Teach Like Nobody’s Watching – Why we Must Free Ourselves from Prescriptive Education Policies
Teaching for any audience other than your pupils leads to wasting time providing evidence something is being done, rather than doing what works
- by Mark Enser
Over the 14 years or so I have been teaching I have received countless hours of training and directives on how I should teach. Very few of these instructions have ever been rescinded so I assume I am still supposed to be following them.
If I were to teach these instructions I would be teaching children according to their learning styles – styles that would be displayed on the front of their books alongside target grades, vulnerable group status and, probably, their star sign
I would be careful not to talk too much, definitely no more than 10% of the time, because pupils only remember 5% of what they are told.
Instead I’d facilitate their learning by being a guide on the side.
I would differentiate each task carefully, so that less-able pupils were given much easier work, and have differentiated objectives too (which they would copy into their books).
These books would be marked in green, students would then respond in red ready for me to respond to their response in purple, and by the time we’ve finished it will look like a unicorn threw up.
This way of teaching would not only be exhausting, it would also be hugely ineffective. And yet it is just a tiny fraction of the advice I have been given on what I should be doing and the things an observer would expect to see.
I believe that many of our schools have cultures born of a mix of appalling advice on how to teach and observations that ensure that appalling advice is being followed.
This leads to teachers not reflecting on their own practice in order to find the best way for them teach, but instead trying to teach to someone else’s checklist.
Lucy Crehan’s excellent book CleverLands reports on her journey around the world to visit and study successful education systems, and one part that really stood out for me was a comment on Finland.
Here, teachers are very highly trained – but once they are trained they’re left to get on and teach without observations, quality assurance activities or the pressure of external exams.
In this system, you might expect to find a lot of variation in teaching styles as everyone finds their own way, and yet studies actually found a great deal of consistency.
They had all found a common way of teaching because it was a way that actually worked. If we all taught like nobody was watching, would we too find a similar common approach free of the nonsense introduced by external observers?
I am lucky to teach in a school that has, to borrow Shaun Allison’s term, a tight but loose approach to teaching and learning. A school where teachers are given the time to reflect on how they teach, to read and discuss pedagogy and collaborate to improve their practice.
This means I can teach like nobody’s watching.
Freed of prescriptive marking policies I can instead choose the form of feedback that best meets the need of that class at that time.
This might involve written comments, but is more likely to include whole-class feedback or pupils marking their own work against a success criteria – as Dylan Wiliam points out, the best person to mark work is the person who produced it.
Teaching like nobody’s watching means that you can explain a new idea for as long or little a time as a class needs. You can work out if they will benefit from writing down the learning objective or not, if a piece of work would be best done as part of a group or as individuals, if pupils need a different activity or just different support.
When you teach like nobody’s watching you have to reflect on what you are doing, and you need the confidence that comes from being well informed about teaching and learning.
You can’t rely on a list of directives or well-meaning advice from on high. You are the professional, and you are in charge.
Teaching for any audience other than your pupils is a recipe for disaster. It leads to time being spent trying to provide evidence that something is being done, rather than doing what works.
We desperately need a change in the culture of our profession and it begins with each and every one of us taking the responsibility to just teach. Teach like nobody’s watching.
Mark Enser is Head of Geography at Heathfield Community College. He writes at Teachreal.wordpress.com and tweets @EnserMark.
