Black Box Teaching

By Graham Dakin

Earlier this year I read Matthew Syed’s excellent book “Black Box Thinking.” In the book, Syed explores why some professions, like airline pilots, react and respond so well to mistakes and how having a positive attitude to this has led to huge increases in passenger safety, whereas other professions are much slower and less inclined to respond to the mistakes made and therefore improvement is extremely slow. I would definitely put teaching in the second category but what are the reasons for this and what can we do about it?

Firstly, teaching obviously lacks the feedback mechanism that airline pilots have, they have an object that is constantly recording everything they say and do during the flight and therefore this can easily be analysed post flight if necessary. Secondly, it is impossible to see whether or not students are learning, which is obviously the aim, whereas it is fairly obvious whether or not your passengers have arrived in their destination safely. As well as these in-built problems, I do feel the teaching profession has also shot itself in the foot in a number of ways.

There are a number of practices that I believe have stopped the teaching profession from improving. Firstly; high stakes, graded lesson observations not only had huge reliability and validity issues but discouraged teachers from actually looking at areas to develop in their practice, rather than just at the number written at the bottom of the observer’s form, which as we now know, would more than likely have been different had someone else observed the lesson. Secondly; the ridiculous educational fads (the mini plenary, VAK learning to name 2) that focussed far more on performance than it ever did on learning. Finally, the lure of Ofsted on the horizon and trying to second guess “what they want.” Whilst a lot of credit must go to Ofsted, who have stated again and again that they have no preferred method of teaching, there are many school leaders who are still justifiably anxious about those all-important two days.

Fortunately, thanks to many excellent books and publications, e.g. The Sutton Trust report into what makes great teaching, Make Every Lesson Count and The Principles of Instruction, the things that have the highest impact on student learning are summarised and they do not include learning styles or mini plenaries. This does make the task of seeing the learning of the students easier but it does however give a sharper focus on the things that could be making the difference rather than proxies for learning. This is why I am very pleased the school has edited its proforma for learning walks to fit the framework described in Make Every Lesson Count.

What have we done as a Science department? We have delivered CPD in my department about what are the elements that underpin good teaching. We ensure faculty meetings focus on these, for example how would we explain/model Newton’s three laws of motion. We have changed how we conduct learning walks, allowing teachers to say which lesson and what element of that lesson they would like observed, encouraging teachers to pick classes or topics that they struggle teaching, where the feedback from an observer will have the highest leverage. Following every learning walk the teachers can be given a small action step that can be carried out within a week and will significantly improve their practice. For this system to work teachers have got to trust the observer and not feel any threat, only then will you get to have an honest dialogue about areas that they can develop.