Tomsett This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teachers

(and what we can learn from them)
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78583-757-9
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Foreword by Professor Rob Coe Through a set of in-depth case studies, This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teachers (and what we can learn from them) by John Tomsett dissects the complex and beautiful art of classroom teaching. Covering a range of school types, social contexts, pupil ages and subjects, it brings to life how nine outstanding primary teachers engage, inspire, nurture and motivate their pupils. Each detailed vignette, based on observing the teachers teach, and discussions with them, their colleagues and pupils, brings the qualities of truly great teachers to life. Each teacher is unique in the way they teach and in how they talk about teaching. But they also have some common behaviours and attitudes that make them truly great, which John draws together, summarising what we can learn from their unbridled enthusiasm, skill and dedication to giving their pupils the very best foundation for a bright future. Essential reading for all primary school teachers, school leaders, teacher trainers and education researchers.

John Tomsett has been a teacher since 1988 and a head teacher since 2003. He is head teacher at Huntington School, York. Tomsett writes a blog called 'This much I know ...' and is a regular contributor to the TES. He co-founded The Headteachers' Roundtable think tank and is a popular speaker on school leadership. He is determined to remain a classroom teacher, despite the demands of headship, and believes that developing truly great teaching is the main responsibility of all head teachers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tomsett, John

Leseproben

Introduction

The genesis of this book, and its accompanying title (This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers), is rooted in a conversation with Professor Rob Coe. At the national researchED conference in September 2024, I had listened to Rob and his colleague, Dr Raj Chande, talk about their quest to establish a single value-added progress score for a teacher’s pupils, to determine that teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom.

What Rob and Raj want to do is find a reliable, easily accessible metric to assess teacher quality. In 2014 I went to Washington DC with Rob and several others, including luminaries like Professor Lee Elliot Major, to launch the Sutton Trust’s publication, What Makes Great Teaching?, in which Rob et al. defined ‘effective teaching as that which leads to improved pupil achievement using outcomes that matter to their future success.’1 It’s logical, in the light of that sensible definition, to choose one pupil value-added progress score if you are searching for a single metric.

I first met Rob over a decade ago when Alex Quigley, Stuart Kime and I ran a project for the Education Endowment Foundation.2 We spent several afternoons in my office discussing how to set up the project. Rob made my head hurt. He genuinely transformed my professional outlook. He just kept asking the question, ‘How do you know?’ And most times, I couldn’t answer him.

When we were chatting about his single value-added progress score project, I said to Rob that I thought there were other things they might do to determine how to measure teacher quality, rather than pursue a single, numeric pupil progress data point. Rob conceded that I might have a point, but then he asked me, ‘Well, what should we be doing?’

I said that I would think about it. And I have. A lot.

My counter to Rob and Raj’s argument is that being a truly great teacher goes way beyond value-added scores. The characteristics of truly great teachers will, in my experience, result in their pupils making great academic progress. But the impact a truly great teacher can make upon their pupils’ lives is surely measured in myriad ways, beyond the single metric Rob and Raj want to establish.

As you may already have realised, dear reader, the single metric Rob and Raj are pursuing sticks in my craw. Sammy Wright’s remarkable book, Exam Nation, asks, amongst many things, how our education system became so obsessed with the single output measure of pupils’ academic progress.3 Don’t get me wrong, examination success gives young people a choice about how they live their lives; that said, without wanting to provoke cries of ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, surely there are other measures of success which matter just as much, but in different ways. If we pursue a single value-added measure as the only outcome of education that really matters, then we have, perhaps, missed the point. As Bernard Andrews wrote in his provocative essay, ‘How “efficiency” derailed education’, ‘if school encourages and enables students to be brave, kind, wise and so on, and if it does so with prudence, then it is time and money well spent.’4

If Rob and Raj did one thing, they got me thinking … about all the colleagues I worked with over 33 years, and about the hundreds of teachers I have had the privilege of watching teach as a peripatetic consultant since stepping down from headship. In answer to Rob’s question, ‘Well, what should we be doing?’ I have concluded that we should try to ascertain what it is that truly great teachers do that makes them truly great. Consequently, I identified 19 teachers – eight primary and ten secondary colleagues, and a special school colleague – who I think could be described as truly great teachers and constructed a profile for each one of them. In the following pages you will find profiles of the eight primary teachers. The secondary teachers’ profiles can be found in the sister book, This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them). I have included our special school colleague in both books, as the learning from her profile is educative irrespective of phase, making it nine teacher profiles altogether in this book.

When it comes to pupils’ attainment and progress, I too want pupils in the classes of truly great teachers to make brilliant progress and attain amazing examination grades. But any data on pupils’ progress needs triangulating with other evidence. Consequently, to assure you that they are truly great, each teacher profile contains the following elements:

• A conversation with their head teacher/principal (if possible)
• Lesson observation reflections
• Interviews with pupils
• An interview with me
• Testimonials from colleagues, pupils and parents
• A summary of the traits that make them exceptional
• Pupil progress and attainment data

Having been involved in education, in one guise or another, for 54 of my 60 years on earth, I knew I couldn’t include all the tremendous teachers I’ve known in that time. I would have featured more, but even nine is probably too many. So, my sincere apologies to all those truly great teachers I could have included but didn’t, because there just weren’t enough pages to go round.

It wasn’t so hard finding nine truly great teachers – there are thousands of them in our country’s classrooms. The challenge was to persuade them to let me include them in the book. Truly great teachers are a modest lot. They took some convincing to take part. And when a school leader asked me what I meant by a ‘truly great teacher’, I replied: Nothing scientific … a teacher who you think is truly great, who really knows their stuff, who teaches great lessons, day-in, day-out, whose pupils get great outcomes and who is just consistently great in every sense. Consequently, the teachers featured in this book are not intended to be representative of anything. They are merely a small group of truly great teachers I happen to know or who have been recommended to me by people I know and trust. In the words of Sir David Carter, they teach ‘consistently good lessons that are well planned and progress sequentially from the previous lesson.’5 And that’s it.

In the final chapter of this book, I identify the professional behaviours common to the teachers I have featured. I contextualise my conclusions within research findings from Barak Rosenshine.6

Now, I am acutely aware of the problem with labelling anyone a truly great teacher. No teacher is flawless. Any teacher can teach poorly, simply because the essential raw materials of a lesson are flesh and blood, not wood and steel. In every lesson there are literally hundreds of variables, each one of which can make any teacher look anything but truly great. As Chris Husbands so elegantly argues, ‘it’s teaching, not teachers, which matters.’7

That said, if I had focused upon teaching rather than teachers in the book’s title, it would have not represented the content of the book, nor what motivated me to write it. The book is about teachers, and how those teachers teach in a way that means their pupils learn. If the book was entitled, ‘This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teaching’, it would have suggested that it’s about me and what I might think about primary teaching, when the book is about truly great primary teachers and, crucially, what we can learn from them.

Beyond that important semantic nuance, I wanted to stress the humanity of the teaching and learning process. Focusing upon the teachers and what they actually do in the classroom in detail, underlined how teaching and learning is such a messy, joyful, human process. And I wanted, ultimately, to celebrate some of the best teachers I know, as I near the end of my professional career and hand the baton on to the truly great colleagues featured here.

I am both delighted and grateful that Professor Rob Coe agreed to write the foreword to this book. He provides a brilliant, forensic counterpoint to my qualitative approach. It may be that any teacher whose pupils make extraordinary progress, only make that progress because that teacher exhibits the professional behaviours shared by the nine truly great teachers featured here. The behaviours and the progress data are, perhaps, just two sides of the same coin.

Finally, the conversations that form the heart of this book have been genuinely inspiring. Gadamer said that, ‘No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation … a conversation has a spirit of its own, and the language in which it is conducted has a truth of its own so that it allows something to “emerge”which henceforth exists.’8 We live in a world of binary intransigence. So, in the spirit of collaboration, I hope that the conversations you’ll find in...