2
BLENDED
FROM GOOD TO GREAT
Interview Peter Dudley
2
yourself as an individual but as a collective . What you will see is that they ’ ll take more risks , or let others talk and plug in when appropriate . It ’ s not like people take turns , you can let others talk while you think and add up . It ’ s all about accessing your tacit knowledge , which is important for teaching yet difficult to harness or visualize . Rehearsal , for example , can enable teachers to more consciously apply this very illusive tacit knowledge to their thinking . Without this process they might not be able to explain why they do certain things very well . If you can use tacit knowledge it can help innovative thinking in day-to-day practice . Talk , rather than written communication , is how we are wired to receive ideas , much more easily than writing . For example , if you read a complicated sentence , it helps to say it out loud . We are wired for talk and narrative . Impact happens when teachers talk about what they are planning do and how it affects student learning . Pinning the talk to specific observations of real case pupils helps as well . Does this mean teachers also gain more accountability for their actions ? You can be accountable in many ways , not only to external inspectors . Teachers are accountable to their pupils , their parents , the community and each other . But I use this expression : ‘ formative accountability ’ that helps improve something at the same time as demonstrating its efficacy or worth . Accountability often conjures up ideas about being judged , that in the end you have to publicly account for what you are doing and people will say it ’ s OK or not . I think the duty of a teacher is to be really clear about what the student has learned and needs to know , about what the next teaching for that child is . The accountability towards parents shouldn ’ t be individual , but should be more focussed on how parents can support their child ’ s development . Give parents clear
ideas about what they can talk about with their children , or what activities they can use . They might even feel quite liberated . A lot of parents feel guilty , and want to help their children learn better , but don ’ t always know how to do is . A school can do this at an organisational level by sharing their lesson studies and the resulting improvements for pupils . Many schools do publish an annual booklet that summarises this . An increasing number of schools are abandoning ‘ performance management ’ observations of teaching in favour of having teachers conduct lesson studies into areas in which they seek to improve their practice and allow them to present the outcomes to their peers . This is very visible accountability and teachers are much more likely to tackle areas of genuine weakness and how they have overcome them , than they are when being observed teaching by their boss and knowing their pay could be cut . Is partnering with parents to support student learning is something you endorse ? Desforges has shown that parents have more impact on their children ’ s outcomes than a good school does right up to the age of 14 and often beyond . Parents can add to their child ’ s educational outcomes , not by trying to teach them in the evenings , but by having encouraging conversations with their children about their learning . To reflect on how this affects their future , and to help children reprocess the information and their learning . You can transform the child life by parental support . Again , not to teach them , that is counterproductive . Schools and school systems need to help parents to understand the best ways to them to help their children learn .
38