The Market Place by Nick Martin
We have been using Lesson Study at Samuel Whitbread Academy as our primary vehicle for improving teaching and learning for the last four years and we are confident that it has significantly raised the standard of teaching in the school. When we first started working with Pete Dudley, the school was graded as Requires Improvement by Ofsted and had been Satisfactory for a number of years. By using a professional development methodology like Lesson Study, which has such a well-structured process and backed by over 200 years of research in Japan, we have managed to get every teacher on-board and working collaboratively to improve their practice. Last summer we were judged as Good by Ofsted and we are in no doubt that Lesson study was a key part of the improvement story!
Over the next three years we aim to become an exemplary school and we see Lesson Study as the perfect vehicle for this journey. It places enquiry at the centre of the process, which is a key element for us, because it exemplifies teachers as learners and gives us a professional language to talk about teaching. We also ask staff to link their Lesson Study projects to their performance management targets and department development plans to ensure there is maximum synergy to our work. This has meant that all of our school improvement work is now based around Research Questions, rather than aims or objectives, which has been a paradigm shift for the school in terms of how we think about continuously improving everything that we do.
Having spent the whole year focussing on Lessons Studies, we chose to hold a ‘Market Place’ on the Easter training day and spent the entire morning talking about teaching and learning. The day began with the Principal, Rob Robson, describing the Lesson Study project he is involved in with the Head of Media and a young NQT. The lesson was designed to help underachieving students structure their answers to essay questions in A level and GCSE Film Studies, by providing them with a new writing frame.
Hearing an experienced teacher with over 25 years experience talking about working alongside a teacher in her first year of teaching isn’t that unusual these days, however, staff were probably a bit surprised to hear the Principal freely describe how his lesson hadn’t gone too well. The students thought the writing frame was overly complicated and results from a following assessment didn’t show much improvement. Rob went on to say how this experience helped the triad redesign a simpler writing frame and, as a result, the next case study lesson by the Head of Media’s was far more successful. Rob finished by saying how much he was looking forward to the final iteration of the lesson, which will be taught by the NQT.
The next two presentations also involved teachers describing their Lesson Study projects, but these were cross departmental triads of teachers from History, Sociology, Art and Maths. They described how they had worked together across the different curriculum areas to improve their pedagogy and how much they had enjoyed working with colleagues from outside their own area of expertise. They all felt it had given them a fresh perspective both on their teaching and on the learning of the case study students. Several of the presenters pointed out how working with someone outside of their subject area meant they talked about pedagogy rather than just subject knowledge and helped put the learners at the centre of any discussions.
After a brief input from Dave Hall, the Academy lead on Department Lesson Study, staff moved to the activity studio for the ‘Market Place’. The benefits of having a staff of over 100 teachers and support staff was that there were 36 exhibits! The stalls included an incredible array of different ideas, resources and displays – all themed around the different Teachers’ Standards. Once the whistle blew, one person from each triad manned the stall, whilst the remaining members explored the other exhibitions. After 20 minutes the whistle blew again to remind everyone to rotate presenters. The hour went incredibly quickly; a visitor from another school described how there was a ‘buzz in the room’ and remarked on the energy and genuine enthusiasm for sharing practice.
This is the second ‘Market Place’ at Samuel Whitbread and we’ve learnt a lot about organising such an event. Obviously it takes a considerable amount of planning and organisation for it all to run smoothly but it was certainly worth it. We produced a booklet with a floor plan and space for delegates to record their findings. There was also space to write the answers to questions they had formulated earlier in the day, based on the work from their triad projects. This year we introduced the idea of arranging the two exhibitions rooms by Teachers’ Standards, rather than subjects, which definitely helped break down curriculum areas and made the event feel about both pedagogy and subject knowledge.
Next we intend to produce a publication to capture the outcomes of the lesson study triads, called ‘The Anthecology’. Why that title you might ask? – that’s another story!
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