heart of heartlands lessons

At Heartlands High School, one of the key priorities for all staff is ensuring that there is ample opportunity to take advantage of the high-quality and meaningful CPD offered by the school. This often takes the form of bespoke specialist workshops, whole-school training or supported opportunities outside of school to aid development. In the last two years we have worked to develop a new format of CPD for staff, based around the Japanese model of teacher-led research - lesson study - something trialled and rolled out across the school for 2017/18.

As with most schools, the traditional method of observation for staff at Heartlands, until the 2016/17 school year, was based around multiple graded observations. This fed directly into performance management, and aligned with the Ofsted grading of teachers. With a shift in Ofsted and a greater focus on teacher development, this new way of observations and CPD (coined Teaching Shapes) encapsulates research, collaborative planning and coaching as a form of development, as well as a way of observing lessons and teaching.

Lesson study itself is very much at the forefront of educational leadership theory surrounding CPD and teacher development at the moment, with continuing research into it occuring, and reports advocating its use being released by the DfE (DfE, 2010). Originating from Japan, this model uses the idea of collectively planning lessons with a focus on individual students and an area of teacher development. The group of teachers then take on different roles, either of the teacher, or the researchers, non-judgmentally observing the lesson and making observations of the focus, student behaviours, based on the pre-lesson assessment of what that student should be doing and the outcomes they should have. This then feeds into a coaching style reflection session which aids the planning of the next lesson, giving developmental ideas on how to improve practice. In the purest form of lesson study, each teacher would teach two lessons, and act as a researcher four times, for the other two teacher’s cycle of lessons (Dudley, 2015).

What particularly stood out for us at Heartlands was the idea of non-judgmental observations that lead into a developmental feedback session, not just benefitting one person, but all involved, no matter what their experience level or teaching ability. As well as this, there is a core interest in the progress of students, and the ability of staff to collaboratively support this training in the development of pedagogy. In his study ‘What Works Best In Education: The Politics Of Collaborative Expertise’, John Hattie discusses the intervention and teaching techniques that have the greatest intervention. He cites teachers working together to evaluate their impact (something that lesson study directly encourages) as having a +0.93 effect on students, with +0.4 being the average effect size of good progress in one year (Hattie, 2015).

Lesson study has, therefore, become a central element to the teaching shapes model now being used at Heartlands High School. We have, in response to staff trial and feedback, adapted our model to a form that best suits our context. We have taken into account that cross-departmental joint planning may be limited to subject knowledge, so the sharing of pedagogical practice is encouraged in the ‘joint planning’ phase, but there is no requirement for all to jointly plan every step. We have factored in time constraints of the staff base and allocated timing for this development, and also added additional focus on pedagogical research, with a question relating to our ‘Heart of a Heartlands lesson’ framework being the focus of the research in every group. This then feeds into a research report from every group answering and evidencing their question, and their use of the model.

The model has been wholly embraced by the staff at Heartlands, with lots of really interesting and indepth research and CPD occurring across the school, and a constant ear to the ground as to how we can develop the model and approach to Teaching Shapes to best support staff development, while still making it a manageable and worthwhile program for all.

For more information on the lesson study program:

• DfE (2010).Improving subject pedagogy through Lesson Study Handbook for leading teachers in Mathematics and English. (http://bit.ly/2mIVS8R)
• Dudley, P. (Ed.). (2015). Lesson Study. London: Routledge.
• Fujii, T. (2014). Implementing Japanese Lesson Study in Foreign Countries: Misconceptions Revealed. Mathematics Teacher Education and Development, 16(1).
• Takahashi, A. and McDougal, T. (2015). Collaborative Lesson Research: Maximising the Impact of Lesson Study. ZDM

For more on John Hattie’s study of what works on education:

• Hattie, J. (2015), What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise. Pearson. (http://bit.ly/1K1ahmV)

Video - Why are so many of our teachers and schools so successful? John Hattie at TEDxNorrkoping (http://bit.ly/QRTJWO)