A Coherent Architecture for Learning

On Thursday 4th October 2012 Canons High School welcomed Alistair Smith (or @alatalite to give him his correct twitter handle) to deliver the keynote speech at our second of five connected whole-staff INSET days. The purpose of this programme is to help the school gear up our Outstanding Pedagogy Project (@CanonsOPP) as we move - hopefully inexorably - towards an outstanding judgment for teaching and learning in the eyes of Ofsted that will validate the strengths we know the school, our staff and students possess. The theme of this particular session was the 'why' of outstanding pedagogy: the raison d'être of CanonsOPP and hopefully, the end of the start of the project.

As I sat listening to Alistair speak I allowed my mind to wander somewhat and I would argue that this is the best compliment I can give to him. When I have to listen hard to a keynote, it is usually because I have to tune in to find common cause with it's key precepts. On the other hand, when I feel that the speaker is completely on my wavelength I tend to hook in to a single concept that latches on to my core beliefs and then let it infuse me. I suppose it's a bit like listening to music that resonates; it transports you and there's usually very little that you can do to stop it. Judging from the conversations that I had with a number of colleagues later that day, I suspect that I wasn't the only one who was transported. And this week I have come across three colleagues who have taken an idea that came from his talk and made it happen in their classrooms (see above). In order to do this I imagine that they must have spent at least some of his speech making mental, or even physical, notes and to-do lists as he was communicating with them. I must remember this when my A-Level students drift away, and hope it is for similar reasons!!!

Anyway, I digress. I wanted to outline the nugget that set me off thinking and it was this. Alistair talked about a "coherent architecture for learning". I knew that this was coming, as he had been in the school a week before to talk with members of SLT and our Pedagogy Leaders about what we wanted from him in his talk. The one word that we thought was most important was the word 'coherent'; the sense that staff, students and their parents would see the links between learning across their different classrooms, subjects and teachers. But as I was listening to Alistair speak I realised that it was the rest of the phrase that struck me most: "an architecture for learning". I became fully aware that we have been engaged in a creative activity in its broadest sense, and that the end result of the process could be either a structure "built on sand" or one designed to last as a result of its solid foundations. We could be creating something to provide "shelter from the storm" for learners or a leaky and breezy shed of a structure. We have it within our collective powers to design a "hideous carbuncle" of a building or a thing of beauty to be admired by its inhabitants and neighbours in equal measure.

In other words that the Canons Pedagogy that we have been working on for three years now is about to leave the world of drafting board, design template and blueprint in order to become a real thing, and that Alistair was here to help us "turn the first sod" or, as the first day of the construction of a new edifice is commonly called, to help us achieve something "groundbreaking". Our aim, through our work as co-architects, has been to create something that is strong, is fit for purpose and is beautiful.

The most fundamental part of our "architecture for learning" is the main reason Alistair was with us in the first place, his Accelerated Learning Cycle which we (our CanonsOPP volunteer teacher group) have worked on for more than a year, have presented with (not to) staff and have built into our new lesson planning mechanism (although we know it is so much more than that). In short, it is the foundations of our pedagogic structure on which all else rests: the aspect of the architecture that provides us with strength. It is not intended to be a straitjacket and has been warmly received by teachers as something that they 'know' is the right thing to do, is strongly related to their practice at its best and puts learning at the heart of teacher planning.

The main thrust of the second half of the day was in getting groups of teachers together in cross-faculty groups to plan a learning cycle on a topic that could be related to subjects or delivered as a PSHCE lesson (I loved working on the 'Legacy of the Olympics' with a Chemistry and a French teacher that ended up being entirely about the political choices involved in spending more than £10 billion pounds). The emphasis was on the process of using the Accelerated Learning Cycle, not on the product of the lesson (or series of lessons) that emerged - although many colleagues liked theirs. The session finished with a peer evaluation of the process that was overwhelmingly positive. Much will remain to be done to keep these foundations strong in order for them to be built upon: the Canons Pedagogy is not a single architectural project after all. But the most positive thing to emerge from the day for me was that although staff were asking for more time and more support to be able to fully implement it, they were adamant that it was the right thing for the school to be doing.

The second part of our Canons Pedagogy, the part that ensures our collective learning is one that is fit for moral, cultural, social and even spiritual (in its broadest sense) purposes are outlined on the slide Alistair delivered shown here. These 'learning themes' are not drawn from the PLTS or BLP or any other pre-packaged learning to learn programme. Instead they are designed to reflect specific Canons contextual issues, linking closely with our school ethos as viewed by our teachers, students and parents. These have been the final piece of the jigsaw to be introduced to teachers and will form the basis of our new hybrid model of professional development that brings together the ideas of Dylan Wiliam's Teacher Learning Communities and David Hargreaves' Joint Practice Development. Teachers will choose their TLC focus and choose their JPD partners in a model that encourages autonomy (thanks Iesha) and interdependence between the incredibly able and focused professionals that populate our staffroom.

The final element of the "architecture for learning" that we call the Canons Pedagogy is the CHS8 of techniques that our Pedagogy Leaders presented on our June INSET day (I have blogged about this elsewhere), and that we will invest time and energy in over the coming years so that they become embedded in a number of classrooms, though not necessarily all as a core tenet of our work is that there is no correct way for teachers to teach. These techniques include some designed to aid areas as diverse as assessment (SOLO taxonomy), group work (Forum Theatre) and home learning (Flipped Classroom), but all are rooted in the principals shown above. Similarly all have been linked to an aspect of the Accelerated Learning Cycle, perhaps a touch arbitrarily but primarily done to ensure a sense of coherence. It is this coherence, ensuring that the fixtures and fittings of learning are in keeping with the structure without putting undue stress on the foundations, that we think ensures that our Canons Pedagogy will be a thing of beauty when it has been fully established.

I have no doubt that this has been one of the least obviously outward-facing blogposts on Canons Broadside, but as our "coherent architecture for learning" has finally fully left the drawing board I wonder whether or not it has a relevance beyond our own four walls. We have no belief that the Canons Pedagogy can act as a blueprint for other schools (unlike the DfE we appreciate that physical and metaphysical architecture needs to be context-specific), but our journey through the stages of the design and building process may well be of interest to others, for our failures as much as for our successes. The challenge I would make of any non-Canons teachers and school leaders reading this is "what does your coherent architecture for learning look like?" And if you can't answer that question maybe, just maybe, it is time for you to go back to the drawing board and begin the process of finding out.

 

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Practitioner-Led INSET

As part of our drive to build capacity towards Teaching School status Canons hired 6 Pedagogy Leaders from across the staff to put rocket boosters onto our existing Outstanding Pedagogy Project (OPP as in our twitter handle). The project, as I have blogged about previously is to capture the art, craft and science of effective teaching as it best suits the context of our school community, students and teachers in order to gather the strands into a Canons Pedagogy or house style of teaching and learning.

The four-term role of the Ped Leaders, as we have come to call them, was to bring two years of work to a conclusion and identify the core ethos, structures and techniques of the Canons Pedagogy, to share these with staff and students and to create a sustained (and sustainable) programme for a full implementation through collaborative pedagogic development practices. Most of all, their job has been - and continues to be - to engage and enthuse staff in this process, to retain a bottom-up focus and to find the surplus of excellent practice rather than start from an assumption that teachers' classroom practice is a broken thing in need of a quick fix.

We are now at the end of the first full term of their work and the results have been magnificent. The team of Ped Leaders is made up of two Heads of Department, an AST, a TLR holder and two NQTs covering five different subject areas and they have attacked their brief with relish, skill and sensitivity. I'll leave @renniesherrie to share with you how they have developed over the term, but this post is focused on their first major public challenge; to plan and deliver an INSET day to introduce the core principles underpinning their Canons Pedagogy.

Their first significant task in the process was to relegate the Deputy Head (me) and Assistant Head (@renniesherrie) to the role of 'guides on the side' and to ignore our guidance on how they should do the day completely. I say 'relegate' but the truth is we were delighted at their chutzpah and sense of adventure (or risk as @alatalite might have it). They trashed everything about the way in which INSET days are normally done (not in the Hall, no Head or SLT introduction, a welcome breakfast, a full programme, Subway lunch, etc, etc) and they invited their SLT leads to get involved purely to assign to us admin tasks to support their vision of the day (our watchword became "what the Ped Leaders want, the Ped Leaders get").

And their product? The Lazy Teacher's INSET day (we have apologised in person to @lazyteacher and now hope that the copyrighting laws aren't too tough). The aim was to introduce the overarching structure of the Canons Pedagogy - essentially the Accelerated Learning Cycle - and to showcase a range of techniques to exemplify each phase of the cycle through pedagogy with our teachers as learners. Their determination to avoid a powerpointed lecture approach and to model the techniques and structure we were advocating throughout the day was a testament to their concern that the actual classroom be the focus of the INSET.

The only problem with this approach was that it made the Ped Leaders the teachers of their peers, and as the day approached some of them began to express concern that it might all fall flat and that colleagues might not participate as learners, particularly in the highly active sessions. This was where @renniesherrie and I were able to feel a real sense of participation in the organisation of the day. But, of course, their concerns were unfounded and once the day was upon us they came to realise that engaging and enthusing learners is pretty much a constant whether they are 13 or 31 or twice that age. They were helped by the fact that the cafeteria staff had played a blinder with their full English breakfast that got the staff buzzing from the first moment; a reminder that the little things often make all the difference to large groups of people.

On the other hand though food alone won't mask the faults of a poor INSET day and the real quality was in the sessions themselves. The Ped Leaders, @biomadhatter and myself (I was allowed off the leash as a teacher on the proviso I didn't let them down!!) delivered sessions that really did demonstrate how to get the students working. A typical comment between us was how little we were doing beyond the initial planning and our in-session facilitating (apologies but I had to use the F word) and how hard our 'students' were working - a fact that was not lost on the teachers we exhausted that day. At least three members of staff reported that this was the first INSET day where they had not looked at a clock or watch for the entire day.

At the end of the INSET day the six Ped Leaders, @renniesherrie and I got into taxis to Kings Cross to head up to the Cramlington Learning Village festival. The first task was to read the evaluations (written on cups in free form style as requested by the Ped Leaders) as we crushed a cup in the wait for the train. Watching the faces of our colleagues as comments like "the best INSET ever", and "can we get started now", and "so inspired", and variations on that theme emerged was truly one of the most pleasurable parts of my career, but it was the way that they immediately began buzzing about "what next?" that really flabbergasted me. And beyond that still, the way that they absorbed the phenomenal school that is Cramlington by being inspired by it but not overwhelmed by it was a joy to behold.

But of course INSET days have no meaning if they have no impact beyond the feelgood vibe of the day, however welcome that is. It's too soon to fully evaluate at the moment, but it is clear from discussions with key departments and individual teachers that the Accelerated Learning Cycle is liked and understood, that Flipped Learning has enthused many, and today I have worked with the RE department to apply SOLO to their lesson planning processes. In the meantime the only people in the school who are less than content with the measures of impact of the INSET day are the Ped Leaders themselves, and they have once again sidelined their SLT 'guides' to prepare the next phase of staff engagement in pedagogy. I'd wish them good luck in this, but they don't need it. What they need is for me and my SLT colleagues to stand back, let them loose, support them when needed and watch them as they change the nature of teaching and learning at Canons in a way which exceeds outstanding because it is practitioner-led to its core.

 

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