s assessment of him: “She...helped S******* to see the key points in the text…and then analysing where he could improve.” Her close tracking of students’ performance and timely interventions ensure her students’ outcomes are consistently superb. Last year her students’ progress and attainment scores at GCSE and A Level were excellent, as her 2019 Appraisal record attests: “Jack is very modest about her success, the results of GCSE and A Level Media were some of the best results in the school.”
With regard to her impact beyond the classroom, Jack’s Performance Management Reviewer nails it when he comments, “Huntington school would be a poorer place without her”. Jack is a great mentor of other teachers, and lectures part-time on the University of York PGCE. Her ex-head of department was originally mentored by Jack: “I feel privileged to have been mentored by Jack as an NQT – her manner, warmth, and consistency have had a wider impact than just in her own classroom.” R*****, a past Year 13 tutee, commented that Jack is “completely selfless and optimistic”. She inspires all our colleagues: one of our Teaching Assistants supported the SEND GCSE class Jack taught, remarking how, “some of these students struggled to write a sentence let alone a PEAL paragraph but, with Jack’s dedication and encouragement, one of the students that struggled to put pen to paper at the beginning of Year 10, ended up with a grade 2!” She contributes to the whole school: as her 2016 Performance Management record highlights, she “even found time to co-ordinate the Sixth Form’s appeal for sponsorship for a guide dog” as well as co-leading our annual York Pride March representation. A******, another of her students who went on to be a teacher, says Jack’s “influence is far reaching and the legacy of her inspirational teaching is that students in Batley are now studying History to degree level”. The last word on the extraordinary Jaqueline Bream goes to Year 8 B********: “I aspire to be like her when I’m older…she is such an amazing teacher, and an amazing person, inside and out”.
Sir David Carter once said, “‘People think that teaching “rock star” lessons is what you need to do to be judged outstanding. I say that teaching consistently good lessons that are well planned and progressing sequentially from the previous lesson is outstanding’”. If that is the case, then Jack Bream is the most outstanding teacher you will ever meet. We work in a profession where sometimes it is the ones who shout the loudest and proclaim their brilliance that are labelled as superlative. Jack Bream epitomises all that we should aspire to as teachers: integrity, tolerance, kindness, professionalism, a deep curiosity about how to improve as a teacher, and an unrelenting belief in our pupils. She represents a core of teachers who deliver great lessons, day-in, day-out; week-in, week-out; year-in, year-out, without craving praise and publicity, and for all those reasons she unquestionably deserves serious consideration for Secondary Teacher of the Year.
Measuring Teacher Quality
So, what does Jack’s story tell us about measuring teacher quality? Well, first of all, recognising truly great teachers is a good, rare thing. As the evidence above suggests, Jack is a modest individual, who took some persuading for me to submit an entry to the teaching awards on her behalf. And yet, when I contacted her about this post, she described the whole awards experience as the ‘best thing to have happened to me in 28 years of teaching!’ Who knew?
When it comes to Pritesh’s teaching techniques and teacher qualities required for securing 100% attention in class, Jack demonstrates a number of them, to a greater or lesser extent:
- Explicit instruction YES, to some extent
- Be the expert in the room YES, to some extent, but as you see from her bio, she teaches out of subject, twice!
- Desks in rows NO
- Teach rooted at the front NO
- 3-2-1 SLANT (an utterly reliable and repeated cue for disciplined attention) SORT OF BUT NOT 3-2-1 SLANT
- High frequency questioning YES
- Checks for listening YES
- All hands up Cold Calling NO
- Participation the norm YES
- Talk in pairs YES
- Establish your presence by:
- Pupils’ names in examples YES
- Telling it like a secret YES
- Be fascinated by the work YES
- Tell great stories YES
- Making it fun and bringing laughter to the room YES
- Assume the right to be angry if students are off-task NO (I have never seen Jack angry about anything a pupil has done…)
- Plenty of carrot but plenty of enforced stick when necessary YES, but I can’t ever remember Jack requiring ‘stick’ to keep a student doing what she insists they do…
It is worth noting that she has presence; not the kind of intense performance presence Pritesh exemplifies – Jack is significantly quieter and more reserved than Pritesh – but she has an ability to hold everyone’s attention at an instant, just by standing there exuding calm. She uses pedagogic techniques that make running the room look effortless to the uninformed observer, but are, in fact, practised until they appear natural. She is a very different teacher character to the teacher character Pritesh constructs; both are extraordinary, in different ways.
Their pupils secure excellent GCSE and A Level grades. I am aware that Pritesh’s GCSE group all attained two grade 9s in their science double-award GCSE examinations – an extraordinary achievement – but I don’t know what the value-added might be for that class. Jack’s pupils make significant value-added progress, whether they are A level students or in the GCSE nurture class. Pritesh and Jack’s pupils’ examination results, one might argue, are directly attributable to their fabulous teaching and their teacher characteristics; but that golden thread from teaching to pupils' outcomes is perilously thin.
So, in the pursuit of a single metric for teacher quality, Jack Bream raises more questions than she answers. Jack’s pupils’ value-added scores are excellent. Out of 26 A Level subjects at Huntington in 2019, her students began with the fifth lowest average GCSE points score of 6.03; the lowest five subjects in terms of that metric were: Art (photography) (5.0); Sociology (5.69); Business Studies (5.91); D&T Product Design (5.91); Media Studies (6.03). In terms of ALPS value-added scores, out of 26 subjects, Art (Photography) came top with the best ALPS value-added score, Media Studies 2nd, Sociology 3rd, D&T Product Design 6th and Business Studies came 11th. Further mathematics students began with the highest average GCSE points score of 7.63 (2.63 grades higher than Art (Photography)), and yet their ALPS value-added score placed them 8th. Interesting, eh? I'm sure this is not true for a moment, but just imagine if all of Pritesh’s students were predicted, based on their KS2 SATs scores, to attain double 9s in their science GCSE examinations. What value would have been added, yet he is a tremendous teacher? And then there are all the variables around school context. In a class of 30 students, even what they had for breakfast may make a difference to whether they are paying attention to you, or not. Value-added as a measure of teacher quality comes, as you can see, with certain complexities.
I gave my wife, Louise, Sammy Wright’s book Exam Nation to read last week. She is a superb teacher, Breamesque (at one point they both taught in Fulford School’s wildly successful History department). She read the book in a matter of hours and, despite having read all my books, declared it the best book she had ever read on education… And I think she is right. It is an extraordinary book, the book I thought I could have written, but know I couldn’t have done, really. Sammy explores all those tensions and contradictions that make leading schools so damned tricky. Counterintuitively, he does not argue for the end of examinations. Far from it. But he does argue for something more than obsessing with examination results as the only thing we value in terms of the output of schools. Schools are so much more than examination grades, but, all too often, that is what we use to judge the impact of schools (i.e. their teachers) upon their pupils. In the light of what has happened over the past two decades, Sammy argues that we have to rethink what schools are for if we are going to begin to heal the divisions in our country. Read the book. It’s tremendous.
I have no doubt, after 18 years as a headteacher in what Alastair Campbell would have described as two large, “bog-standard” local authority state secondary schools, that the quality of teachers’ classroom practice has a hugely significant impact upon students’ examination outcomes. Of course it does. In “What Makes Great Teaching”, Rob Coe et al., defined "effective teaching as that which leads to improved student achievement using outcomes that matter to their future success." I think it can be an even more helpful definition, with a tiny qualification – ‘outcomes that matter to their future success’ is not just examination outcomes, but a whole raft of important things which we teach those young people who leave us at 16 or 18 that help them to become decent human beings for the rest of their lives.
We only have our time once. The opportunity cost of pouring huge resources into a system which produces a single value-added score to judge teacher-effectiveness is immense. There are, perhaps, other things that might be done with that resource to help attract the brightest and the best graduates to the teaching profession (which is the main problem we have to solve, urgently). For starters, a more intelligent accountability system that establishes a broader set of metrics to measure students’ outcomes would go a long way to repairing the damage that the examination results single focus has had on our schools, and to making the profession more attractive to prospective teachers. That is what I would be working on, Rob...
I loved leading Huntington's Research School. I believe entirely in the evidence-informed approach to school improvement. I really enjoyed Raj and Rob’s talk last Saturday; it got me thinking and prompted me to resurrect my blog and for that I am deeply grateful. I can see the absolute logic of their work, but I think it will lead to nowhere very useful, I’m afraid. I have my doubts that a single value-added score to determine teacher effectiveness is either achievable or valuable.
In the end, what Jack Bream brings to her classroom is so much more than an ALPs score of 1.16.
[1] Criteria
Learning environment: The ways in which your colleague creates a learning environment which inspires a love of learning and fosters a student’s enthusiasm to strive to achieve their full potential both educationally and holistically – developing a range of skills and qualities to help them be ambitious and optimistic about life.
Teaching and learning: The skills, characteristics and methods your colleague utilises, making them an exceptional classroom practitioner, who uses excellent pedagogy and inspires and motivates every child s/he teaches so they make impressive progress and achieve well. How they engage other colleagues and parents on their children’s learning journey.
Assessment: Monitoring and assessment methods used to evaluate the experience and progress of each pupil allowing approaches to be adjusted to take account of the needs of individual pupils and the class as a whole; ensuring continuing assessment has a significant and positive impact on a student’s outcome and self-esteem.
Impact beyond the classroom: The ways in which your colleague ensures children in their class are learning to be good citizens and can show how their actions make a difference. On a wider level how s/he enriches the life of the school community. Why do teachers, staff in school and parents think s/he is a wonderful teacher?