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Teach Middle East Podcast
The Teacher Effect: Why Expertise Trumps Class Size- Zoubiya Ahmed and Rob Coe at MESLC 2025
This episode centres on the critical importance of professional development and leadership in education. It discusses the need for schools to prioritise teacher expertise as a means to improve student outcomes and addresses the ongoing debate regarding class sizes and effective teaching.
Guest hosted by Zoubiya Ahmed
Connect with Zoubiya at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoubiya/
• Overview of conference themes and keynote insights
• Emphasis on the necessity for enhancing teacher expertise
• Discussion of the inadequate time allotted for professional development
• Argument for finding time for collaborative and individual professional learning
• Larger class sizes with skilled teachers vs. smaller classes with average teachers
• Enabling effective leadership to foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Addressing scepticism towards research in educational practice
• Importance of aligning professional development with classroom realities
• Encouragement to create open dialogues about teaching practices
• Vision for schools as centres of holistic learning and growth
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Hosted by Leisa Grace Wilson
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Hi, rob Hi.
Speaker 2:Zubir.
Speaker 1:A pleasure to meet you.
Speaker 2:Likewise.
Speaker 1:I've had the opportunity to have mini chats with you. Yes, got a chance to experience your keynote, really get to grips with the current developments in the Great Teaching Toolkit. I'd like you to first give our leaders and we're at the Middle East School Leadership Conference by the way give the leaders who are listening and the educators listening a sense of your keynote today okay, just a short elevator pitch.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, uh, okay. Well, it's about leadership, which obviously people are interested in, and the idea that, uh, the most important thing leaders do is to build the expertise of their staff, because it's classrooms where learning happens. Schools are about learning. Let's keep the focus on the main thing and the thing that determines how much learning is really the expertise of teachers in classrooms and what they do, and so school leaders have to maximize that and optimize that, and the strongest lever that they have is to focus on professional development and how they frame that, how they offer it, how much time they give to it, what they do with that time to make it effective, because it is that's the thing that influences teacher expertise and it's it's the gift that keeps on giving. I didn't say this in the talk, but you know, if I learn to be a better teacher gradually over time, every class I teach benefits from that for the rest of my career. It's not like an intervention where you you get it while you're doing it and then it it fades out which most do so.
Speaker 2:The the argument, the rational argument for saying this should be our top priority, I think is overwhelming. That's at odds with a lot of current practice. Where I mean in in england, surveys say that an average teacher spends half an hour a week on professional learning out of a 50 hour working week for an average teacher. So that's one percent. That does not scream highest priority to me. That screams this. We fit this in around the edges and it should be the other way. I'm not saying they should spend 49 and a half hours of professional learning, but it should be more than that how much more.
Speaker 2:Well, uh, I, we, we talk when we're talking with schools about, for example, using the great teaching toolkit, that if you can't find an hour a week for every member of staff, you're unlikely to get the full benefit. Now, schools will often raise an eyebrow when you say that, because it feels like a lot An hour a week to dedicate and we talk about. You know, a good model would be to find an hour a week for meeting time where people get together and collaborate and support each other. And then on the other week, the hour is for individual study, for collecting information and insights about their own classroom, perhaps using student surveys or video or other techniques, looking at other people, giving other colleagues feedback. So there's the kind of out of meeting, study and interaction. And then there's the focus of out of meeting, study and interaction, and then there's the focus time in a meeting where people are together helping each other.
Speaker 2:And if you can find an hour a week, that's great, but I don't think that's like a, an ultimate target.
Speaker 2:I think that's a, that's kind of minimum requirement if you can find two hours a week, you know. So one of the questions I would have is would you rather, how do you find the time and the money to do this. Well, one of the ways you can do it is by teaching bigger classes, because the economics of this is quite simple if you teach more children in the room, then, uh, the unit costs of delivering that go down absolutely and um, therefore, you've got money and time to play with. No teacher wants to teach a bigger class, but as a parent, one of the questions I would ask is would you rather have a really excellent teacher with your class in a class of 30, or an okay teacher with your, your child in a class of 25, or just a kind of mediocre teacher with your child in the class of 25, or just a kind of mediocre teacher with your child in the class of 20? And I would always have the expert teacher with the class of 30 it's interesting you took me back to GCSE.
Speaker 1:In my own learner experience, every teacher in the science team used to have monday lunchtime okay so monday lunch dedicated in year 10 towards revising what was learned, and we had this one teacher that everybody knew that he did these kind of power sessions okay yeah, through topics right image okay, I really went into detail worth attending those his.
Speaker 2:There were other teachers who got a turnout of 10 yeah, of dean of year 10 and our year 10 was about 400, 600 children was a big school and um this particular teacher who happened to be my form tutor.
Speaker 1:So at the end of lunchtime we'd go on a monday and see the room was so full okay, to the door right because everyone wanted a piece of that, that 40 minutes so that it's interesting that you say that yeah and it took me yes to that.
Speaker 2:So it I think there is some well a great teacher can manage a big group, and you know it's harder, it's more work. You know it's harder, it's more work. For sure it's more difficult in many ways. It's difficult when you're in a fee-paying school to persuade people that that's what they're paying for.
Speaker 1:Or justify.
Speaker 2:Justify yes, yeah, but if we lived in a rational world which you know, I know we don't people would be saying yes, I rather have, uh, my child in a big class with a really great teacher than in a small class. So if we could find a way to sell that to teachers which again, I know is a challenge um, you could teach if, if the choice for a teacher could be that you teach a full timetable over five days, let's say, if you have a five-day working week with classes of 25, or you teach bigger classes of 30, but you only teach four days and you have a whole day for professional development and the costs are quite similar for those sorts of numbers. I mean, you know, you reduce the teaching by a fifth, you increase the numbers by a fifth, it sort of works out roughly speaking.
Speaker 1:Do you know of any schools who've piloted this Well?
Speaker 2:I know some schools who have freed up time for professional learning. They're not always very transparent about how they've done that, or the measurable impact at that time.
Speaker 1:I know, but it's difficult.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the challenge, that's the barrier, I think, because, as I say, in a rational world, if you believed that the time you spend on professional learning would pay back in a way, in the way that the research says it can do, then it'd be a no-brainer. You just say, yeah, we, we want to free up this time. We'd have give people a whole day a week to spend on their professional development and we'd find a way to do that because it's the most important thing. You know, schools are really value-driven places. They're all about purpose. The purpose is to to help youngsters, to help them learn stuff, to help them grow to be adults and take part in society and all of that stuff, and to do that we need great teachers. So everything that we can do that makes teaching great, we should do that thing.
Speaker 1:It's really that simple I think, though, I can hear the whispers from those potentially watching this thinking if our board yes we're made aware that we have the capacity to teach bigger groups with the same impact. All that will happen is our timetable will grow.
Speaker 2:Just be given grow.
Speaker 1:You'll be given more and that professional development time would still be utilized for lessons? Yeah to increase the capacity of the school and it would be seen as a, as a. Do you see it?
Speaker 2:yes, it'd be worse than where you were before exactly yes so I obviously I wouldn't advocate that.
Speaker 2:I think it will depend on the context. In some contexts school leaders have that power to decide. Certainly many schools in England that would be the case. Schools here I think some do is, my sense, more about kind of delivering well, making money perhaps in some cases, or certainly delivering according to a set of expectations. And those expectations are very varied. They come from the parents and the community, they come from inspection processes and other kinds of accountability, and you can't not do those things you have to. If you don't satisfy your market and you don't satisfy the regulators and you don't deliver on those key outcomes, no one's going to think you're succeeding. And that's quite right. Unless those regulatory systems are really misaligned, then it's not wrong that you should have to tick those boxes, but it is wrong if you think that's all we have to do. True, they shouldn't be a check.
Speaker 1:Know they shouldn't be.
Speaker 2:They should be a check they shouldn't be the be-all and end-all and that's not a school. If, if all a school does is satisfy inspectors and regulators and parents, it's not a school I want my children to go to. It's not a school I want to work in, because it's just a really impoverished view of what education is about isn't it yes and no?
Speaker 1:I agree and disagree in part, and I'm gonna explain why. Because and I haven't really said this on camera before I have a daughter with additional needs. Okay, um, she wouldn't be able to cope in a classroom?
Speaker 2:Yes, in a big class. And I was interjecting while you were still making your point.
Speaker 1:Premium schools. One of the things about the atmosphere that they're trying to project to parents is this idea that their child will have a personalised learning journey and that attention is quite targeted to the child, and it begs for the question if the class was bigger yeah and the school was bigger yes would every child feel seen, hurt and valued enough? Yes, learning to therefore be affected on them? Yes, so that's, that's, so, that's really, really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are some children, you know. Additional needs covers a wide range of things, some of which do need very intensive, very individualized personal experts. Let's put that out there. This is not just about having another body to be with them. It's about someone who really really understands the challenges, what they need, how to help. So there are some children where that is a requirement and if we are a civilized society, we should we should fund that. Yeah, but that's an extra. That's not the kind of regular cost of, uh, everyday instruction. That's an extra requirement that makes the world fair. You know, it's like putting ramps in so wheelchairs can get out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, making things accessible to everyone, and you know it's like putting ramps in so wheelchairs can get out. Yeah, making things accessible to everyone and you know that's a principle and I wouldn't wouldn't waver on that that we meet where people have different needs. We have to meet those needs. But I don't think it follows from that that in order to feel you belong, to feel seen to, to be respected, to have an identity, belong to an organization, it doesn't follow that you have to always be in small groups. In fact, I would say it's pretty much irrelevant the size of the group. It's about the relationships that you have, it's about the culture, it's about the values, and you can achieve that with big groups or you can achieve it with small groups, you know, provided those specialist needs are met. I don't think it follows that. Now, I know, um, you know, parents in general will have a preference to say well, it's a nice small group, it's nurturing, it's friendly, it's good or they will want that.
Speaker 1:It's the the amount of time that yeah it's this division concept that if a teacher has this many minutes and it's divided the mathematics people feel bad. That being said, I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that that's the popular belief that we would face the challenge we'd face as leaders. To try and justify that, the impact of this teacher? Yes, irrespective of minutes.
Speaker 2:Okay is different yes to this yes, model, I know, and there's a whole debate to have there and one of the things that drew me into talking about pedagogy in the first place because I was a researcher. My research was about assessment mostly, and I um, I was in and and evidence and evaluation. That's what I was interested in Nothing to do with classroom practice. And then I was involved in a thing that became the EF, the Education Endowment Foundation's Teaching Learning Toolkit. This was originally a thing for the Sutton Trust. This was in 2010.
Speaker 2:We started writing this and it was a summary of what the best evidence available says about different interventions. Still on. The EF is still promoting. It's still widely used school leaders and everybody else. People in England know about it absolutely, and you're nodding, right, so this was a new thing there, and the reason we did it was because um, it was we were coming up to an election in England, 2010, and all three of the main parties were saying we would have some kind of pupil premium.
Speaker 2:That was a new thing then. It didn't exist before, and we thought that meant extra money for schools, although, looking back, that isn't quite how it played out. And so school leaders, sutton Trust, did a survey and they said to school leaders how would you spend this extra money? And they said we would hire more teachers and have smaller classes and we'd hire more teaching assistants and those are both really expensive things for a school to do. And they were the kind of top favourites. That things was that they would have a small effect which was not as big as many other things that they could have spent that money on. So not that there's no effect of having a smaller class, it's just one of the most expensive things you can do and it's a modest effect. So if you're following the evidence, you probably wouldn't do that. At least that wouldn't be your first go-to. And we thought well, why are people saying this thing that's so against the evidence? Well, because they don't know what the evidence says so, let's produce an accessible summary.
Speaker 2:And that's the piece of work that was led by Steve Higgins, who was my colleague at Durham, and I was part of that original thing and then it got taken over and I wasn't involved after that so much, but I was definitely part of the the creation of it and that's why we did it. And then we put this thing out and it said class sizes don't matter as much as you think they'll matter, and that was a shocking message I it was a. It was well received. I think the whole the toolkit and I was often asked to speak about it to audiences of teachers and I would say this thing I, you know, like to be controversial, upset people when I'm talking or give them something to think about. Let's put that in a nicer way. So I would say you know, class sizes don't make as much difference, and teachers would be absolutely sure that I was wrong and they'd want to argue. You know, that's that's the prevailing. Yeah, that's changed in England now people don't want to argue about it anymore. Other places they maybe do, and for me that was incredibly rich discussion because it basically got down. I would well.
Speaker 2:Why do you think you can be more effective in a small class? Why do you think more learning happens in a small class than a big class? And they would say things like we can give more individual attention. And I would say something like okay, so imagine you've got a one hour lesson and a class of 30 children. If you do nothing other than individual attention, that's two minutes per child. And what is each child doing in the other 58 minutes? Is that a great pedagogy? No, it isn't so. At most you're you've got two minutes of individual attention and the reality is you probably most children don't get any and and some get a bit, but it's a few seconds out of an hour's lesson. So to be an effective teacher, you have to have strategies that enable you to interact productively with youngsters in a way that isn't one-to-one, because one-to-one unless you get down to about five or certainly ten one-to-one is just a really inefficient strategy. So give me an example, I would say, of a strategy that you think can work with a class of 15.
Speaker 1:That doesn't work with a class of 30. I think the important words you said there was productive yeah and being um efficient yes, time as well, both of those are critical to ensure, and my mind went to the, the the spheres of zone of proximal development when you're speaking, yeah and sometimes there's a topic within a sequence where 50% of the children are in the inner circle where they already are able to do the learning efficiently and without assistance. If that's the case, are we then still giving them their two minutes? Probably not.
Speaker 2:In practice not, we're probably going to focus on the children and it's very hard to who need the interventions? Yeah, the children who have. Yeah no prerequisite yes, yes, knowledge of that topic to bring them in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so do we really give equal time?
Speaker 2:no, we give equitable time to children in the classroom so I think that the argument falls well, and when you, when you describe that, the complexity of managing all those, the different children with their different starting points, their different needs, their different appetites, their different attitudes they're different uh, all the interactions between them, it just sounds like there's no way anyone could do this. It's just too hard, yeah. And yet go into any school, literally any school in the, and you will see teachers doing that. Yes, you know, schools that people have said are not good, you will find teachers doing that thing, because every school has those teachers and some, when you see the best do it, it's phenomenal. It just makes you well up and the hairs on the back of your neck go up and you just think this is incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how do they do it? I don't know, they're superhuman and they're extraordinary, but they're doing it every day. You know, while we're sat here speaking, there are teachers, you know, less than a mile from us, I'm sure, in schools, doing that very thing. And so if you are a teacher and you want to, you're kind of puzzled by well, how can, how can that be? How can I manage this impossible challenge? The answer is don't ask me, because I'm a researcher. Go and look at another school nearby where somebody is doing it well, and talk to that person and build those networks of support, because your colleagues are doing this, even if you're not, and probably you are too, actually. So maybe all you need is just to be told you're already doing it well and just keep going. But we can learn from other people, and we should, and that's where the answer is.
Speaker 1:Speaking of learning and adult learning, professional learning in education. You touched earlier on the point of professional development and we talked about a guideline of number, of amount of time. I mean time is relative and what we do with our time.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah. And also, how do we define professional learning and the impact of?
Speaker 1:that. My question is the Simzatel resource that you I know it well Okay. My work with the MPQs. Yes. I'm excited in that, yeah, and the Sutton Trust is also excited heavily for leaders to know about.
Speaker 2:Yeah and the.
Speaker 1:Sutton Trust is also cited heavily for leaders to know about. But I'm pretty sure most educators, or anybody who's not familiar with that work, aren't necessarily skilled to evaluate the quality of professional development when they create it. So I'd love for you to give a run, a quick rundown of, of not necessarily all 17 dimensions, but the gush right, okay, just yeah.
Speaker 2:The mechanism, the idea of mechanisms, yeah, 17 mechanisms, yeah okay.
Speaker 2:Sense of yeah, pd is only as impactful as, yes, knowing what's in it yeah, I mean, it's a great example of what I would describe as evidence-based practitioner advice, because it starts with a systematic review of what do we know about professional development, and there's lots of studies that have tried to evaluate different kinds of professional learning, professional development, cpd and so we should start by well, what do they tell us?
Speaker 2:And the answer is that it's quite a mixed picture, but broadly there is support for the idea that professional development can make a reasonably substantial difference to how effective teachers are.
Speaker 2:Teachers who engage with the right kinds of professional development become more effective, become more effective quicker than they would have done if they hadn't. So the overall case is there, and then what they tried to do is not just to report that headline as a statistical average but to say well, do we understand some of that variation and do we understand, crucially, why? So they focused on mechanisms and the idea that, if we think about what we're trying to do in in professional development is partly seen as learning, partly seen as behavior change, and though you know those two are not separate, but they um, they have, they come from different um traditions in terms of how people research. So, for example, in health, there's a lot of research about behavior change, how you get people to adopt more healthy lifestyles, and those kinds of things. You know, we've all tried to do that, I'm sure, and we found it very, very hard to change behaviors yeah, changing yes and it's uh.
Speaker 2:you know many other examples, you know I I talked to examples about things like learning an instrument. Again, you might have had the experience where you had one teacher and they told you to hold your bow this way or something, and then a new teacher came along and they said, oh, not like that. And it just felt excruciatingly uncomfortable to change something that you'd had that was working. You thought it was fine, but somebody else looks at it and says, no, this is To be back to piano lessons.
Speaker 2:Okay exactly yeah. So your hands position Go this way, not that way. The thing about it to hang on to is that the change felt wrong. You felt like you were getting worse. You felt less comfortable. You were getting worse, you felt less comfortable and, uh, it took a lot of work to make the new thing the thing you do, and you, maybe you didn't succeed. I don't know. But you know, eventually, if you persist with that, you become comfortable with the new way and if the advice is right.
Speaker 2:you become better, you know your sound is improved or your ability?
Speaker 1:yeah, play, I think, a good analogy, for that might actually be learning to drive, and then, becoming a driver and then learning to be an instructor of those who drive. The instructor level will have different, pedals will have different mechanisms and different tools to enable the driver to be an advanced driver, because oftentimes when people hear professional development they think, um, am I lesser than the standard?
Speaker 1:okay, deficit model, right, he comes into people that well, professional development and this comes back to the point you made in your keynote that do we only focus on an improvement mindset for those on a yeah and those on a plp? Yes, different things, but um this idea that you're doing okay because we've got this inspection rating that we're trying to maintain, yeah, so let's focus our attention on the price. Terrible, terrible way to go about but if you've only got so much time, yeah would it not be a slippery slope that you could slide down quite easily?
Speaker 2:to to fall into that? Yes, of course crisis management. Okay, well, these are the crisis if you're in a crisis, crisis management is right. If your building's on fire, you need to put out all the fires. You can't say, oh, I'm prioritizing this one because the other one's going to burn your house down. So if that's genuinely the context and if you are a leader, and that's the school and that's your context, well, you know, I feel for you and that's a different game. So, if you're in a crisis, crisis management.
Speaker 1:But we would say that if you are consistently crisis managing, professional development that is a trend that we need to address yes, and it's not a crisis Exactly, or at least it's not a sustainable way to live your life.
Speaker 2:So if you're consistently in a crisis because you're failing to see what the opportunities are and to think longer term and to prioritise what's important versus what's urgent, then that's a failure of leadership and that's on you. Versus what's urgent, then that's a failure of leadership and that's on you. If you're in a crisis because you don't have any power to do anything other than just to manage a crisis, then my advice would be leave and get another job, because you know it will kill you and it's not a nice place to be and it's out of your control and that's not the school leader you want to be.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe some people do, I don't know but the survival instinct keeps you there, but you probably wouldn't be able to, and in the theme of the conference being, uh, being, building a sustainable legacy.
Speaker 2:It's not sustainable, it's toxic and you, you need to look around and say, well, do I want this? I mean, I don't know if that's helpful advice, but I, I do think we, we, we sometimes have these narratives around the sort of stress and the crisis and the outside pressures. And yes, of course they're there. I'm not saying they're not, I think they can be. They're certainly very real, they really really matter. I mean, that's one of the things that strikes me about the context in UAE, particularly that the stakes attached. I mean head teachers in England talk about high stakes or in relation to off-stakes.
Speaker 1:I think it's worse here.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, really really matters, and it's more regular as well. Inspection process, for example. There's zero tolerance of even just slight falling away from being the highest do you think that's counterproductive? Yes, I do, yeah yeah, I think well, I don't know, I think well let's not be so hard-hitting.
Speaker 1:Perhaps it's a impeding, or inhibiting yes kind of professional development that's truly embedded. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2:I think it's a reason why we're not thinking as much about the longer term, about the really authentic, sustainable solutions that really make a difference to the things that are important, and it's very hard to have that conversation with yourself and to strategically think about what matters here when you've got these drivers all the time kind of beating on your door saying you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this. Good leaders are able to manage that, I'm absolutely sure, and you know they're here in this, this building today. I've spoken with some of them who make me think that's what they're doing, but they do it by protecting people from that pressure they don't pass that pressure on and they actually internalise it.
Speaker 2:Yes, maybe and that's hard that is hard for them, but maybe to some extent that is part of the job. Some people do that really well and I think it's great that they do. I think we all need to have pressure. I'm not saying we should just have a free-for-all and nobody ever looks to see whether it's good or not. We should definitely know what's good. We should have pressure, but it shouldn't be the kind of unrelenting pressure that doesn't give you space.
Speaker 1:Or stifle people to actually have a go.
Speaker 2:You're afraid to try anything, you're afraid to say invest in professional learning, because you think I've just got to tick these boxes and unless I do that, my job's under threat and the school's under threat, and you know all these people's livelihoods and you go down this, this spiral of anxiety about that thing, so you haven't got space to just think about what's important.
Speaker 2:Can we try something different? If you try something different, you're taking a risk, and you need to. People need to feel empowered to take a bit of it. If you're not taking a risk, you're not really doing the job, are you?
Speaker 1:What would you say would be your advice for a leader who is research-informed, who understands the dynamics of scaffolding and monitoring and feedback and really has a strong sense of that in their own practice. They're a good practitioner. They're able to translate that in their own practice, yeah, when they go to their team right?
Speaker 2:yeah, and they are with a department.
Speaker 1:Yes, and then you've got variable levels of skepticism you've got some who think, well, well, that works in the UK schools where they don't have EADL students. There's this cynicism of contextual relevance of widespread research. And they well, the theorists, don't know my challenges.
Speaker 2:It becomes personal to them.
Speaker 1:What would be your advice to a leader who? Has to bring in the best of the research yes, into a context and make it convincing yeah but also relevant.
Speaker 2:Yes, okay, your advice well I I think this is a real challenge and a big challenge and it's very difficult. I think the example you gave earlier of the you know the good driver who becomes a driving instructor. It's a different set of skills. Being a great teacher is not the same as managing a team of people, so there are different skills involved and that's important, I think. First of all, I think that the knowledge that that person has being research-informed, understanding pedagogy all of that helps them. It does make a difference because their job is to manage that team, but to manage that team in a specific activity which is teaching and learning.
Speaker 2:And so being an expert in that themselves does give them strength. I think it's important they need to focus on things that really really matter. They need to focus on things that really really matter. I don't think we get um, I I. I think it's. It's rarely the case that one teacher should tell another teacher how to do something, because in my experience, when that's happened to me, if someone else has said, oh, you should do this, I've always just thought, well, that's your advice, that's your opinion, that works for you. I'm, I'm, some, I'm. Sometimes it's helpful. Quite often it isn't so, um, but I do think that teachers should understand. I talked about the need to understand the theory. So if the research informed teacher knows about the science of learning and what learning is and how it happens, they'll know about, um, how things go into short-term memory. But they really don't stay for very long and we can't process very much Sure working memory.
Speaker 1:Working memory yeah.
Speaker 2:But some of that ends up then getting transferred into long-term memory, which is obviously much bigger and much longer lasting. So that's the aim. How do we do that? By processing? And so that's the aim. How do we do that by processing? And so that's the. You know, how do we get students to do? That model is helpful if it helps us to think about process and it leads us to do things like retrieval, practice spacing so that we give time to forget, and so on. And if you didn't know that theory, some teachers just instinctively think well, that's what you know. We did this last week. We need to just check if it's there, but most don't. When I was a teacher, I certainly didn't. I would teach a topic. Students could do it. I think, great, they've got this. We'd come back literally the next day and they couldn't do it and I would just be hitting my head and frustrated thinking, how can this be? You could do this yesterday, why can't you do it today? I was annoyed with them, if I'm honest.
Speaker 1:And I now think well, what an idiot Did you see it as a reflection of your own aptitude or your abilities? Up to a point I suppose.
Speaker 2:But no, I thought it was just them being perverse, which is just ridiculous because it happens again and again and again, and after a while you might think OK, whoever's fault this is, you can't just be in denial about it. You need to address it and think about why it is and what you can do. Maybe to some extent I did, but I don't think I really did properly. I just thought I didn't understand why I think and therefore it just seemed a bit bizarre. I didn't understand why I think and therefore it just seemed a bit bizarre. And I think if I'd known a bit more about memory and how it works, I might have been better able to respond to that. So that bit of theory would have helped me in adapting you had some aha moments following that exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of yeah, thinking about oh okay, I wasn't that great, was I?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Looking back very much.
Speaker 1:so yeah, you mentioned the point earlier as well. Sorry getting in there, because it's exactly on this point that most leaders, teachers, educators think they are better than they are All right. So that's, one idea.
Speaker 2:I want you to hold.
Speaker 1:And then I want you to hold the other idea that often the teachers who are the most self-critical yeah and I found this in my coaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they are the ones who are hardest on themselves but at the cost of their well-being, yes, and those who think they're great yes are the ones who don't have the anxiety of the improvement mindset yeah how would you manage?
Speaker 1:okay?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, okay, so these are classic management challenges, aren't they about dealing with human beings and all the variety? And you're right, you have some people who are more confident than they should be and some people who are less confident they should be. Obviously, there are some gender relationships there as well that tend to be correlated with that or different other kinds of characteristics, and cultural and cultural, yes, exactly, and we should be aware of those, but not limit people by those characteristics, but take each one as they are. I think the efficacy is important, so the belief that you have agency here, that you have control, that you can make a difference. So it's all about trying to help people, not to think about what matters is how good I am today, but what matters is what direction am I traveling in and what am I? Am I the owner of that journey or am I just being buffeted a feather?
Speaker 1:in the wind? Do you mean like aspirationally?
Speaker 2:Yes, aspirationally, for sure. So if you ask teachers how important is it to you to be better at your job, you'll get a range of answers.
Speaker 1:It sounds like a coaching conversation exactly some people will say it's absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's everything to me. I want to be the best I can be. I know that's hard, I know I have to work at it. But and I know that some of you know, like any other kind of learning, that can be bruising where I find that I'm not doing as well as I thought I was. But I'm up for that. That's my challenge. Other Other teachers will say look, this is a tough job. I work 50 hours a week. I do everything for my children. The last thing I need is you telling me that I should be better than I am.
Speaker 1:I'm good enough, thank you, and I'll quite put it in those words that's actually the crux of what I was getting to, because you've got someone, many things on their plate and we almost feel the guilt, yes, of saying well, you're great, but it would be even better if we bear the weight of that.
Speaker 2:What they hear is you're not good enough, yes, so you say you're great, but and then you've lost your great because it could be.
Speaker 1:You're great and yes, how about we look at?
Speaker 2:yes, it's really really hard to get that message. The only way to do it is to model it, to live it. So school leaders have to say I'm really proud of our school and what we do, but here are some things that we can be even better at we'll speak about themselves I'm really great at this to share but I'm not great at this exactly and to share if they're classroom practitioners as well which many school leaders, of course to talk about that in terms of their practice.
Speaker 2:So I did this survey with my students to find out what they thought. There were some things they liked and said were good. There were some things that I didn't. I didn't. I wasn't so keen to hear that they didn't like as much. These are things I can work on, so to share that openly when leaders do that is really powerful, because it gives everyone the license to say, well, okay, so we don't have to be perfect. It's all right to admit that there are things we're working on. That culture changes when leaders do that themselves. So if you think an improvement mindset is important, it has to be for you as well as a leader, not just, oh, you know, try and get everyone else to do it, but I'm not or get the troops to improve, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just get them to improve.
Speaker 2:Live that yourself and model it, and then you'll start to get some buy-in and not everyone for sure, but work with the people who are, you know, good to work with, who are keen to interact, who are keen to learn, because the more you do that that's a kind of richer place to start. I think there will be some who are keen. You work with them, they start to have a fabulous experience, to be demonstrably improving, and then everyone else will want to have part of that. You don't have to force it on them. I, you. The efficacy, feelings do matter, the belief that you can do things, that you can get better. How do we boost that for people who, um, don't have good self-esteem? It's very, very hard. But you know we're doing that in classrooms for young people. Every day we have classrooms full of kids who don't have high self-esteem.
Speaker 1:I think that's that effortful approach where we know this isn't easy, but it's necessary because in order to have high-impact learning, meaningful learning, happen at all levels, we need to apply ourselves in what matters, which is learning in the classroom. So I think that shift uh, it's a paradigm shift for some yeah where it's very organized org chart. I'm reigning over these teams and it has to be a more of a cyclical relationship, just lastly, okay, and I know we've been speaking probably longer than i- we did.
Speaker 2:That's fine, really me it's really interesting conversation You're going to have to edit it down?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I probably not, because everything we've spoken about might make up multiple clips. But just lastly, you mentioned the point about your evidence, reviews and your toolkit being available in multiple languages, and that's something despite me being very au fait with that because, I hadn't seen it in different languages. So I'd love for you to just take the opportunity to tell everyone.
Speaker 2:So we wrote the review. I mean, you mentioned Sutton Trust, but what Makes Great Teaching was again the thing that followed on from the teaching and learning toolkit that became the EF thing and from that then five years, that was 2014. Then in 2019, we thought, okay, we should update this thing and that's what the Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review was really. It was an update and we published that and it changed a little bit. I think the focus is more kind of practical application, usable thing for practitioners, whereas the first one was a bit more theoretical. Um, anyway, we published this thing and people just came to us and said this is really powerful, it's really useful. Uh, but we're working in. I think the first one was china and we want to have a chinese translation. Are you interested? And we said yes, we're absolutely interested, and translation is a is a challenging game because it has to be localized, it has to context has to work, but also the kind of technical education language and research language.
Speaker 2:So you can't it's not, not everyone can do it. You have to be a fluent speaker of the language but also understand the education context and understand the research and that's quite a. You know, if you think about those Venn diagrams, it's not, there aren't many people, there's a really narrow sweet spot there is, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we were lucky to find people who wanted to do that and they've done it. You know it's been through various different kinds of quality assurance. So, yeah, the Chinese one to begin with. I think Arabic may have been the second. Welsh came quite early because we were working with a lot of schools in Wales and then the others have followed, literally just because a group of schools have said we'd like this and we're happy to lead on that translation process and we've said fantastic fill your boots Brilliant.
Speaker 2:So there'll be more as well. We've got all those languages. I think Swedish was the last one we've got. We've got Spanish, brazilian, portuguese, arabic, chinese, welsh. There's maybe one other Anyway that's the story.
Speaker 1:Importantly for the language, the schools that have a language focus for example, we've got Italian and French schools and so forth the toolkit is available for them to convert into their schools in a linguistically appropriate and pedagogically appropriate way?
Speaker 2:We hope so. Yes, and if it isn't available in your language currently, come and talk to us, because we'd love it to be, and it's great that more and more people use it. It's available on. All those different language versions are available on the website for free. Anyone can just download it and read. Obviously, the other tools that support people in using it are not free. That's a that's. There's a lot more value in that, but um, you know it's a.
Speaker 2:It's a real principle of everything we do that we want as many people as possible to benefit from it. So where we possibly can, we make things available for free on that note, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:We've had a really in-depth, insightful, challenging as well conversation about contemporary issues in uh, the middle east, leadership, um, and and how we can overcome those challenges. Thank you so much for your time thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:It's been great I really enjoyed it.
