Teach Middle East Podcast
Welcome to the Teach Middle East Podcast, the ultimate audio hub where educators find inspiration, share innovative ideas, and grow together! Brought to you by Moftah Publishing—the minds behind the premier Teach Middle East Magazine—this podcast is your gateway to the latest research-based practices, cutting-edge classroom strategies, and the heartwarming stories of educators from the Middle East and around the globe.
As the only podcast that interviews school leaders from across the Middle East and beyond, we offer unparalleled insights into the challenges and successes that shape educational landscapes in diverse settings. Join us as we dive deep into the fascinating world of education, where every episode promises a treasure trove of insights designed to connect, develop, and empower the brilliant minds shaping our future. Whether you’re seeking fresh perspectives, practical tips, or a dose of inspiration, the Teach Middle East Podcast is your must-listen resource. Tune in and transform the way you teach!
Teach Middle East Podcast
Bridging the Gap Between Classroom and Research With Rob Coe
This episode focuses on bridging the gap between educational research and classroom practice. Professor Rob Coe offers insights on effective professional development and the challenges faced by teachers and school leaders. Rob emphasises the importance of making research accessible and actionable to improve teaching quality and student outcomes.
• The journey from teacher to researcher informs Rob’s approach
• Emphasising the role of professional development in educational settings
• Identifying barriers to the implementation of evidence-based practices
• The significance of behaviour change in educational environments
• Measurement as a tool for growth rather than accountability
• Insufficient evidence regarding effective leadership practices
• The enduring importance of foundational teaching principles amidst technological advancements
Teach Middle East Magazine is the premier platform for educators and the entire education sector in the Middle East and beyond. Our vision is to equip educators with the materials and tools they need, to function optimally in and out of the classroom. We provide a space for educators to connect and find inspiration, resources, and forums to enhance their teaching techniques, methodologies, and personal development. We connect education suppliers and service providers to the people who make the buying decisions in schools.
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Hosted by Leisa Grace Wilson
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Speaker 2:Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Teach Middle East podcast with me, Lisa Grace. Today I have the distinct pleasure of having Rob Coe on the podcast with me Now. If you are from the UK, you might know who Rob Coe is and you might be familiar with his work. If you are not, then this is a fantastic opportunity to pop your headphones in and learn a little bit about what Rob does and also some of the research that he has carried out in education and how that might impact your school and your classroom. Rob, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 2:Thank you. So Rob is on this podcast as a precursor to his appearance at the Middle East School Leadership Conference on February 5 and 6. Well, he's going to be on on February 6 in Dubai. If you're listening to this podcast before then, you have to go and get your ticket, and if you're listening to this podcast afterwards, you missed it. What's wrong with you? Okay, now Rob, let's go to a little bit more about who you are and the work you currently do.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay, yeah, so who am I? Well, I am what I currently do. Let's start with that and maybe work backwards. So I'm the Director of Research and Development at a group called Evidence-Based Education. We're a small startup in the northeast of England and we're all about trying to help teachers to understand, engage with, respond to research evidence about best practices in teaching and school leadership and understanding the teaching and learning process and so on. So I would say our main focus is on professional learning for teachers and school leaders, trying to build expertise in the system so that people get better at what they do. And I've been at evidence-based education for about five or just over five years, and before that I was a professor of education at Durham University and before that I was a teacher, maths teacher in secondary schools. So that's kind of my CV.
Speaker 2:I like it. I'm tempted to talk only about your maths teacher days because the people who listen here they know I like maths teachers. We do a maths teachers conference, which has now rolled into a STEM conference, and in my time in schools I would always be sitting either with the design technology teachers in the staff room or the maths teachers, because they were like fun yes, well, they, we, a peculiar group, I guess.
Speaker 3:I mean I still I still identify in many ways as a maths teacher. I think you know it's an experience. I was a teacher, I was in schools for seven years teaching and, and you know you learn a lot in that time and you learn a lot about well teaching and learning. You learn a lot about students and how they interact. You learn a lot about schools and what they're like and other teachers and what the kind of constraints are. And I think because of that my focus has always been on trying when was it became a researcher? Always trying to do research that I think I always had the audience in mind as being teachers, not specifically math teachers, but teachers in general, and I am. I'm actually doing some work now with the math schools, which is a group of of post-16 schools in eng that are selecting highly high attaining able mathematicians and really giving them a focused diet, and you know that's an interesting piece of work I think.
Speaker 2:What led you to research?
Speaker 3:That's a really good question. Yeah, so I was a teacher. I wasn't really. I mean, you know, people talk about research evidence and what did you think about research evidence when you were a teacher? And the answer is I knew nothing about it. I didn't. Nobody was really interested in it very much.
Speaker 3:I did a master's in maths education just because I was interested and I, you know it just seemed like a good thing to do, I think relatively easy to do a master's. And then, because I was doing that, I got I got a bit more interested in research and I thought I'd like to do some more of this, I think, and so I thought about maybe doing a PhD. And you can do degrees like master's and PhDs part-time while you're teaching. Many teachers do that. I think it's very, very hard. I've supervised a lot of teachers doing Masters and PhDs and I absolutely have huge respect for all of them because you know they're both full-time jobs, basically, and you try and do two of them at once. So that's very challenging. But I was lucky that I had the chance to do a PhD full-time. So I gave up teaching and my assumption was that I'd come back into teaching. You know, I liked the job. I was enjoying it. There was nothing. There was nothing kind of pushing me out of it. I did have a question about where I was going with it. So I was.
Speaker 3:I was a second in department in the maths department in the school I was in and I thought, wow, do I want to be a head of department? Yeah, maybe do I want to be a like a, an assistant head or a deputy head? Don't think I do really. So I couldn't quite see myself going down that route and therefore I suppose I was a bit thinking I wonder what the career progression is next year. But anyway, I just thought I've got an opportunity. I'm going to do this.
Speaker 3:Three years of research. It's an indulgence. That's what it was. It felt like a just a fun time to wallow around in research for a few years and my wife was working so she could support me. We didn't have any children then, so it was an opportunity that I could be unpaid for three, or pretty much unpaid, and I did my PhD and then I did enjoy it and it led to me applying for a job in the university where I'd done my PhD at Durham and carrying on as a researcher. That certainly wasn't the plan when I started on it, but I really loved research and I just thought this is a great thing to be able to do. I really loved research and I just thought this is a great thing to be able to do.
Speaker 2:So how has your experience, then, as a mathematics teacher, how has that shaped your approach to evidence based education, particularly in making research practical for teachers? Because we look at the papers and we're like, oh my God, how do we translate this into the classroom?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think most academics. If you ask them who's the audience for your research, they'll say other academics.
Speaker 3:And that is the way you know. That's the environment you're in. You're writing papers to submit to journals that are read by other academics at best, actually, because most papers never, in most academic journals never get cited by anyone. They may get read, but then literally the, the, the modal citation number is zero, the most common number of citations for academic papers, I know. So you think, right, well, who's going to read these things? You give papers at conferences, you, you interact with other academics, um, peer review, lots of other stuff like that. So that's who your audience is and that's who within the university system, your career, your status depends on the esteem that you have within that academic community among other scholars, other academics. So you're writing papers for other academics. So you're writing papers for other academics. And so when you read those academic papers you think, well, did this person deliberately make this incomprehensible, or was it just a sort of? Did they not realize that a normal human being couldn't possibly read this? And I think that's you know.
Speaker 3:You might argue well, if you're studying quantum physics or something, ok, members of the public are not going to be able to pick up those journals and make sense of it, because it is quite technical and you know that would be true in a lot of disciplines. But in a discipline like education, which is, if it matters at all, it matters because it impacts on people's lives. Children in school, students, teachers, we all interact with education every member of society pretty much in some way. So it's a practical, it's an applied discipline and therefore and not all academics in education departments in universities think that, of course some of them are, you know, they're philosophers of education or they're interested in sociology or other issues they're not specifically looking, they're trying to build theory, they're trying to build understanding, they're not looking for practical applications. So not everybody's thinking that way, but I always was.
Speaker 3:So why not try and write things that people could actually understand? You know, that's a good challenge, I think. Think that anyone should who doesn't have that technical knowledge. And it's difficult because sometimes, particularly if you're doing, let's say, some quantitative analysis I mean you know there is technical stuff there and you can't it becomes very difficult to go right back to basics every time you want to talk about those things. So there are limits to that. But I think, broadly speaking, most of if you're talking about ideas that you want to, to resonate, to have impact on people's lives, then, yeah, you should try and make it comprehensible.
Speaker 3:So I think, even when I became an academic, I was always had in mind that the audience was mainly teachers. That's a that made me not as successful as an academic, probably, but I think it allowed me to engage more with teachers. And the other thing that I think that I always did was that I had a lot of interactions with teachers. I mean, I had been a teacher but I continued. I'd give talks to groups of teachers and people would question and challenge and we'd have discussions. I want to know what's going on in schools, what are the issues and what are the barriers, what are the opportunities? You know why. Why are you doing these things? Why are you not doing these things? To try and understand the teacher's perspective and to try and connect that with the research, which has been really helpful, I think, for me in thinking about and shaping the things I've been interested in, but also thinking about those ideas and how to present them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I also wonder if, when teachers look at research, because of some of the things you've pointed out, they do not want to interact with it regularly because it takes so much time and can be so dense. And also it makes me wonder, as well as it relates to school leaders, if that is one of the barriers to them implementing research based practices in their schools. What do you find are some of those barriers for that implementation of research-based practices?
Speaker 3:Well, I absolutely agree and of course that's right. I mean, there have been quite a lot of attempts and I was involved with some of these in my early days as a researcher about trying to summarise and present research findings in a more accessible way than what you typically find in research outputs like journal papers, and there are some quite good examples of that, and people have been doing that for quite a long time. So I think, although maybe they're not, you know, they haven't been that easy or that prominent, they're easy to find, but there's there's a lot more to it than that. So that is definitely part of it. It's necessary to find ways of communicating complex, abstract ideas that make sense to practitioners. So the practical application of this thing rather than just the theory. Sometimes you do need to understand the theory, but then you need to have a presentation of those ideas that is accessible. One of the problems with the scholarly community is that they talk about lots of ideas and they don't say, oh, this means X, y, z, because they assume everybody knows what it means. It's like any other kind of writing. You know there are certain assumptions, but of course school leaders and teachers may try and read those papers and not know what those things mean, and that makes it very hard. It's like trying to read something in a different language. So so, yeah, we need to have forms of summarizing and presenting research evidence in accessible ways, but I I think we need to do a lot more than that so it isn't just and people talk about the idea that there's kind of research findings and we need to get people to understand them and to use them.
Speaker 3:And again, I think maybe I did think that in the early days. I don't think now that that's quite the right way of framing it. I think what school leaders do and what teachers do isn't there's more of an interaction. I think is what I'm trying to say that we have to sort of build a new kind of knowledge. It's not taking knowledge from research and saying can we apply this in schools and get teachers and school leaders to do this, you know, to use this research, to do this research.
Speaker 3:I think we actually have to learn new things about how you change people's behavior, for example. So one of the things we know is that knowledge on its own doesn't or isn't very effective at changing people's behavior. We all know lots of things we should do that we don't do. You know? Time of new year resolutions, everybody's saying, oh yes, I'm going to go to the gym every week. You know, we know we should do these things, but we don't always do them. So changing behaviors is really hard. If that's not something you've done regularly, then turning into a thing that you do do habitually, that's difficult and it didn't. Just knowing isn't enough. Knowing that you should do it, or knowing, deciding that you want to do it even isn't enough. It takes more than that.
Speaker 3:So, and that's more like, I think, what we're trying to do when we're thinking about practices in a classroom, if we talk about classroom teachers because I mean a classroom with full of kids is one of the most chaotic environments in the world, isn't it? There's 30 youngsters or that order of none. Um, they're all different. They're all have different kinds of needs, they all different expectations, different kind of norms about behavior and different prior knowledge, and as a social environment it's just incredibly complex. So there isn't time for teachers to think about oh, what should I do next? You know, by the time you've thought about it, you've missed it.
Speaker 3:And so mostly what teachers do is quite intuitive, instinctive, if you like. It's an automatic set of behaviours that we can reflect on them afterwards. But we're not mainly acting in ways that are well considered. We're not thinking, oh, what should I do here? Oh, let's do that in the way that it might be if you just sat at a desk thinking about a problem, because it's just too fast, it's too crazy, it's too busy. You're just acting all the time. So changing the way people think has a limited impact on what they actually do in classrooms. It can have some impact it's part of the story but it's not enough on its own. So the idea that we'd say, well, just using research, then you know it sort of gets you a bit of the way. It doesn't get you all of the way, because we need to think about changing the way people think, changing the way they behave, changing their actions, their defaults, their habits, their automatic routines and so on, and that's much harder.
Speaker 2:How do we do that?
Speaker 3:Well, we know a bit about it. I mean, there's quite a lot of research, for example, particularly in health, about changing behaviour, and actually I think the irony of it is that mostly changing behaviour like this is what we call learning, because it's exactly what we do with children.
Speaker 3:When we want them to learn stuff, they have to automate those behaviours because we want them.
Speaker 3:If we take well, let's take an example from maths. So supposing we want them to be able to rearrange equations or something like that Now when they start out they have to think quite hard about what they're doing, why they're doing it, how it works. You know, you take a number and if it's added on this side, you can take it away from both sides and it becomes a negative on the other side. Let's say something like that, and that's quite counterintuitive and it takes a lot of getting your head around and you see a few examples and you start to do it and then it gradually becomes a bit more familiar and we hope it does and then after a while children can just do it without really having to think too hard about it. It becomes more or less automated, and that's really necessary because when you then want them to use that as part of solving a harder problem, it has to be automated. If they have to stop and think hard about how do I just move this number to the other side of that equation, or get you know, get this variable over to there, then they've lost the shred of the bigger problem and they can't kind of see the next step. You have to be able to see three steps ahead to be able to think, well, is this the best step for solving that problem? And you can't do that if you're thinking hard about the details of that step. The step itself has to be ultimate.
Speaker 3:What maths teachers have been doing for thousands of years is to get students to automate those processes to get them so fluent that they can do it more or less without having to think, having to give it conscious attention. And it's exactly that. And you know teachers know how to get kids to do that. It's mainly just through practice and certain kinds of practice. So you practice examples and then you gradually make the examples a bit more complex and a bit more varied. You probably give people a break and then they come, you know, give them a bit of time to forget and they come back and practice again to refresh it. And maybe you make those gaps get a bit bigger and you make the practice harder as you go and eventually it becomes a thing. If you do it enough and with enough variation, it becomes a routine thing. And I think it's exactly the same for how teachers learn to do things like I don't know, let's say, to use mini whiteboards in a questioning, question and answer session, where you're getting every child to write on the mini whiteboard their answer and then they all hold them up at the same time and just just learning the technique of doing that. The first time you try it it probably doesn't work very well and the kids don't know what to do. You know you haven't quite told them exactly enough and they so, but then after a few goes, you get it, you get better at it and then, if you do it enough times, it becomes a routine and it becomes just something that everybody knows how to do and you don't really even think about it, just it just becomes more or less automatic. And I think it's much the same as learning to rearrange an equation or learning about you know, I don't know the carbon cycle or or you know, any of the stuff that we we try and teach youngsters.
Speaker 3:It's about repetition and automation, and one of the things that I think is really interesting in terms of helping teachers is about some people have called this rehearsal, the idea that you can practice a thing not just in the lesson, but in a simpler and perhaps safer space than in a lesson full of kids.
Speaker 3:So that might be practice it in front of a mirror or practice it in front of a video camera and then watch it back. So that's a safer space because you're the only person who can see it and if it's terrible you can just, you know, delete the video. If it's also safer, because if it is terrible it doesn't matter to anyone. No one's going to be affected. It's not like a lesson where if you give a, you know you do something really badly. Then you've got to dig yourself back from that. So so, safe and and simple as far as rehearsal goes is a good thing. And again, that's exactly what we do with the kids. We give them nice simple examples to begin with and then we gradually build up the complexity once they get that fluency with the simple ones yeah, which kind of leads me into the great teaching toolkit, because that identifies the dimensions of great teaching.
Speaker 2:Help me out how can school leaders create those systems that measure, you know and support these dimensions? Because you talked about starting simple and that's what kind of got me thinking how do we do that without overwhelming the teachers?
Speaker 3:yeah, well, okay, but you know, people can learn incredibly complex things. They just it just takes time, okay, and you do have to start simple and and things like understanding cognitive load for can be helpful because it makes us realise that the amount of information we can process at a given time is quite small, but the amount that we can store in long-term memory is pretty big. In fact it's probably unlimited. So you can kind of cheat that working memory by having enough stored in long-term memory that you can, uh, you can, draw on that and effectively think with it. But that's how. The same kind of thing when we want teachers to understand or school leaders to understand yeah, these are complex ideas about the dimensions of great teaching. How do, how do they know what that is? And you know, you mentioned the word measure, which is really important.
Speaker 3:Measurement is right at the heart of everything that we're doing in the Great Teaching Toolkit. And again, maybe that reflects my background in maths I don't know Certainly. My research in the early part of my time as a researcher was mostly in assessment, which is basically all about measuring attainment. So I did a lot of work on that and know about that, but I think it has a lot of power to help people to. I mean, there are lots of ways people can use measurement and when you talk about trying to sort of measure the quality of teaching, people get a bit anxious because they they think, oh, this is all about performance management or accountability or those kinds of things and we are doing measurement, we are trying to measure the quality of teaching in in different ways, but it's not about performance management and it's not about accountability. So we think that measurement is valuable because of the insights that it gives. When you give that feedback to people, it gives them a deeper understanding of their classroom, their context, their school and and that's why that's the reason that we're doing that. So it's not about sort of ranking people in order, it's not about giving some people a pay rise or sacking teachers or nothing, nothing like that. So we've created a whole suite of tools which are trying to do this, to give those insights to, to create measures, if you like, and.
Speaker 3:But we've always said that they're optional. If anybody chooses to use them and a teacher or a school leader, that's up to them. If someone doesn't like the look of it, then they won't. And most people don't like the look of it frankly, because if you, if we think about something like a student survey where you ask the pupils what their perception of what's going on in that lesson is that's not a thing that most teachers do routinely, and if you ever have done it you'll know or if you haven't done it and you sort of think about what would this be like? It can be quite bruising, because some you know kids can be quite honest, can't they? But it can also be really helpful to tell you things that you didn't realise were happening, or that their perceptions are different from your perceptions, and you might.
Speaker 3:Very often people will look at that feedback and they'll say, well, I thought I did this really well, but the students are saying they don't think I do. And you might say, well, that teacher would be happier if they never knew that, because they could just carry on thinking they do it well. But they would undoubtedly which is probably true, and that's the reason, I think, why people often don't want to do that get that feedback. But there'd be a better teacher if they do get the feedback, because they'll then understand, they'll have a more realistic picture of what's actually happening, which is that they probably don't do it as well as they thought and they'll also be much better equipped to try and address that and do something about it and improve it. So those feedback tools are very powerful, I think, but they are.
Speaker 3:They're optional, they're on demand. If you wanted to use it, you can. If you don't, then you shouldn't. I mean, in some schools schools people will be encouraged to use them, of course, and that's fine, I think.
Speaker 3:Um, but also, the feedback you get is for you, it doesn't go to anyone else. It doesn't go to your line manager or the head teacher or principal or anybody else. It goes to you. If you want to share it with a group of trusted colleagues, great, and we definitely encourage you to do that, because we know that you're much more likely to act on it in constructive ways if it's not just you looking at it and thinking okay, right, and it's much more likely to lead to benefit if you share it with other colleagues. So we very much encourage you to do that, but that has to be something that you choose to do because you trust those other colleagues. So we very much encourage you to do that, but that has to be something that you choose to do because you trust those other colleagues and they're doing the same, that they're trusting you as well, perhaps with their feedback, and you're working collaboratively to help each other to improve. So that's the ideal and within Great Teaching Toolkit we set up, we have a structure for setting up those great teaching teams where people collaborate together, they share their own insights, they watch each other's teaching, they look at the other instruments, the data, and they support each other with choosing things that they're going to work on and choosing how they're going to work on them and actually doing the work to make them better, and sort of checking in to see how it's going, and all of that kind of thing that great colleagues do.
Speaker 3:So is it overwhelming? That was part of your question. Well, of course, teaching's hard and finding time to do these things is hard and you know there's lots of information to take on board. As you say, our model for great teaching. We think teachers need to understand a bit about the theory of that and how it works. So there's stuff to learn.
Speaker 3:So all of that, I think, comes down to schools prioritizing professional learning, because if you think professional learning is just a thing that you squeeze in on top of your, your full-time job is to teach children every day and professional learning. Well, if there's time, we'll do a bit of that. You know, just squeeze it in, maybe do it in your own time. If that's your approach, well, obviously it's not going to happen and it's going to be overwhelming because just teaching is a full-time job. How are you going to do this as well?
Speaker 3:But I think in great schools, where school leaders don't adopt that approach, they say and this maybe comes back to your earlier question about what what are the barriers to school leaders using evidence well and doing things that really make a difference? And I think one huge barrier is prioritizing time and, in particular, time for professional learning, because professional learning is never urgent. There's so many things in teaching that are urgent. If you haven't prepared your lesson, then that's going to be bad. If you haven't done some piece of marking, that's going to be bad. If you haven't dealt with that behavior issue or safeguarding or whatever, you know you can't not do those things, you have to do them. If you haven't done your a bit of professional learning, no one's even going to notice. So it's not.
Speaker 3:It doesn't have immediate consequences, but it is important strategically. It should be the highest priority, I think, for all schools to invest in staff professional learning. So it takes a brave school leader to say this is not urgent, so it doesn't have its own inherent drivers to do it, but it is important. So we're going to prioritise it as a matter of strategy. We're going to make time for it. That means reducing the time that people spend on other things, which is very hard. It's really hard to do that, but it is possible. So we're going to ring fence some time by by carving out some time from other things that teachers do and make sure that that time is dedicated to professional learning. And if you do that, then I think it shouldn't be overwhelming. It should be manageable within the normal set of hours and work-life balance and everything that everyone should want and have. And that's what we're trying to do within great teaching toolkit. We're trying to create tools that help people to make that manageable, so it's efficient time but it does need some time educating.
Speaker 3:It's not something that you're just going to magic out of no time at all yeah, and at the.
Speaker 2:Well, I know you've got two appearances here. You've got one at the abu dhabhabi Teachers Conference where you're going to be talking predominantly to teachers. So if you are listening and you're a teacher, hopefully there are still tickets available for that. But then you also have a session at MESLC where you're discussing what leaders can do to improve teaching quality. Leaders can do to improve teaching quality. Give us some counterintuitive findings from your research, that you know some little quick nuggets that school leaders might not be thinking about when they're thinking about improving teaching quality.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, there's a whole lot of stuff. I mean, I think the thing I struggled to get my head around maybe other people won't find this counterintuitive but it's just how little good evidence there is about leadership. So when you think about the leadership industry, you think about all the training, all the books, all the experts who go around to conference well, like this conference and all the millions of pounds and dollars and money that's spent on leadership training and leadership conferences and leadership gurus. And you might think and this has been going on, this isn't a new phenomenon. It's been going on for many, many years, forever.
Speaker 3:And yet there's really no good evidence that any of this works for school leaders. We don't know how to select good school leaders. We don't know how to support them, how to train them, how to what advice to give them. That's not. That doesn't mean people aren't giving advice. They are selecting, they are training, they are giving advice. It's just that none of it is evidence-based. None of it is evidence-based.
Speaker 3:There are no good studies that say if you get leaders to do this particular course, then they end up being better. Being better for me means that the students in their schools learn more. That would be my criterion, so there might be other criteria. The leaders are happier, they feel more confident. There are a lot of studies that show you can do things that make leaders feel more confident, but actually to impact on learners in the school no evidence at all of anything. So we, we're just completely ignorant. Despite more than 40 years of research, many, many events, conferences, gurus, books, leadership training we actually don't know what works in relation to leadership, which is extraordinary. So we've got to go with best bets, which I think are really focusing on what's happening in classrooms. That's the most important thing. I don't know would that be counterintuitive? I mean, it's not what every leader does.
Speaker 3:I think leaders get absorbed in the business of running a school and things like you know, building a vision and all of that sort of strategy, high-level stuff. They can easily get caught up in that. I think they can also easily get caught up in day-to-day stuff. Like you know, there's a leak in the roof. We need to get someone in to fix it, that type of thing. Our toilets are blocked again. That you know. The management, quite sort of low-level management stuff. And actually the thing that matters above all of those is what's happening in classrooms. What are teachers and other adults in the classroom doing and what kinds of expertise do they have and what kinds of interactions are they having with the youngsters and what can I do as a leader to support those? What can I do to build that expertise? What can I do to make classrooms more effective?
Speaker 3:And there are some things that there is some evidence that points to some things. So things well, professional development, obviously that's one. I've said that already, emphasizing that making sure collaboration is effective, lots of. There is some evidence that shows where you get collaborative cultures, students do better and teachers are happier. Trust is obviously part of that. Having the right incentives so that people think that what matters is what really matters. You know, it's not just creating lots of paperwork so that we've covered our backs here. It's about doing things that genuinely make a difference to valued outcomes, which are mostly about children's learning. So aligning those incentives with the actual intended goals, those kinds of things. So some of those things do make a difference, we think.
Speaker 2:But it's a really patchy space where the evidence is much more limited than really it should be. So I know I asked for that counterintuitive thing. But when you look at school leadership, what is the one action that a school leader can take that you think would move the needle the most?
Speaker 3:Right. So the one action that moves the needle the most beyond doubt and I don't think there's really much any competitors for this is sorting out professional development. The problem with it is, as I say, it's never urgent, so it gets pushed out by other things. But that's the job of a leader is to say, well, what's important, let's make sure that that important stuff happens. It's not just to go with what's easy. So it's always important, never urgent, and so we need to make sure it doesn't get pushed out. The other thing about professional development is it's not the quick fix. So if you're a school leader and you come in and the school's a mess in different ways and you need to turn it around in six months or a year, then professional development is not going to do that for you because it's more of a slow burn. You know, if you want to be the best school in the Middle East in five years time, well then, yes, professional development that's, you know beyond doubt. That's the thing you should focus on. Getting that right. How do we support and build the expertise of professional teachers? And that's some of that's about recruitment as well. Of course, some of it's about retention, but a lot of it is about taking the staff you've got and making sure that this time next year they're more expert than they were in, you know, on the 10th of January. How Well, okay, so so that's exactly the stuff that we've tried to condense into the Great Teaching Toolkit, taking that best evidence. So the short answer is you know, use the Great Teaching Toolkit a bit.
Speaker 3:More detail is to say what's the evidence about best professional development? The best review is the one that was commissioned by the education endowment foundation, by sam sims and colleagues from about three years ago, and they say they focus on the mechanisms by which professional learning has an impact on children's outcomes and they identify four mechanisms. They talk about we actually change the, the presentation of this a little bit when we use it in the great teacher. So we talk about goals making sure that teachers believe that they can get better. You know that's another challenge with professional development. Most teachers have experienced professional development. Most teachers it hasn't been great and they just think well, I don't deep down, I don't really believe that this is going to make me a better teacher, because that hasn't been what they've experienced. So goals is about changing that is about changing those beliefs and getting people to set a goal that says, yes, I'm going to do work on this thing, yes, I'm going to get better at this thing, knowing that if I get better at this thing, that means kids are going to learn more. So every teacher in every school should have a really clear goal for their professional learning. Over this six weeks I'm going to get better at responding to if I ask a question and I get answers. I'm going to improve how I involve the whole class in that process. Let's say, or something specific like that so that's the first one goals in that process. Let's say, or something specific like that so that's the first one goals.
Speaker 3:Then the second is about building understanding or insights, so that teachers understand the principles behind what they're doing. So if we're talking about something like retrieval practice, they need to know how does memory work, why is retrieval a good thing, why is it good to allow time to forget, what kinds of retrieval questions are more effective than others for different types of learners, and so on. So that's theory, really. I would say. Not all teachers are strongly drawn to that, but they do need to understand those principles. The third is skills, which is the practical thing of actually doing it, being able to actually manage a retrieval quiz, keeping it short, keeping it tight, making sure everyone engages, making sure they get good feedback, making sure you follow up, actually just managing it with a group of kids and that's where the rehearsal stuff comes in and practicing and getting feedback and and repeating it again and again and again till it becomes automatic.
Speaker 3:And that's the one which is about embedding, to make it habitual. So, making sure you repeat it enough times, making sure you keep coming back to it, because too often professional development we hear, oh, this term we're all going to focus on language or literacy, let's say, or something like that, and everybody does training on literacy. And then next term it's something else. And if I came, came back in a year, would I see any impact of that literacy? No, because we've moved on and obviously that means it's had no impact. If there's no evidence a year later of any change, then it hasn't worked. You've done it. You can tick it off, you can say, oh, everyone engaged in this process, but unless it has long-term sustainability, then it hasn't worked.
Speaker 3:So, making sure these things get embedded, they become habitual, routine, automatic, part of everyday practice. So it's those four things goals, understanding, skills and habits and we talk about gush g-u-s-h to remember how that is goals, understanding, skills and habits. So that's what the evidence says pd should look like and if you're looking at how you frame professional learning in your school, then compare it with that. Does every teacher have a goal? Do teachers spend time reading and thinking and discussing to build their understanding and questioning them? You know, when we want children to learn hard ideas, we make sure they have to answer questions about it. They don't just read stuff, they have to answer questions about it. They don't just read stuff, they have to answer questions and produce work. You know, write essays or whatever. So teachers have to do the same thing in order to build their understanding.
Speaker 3:Skills come through practice, yes, in rehearsal spaces, but also in real-world classrooms. Embedding comes from making sure that we follow up and repeat and make sure these things become fully automated. So if cpd offer is not doing all four things, then it's not going to work as well as it could do and you need to think about well, how can we address those? And, as I say when, when we've designed or are still designing it's a work in progress the great teaching toolkit. That's exactly what we've got in mind. How can we help people to do all those four things across a school so that we make it as easy as possible for them to do all of that? Because you have to do all of it. That's what the research says.
Speaker 2:Is there a place for inset days?
Speaker 3:Well, inset days are interesting, aren't they? I think that that probably knows the short answer to that, and I know that's probably what we do. I think that probably no is the short answer to that, and I know that's probably what we do. I think you know it's like, if we're thinking about children's learning and the idea that you could have, say, five days a year where you teach them something at the beginning of term, you expose them to some idea, and then you never revisit it again and you think, oh, they've learned this. Well, no teacher would ever think that you wouldn think, oh, they've learned this. Well, no teacher would ever think that you wouldn't think that they've learned this. You'd know that. You know within a week, they've forgotten it. That's not, that's not how learning happened. Well, why do we think it should happen like that for adults? You know it's absurd, it makes no sense, it goes against everything we know about learning. So why do we hang on to them? Well, because they're kind of easy to manage. Um, and what we actually need is and many schools do this they take that same amount of time and they, they spread it across the year and they say we'll take, we'll have those days. You know you won't. Those days are not set aside for that.
Speaker 3:You can do other things, but the same time has to be spent an hour a week, whatever every week with a meeting where you're focused on, let's say, in those great teaching teams, working together, collaborating to help each other to get better, and then maybe. So a typical model we would say is, if you've got an hour a week for that meeting with the team where you're focusing on, each person in the team is helping everybody else on their goal, so everyone brings their goal and the rest of the team are helping everybody else on their their goal. So everyone brings their goal and the rest of the team are helping them with their goal. So let's say you have an hour a fortnight for that team meeting and then on the other week you that same hour is spent in your own individual study. So that might be doing student surveys or capturing video of your classroom, or it might be reading or doing courses. We have courses in in the program.
Speaker 3:You know there's a whole lot of things you might be doing. You might be watching video of somebody else in order to help them. That those kinds of things. That's another hour a week. So by setting aside an hour a week, and ideally it should be much more than that. So you know. But many school leaders will say, oh, that's, you know, far too much, we couldn't possibly do that. I think that's a much better model than, let's say, sort of two days at the start of term and then one day at the end, that kind of thing. Because I just think mostly those don't lead to proper learning for teachers and they certainly don't need to change in classroom practice or change in thinking. And if they don't do that well, why would we expect them to have an impact on children's learning?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's, that's that's true. Is there a place for conferences?
Speaker 3:well, conferences is is a bit different, I think, because you know, obviously, as you've said, I'm going to be talking at these conferences and you can't stand up at a conference and say, by the way, this is a complete waste of time, it's pointless, you shouldn't be here. And well, I mean, if I really did think that I presumably wouldn't go. So I don't think that, because I think that having groups of people together to think about the thing is most school leaders don't think in this way. They they're still using the five insert ways, they're still not prioritizing professional learning, really not giving it enough time. So one of the things that I want to try and do is to change that, to make them think it's important, to make them think that it's possible to find a different way of thinking about professional learning. And how are you going to do that if not in an event like a conference, where you have a group of people together, you present some ideas to them, they talk to each other, of course, because they're there with their networks and, hopefully, if you make a good case and you persuade some people, then they're in the room persuading others and saying, yeah, I think we're going to give this a go and it becomes a sort of group thing thing that people do and I don't know how else you could do that.
Speaker 3:It's the same. If it's school leaders you get, you know you're we're trying to change the way they think about stuff. Same with teachers. And the thing is, if you persuade some teachers to change what they do, then you know they're either the future school leaders or they're influencing current school leaders, because school leaders talk to their teachers and they you know people come up with ideas about how they should change the way they do, inset, for example. So all of those are ways of getting in, to help people to think differently about the problems that they're. They know that what the problems are they're trying to solve, they've just they're kind of stuck in particular ways, I think sometimes because that's how it's always been done and it takes a brave person to break out of that and that's why you need to have a network of people around you who can tell you yes, you know, we've tried it and it worked for us and there's nothing. You know, that's the best way to persuade people to make a change is to see someone else doing it and it working.
Speaker 2:Yeah, final question Okay, looking ahead then, rob. How do you see the relationship between classroom teaching qualities and school leadership evolving? Yeah, especially with the emergence of AI. I just had to put AI in there.
Speaker 3:Okay, yes.
Speaker 2:And all the other technological advances that we have.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I think the answer is it's very hard to predict, actually, and I think if you look at the history of people trying to predict how technology will make a difference to education, the only thing you learn from it is that they're almost always wrong Almost every prediction that anyone made about some new technology. When we look back at it now, we just laugh and we think, well, they had no idea. So rather than trying to make those predictions, I would say try not to make them, because I don't think we're very good at it. I do think these different technologies well, technologies have made a difference to classroom practice already, and certainly AI, I'm to make is already making a difference to lots of aspects of our lives, including teaching and learning. There's no question it will, but predicting how it will, I think, is very, very difficult, because until you see that, you know somebody will have a brilliant idea for a technology and then it will just take off and it will go, and some of those are already happening. I think there's some interesting things, but I'd also say that. So I'm definitely not against technology. I think it's great and I embrace it, but I also think that, in many ways, the things that matter most about teaching and learning are not really affected by technology. They're not changing.
Speaker 3:If you went back to some of the earliest schools, you know proper schools where one teacher is working with a group of of children. Let's say, I don't know the first schools, maybe starting about 600 years ago or something like that. Um, it would be quite recognizable what those teachers were doing and the kinds of things that would help them to do it better are the same today as they were, let's say, 600 years ago. Very much the same. The technology would be different, but the fundamental things about, for example, how they explain complex ideas they were doing that then. They still need to do it now.
Speaker 3:They didn't know about cognitive load theory, but they did know that if you explain too much at once, people can't take it in. You know, people have known that always. You don't really need cognitive load theory to tell you that. They knew about the power of questioning and the kind of Socratic method that goes back. You know much, much further, of course. So I don't think the things that matter are fundamentally changed by technology. I think the things that help teachers to be even better than they are are mostly the same as they've always been. So we should embrace technology, we should use technology. We should certainly keep our eye on it. I don't think we should try and predict what it's going to do, because we'll get that wrong and I don't think fundamentally it changes how we think about the best ways that we can improve school systems. Let's say, and help children to learn more.
Speaker 2:That's a great place to end the podcast, Rob. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, it's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2:Where can people find more information about evidence-based education and the work you're doing?
Speaker 3:OK, well, yeah, I mean, if you just search for evidence-based education, it's all on our website and information about the Great Teaching Toolkit and if you're interested in it, obviously we do demos and we can show it to you. We can come out while we're out in the UAE for a week at the end of January, beginning of February. So I know we've got some meetings scheduled, but if anybody else wants to catch up there, they've still got a bit of time to do that, so that'd be really good.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. I will link to evidence-based education in the show notes. And remember you can catch Rob at the Abu Dhabi Teachers Conference and the Middle East School Leadership Conference. One is on February 1 and the other is on February 6.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Teach Middle East podcast. Visit our website teachmiddleeastcom and follow us on social media. The links are in the show notes.
