Teaching Backwards by Andy Griffith

Author:Andy Griffith [Andy Griffith and Mark Burns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845909345
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

4. YOU’LL GATHER MORE ACCURATE FEEDBACK ON LEARNER PROGRESS

Experienced detectives develop a methodology for solving crimes. They may also call on their instinct, developing a professional ‘nose’ for facts that don’t fit and for incongruent behaviours. But they know that hunches alone are not enough. They’re only a guide that spurs them on to unearth the real hard evidence that lies beneath the surface of things. The kind of hard evidence that will stand up in court. The kind of evidence that’s robust enough to convict someone beyond reasonable doubt. The history of policing is littered with cases in which lack of rigour or due diligence allowed guilty people to go free or innocent people to be wrongly convicted. Without diligent sleuthing, good planning, and solid evidence the truth cannot come out.

In our experience, the best teachers don’t go into a classroom hoping for proof. They go in with a clear idea of how they are going to get it. In other words, they plan for it before they start teaching. It’s vitally important for teachers to know how much progress their class is making because it’s increasingly how they are judged. The teacher that derives the best data from a class is deemed, often justifiably, to be a more effective practitioner.

Time and again in our classroom observations, we’ve seen that the most successful teachers teach backwards from the knowledge of what robust proof will look, sound, and feel like. And they ensure that those proofs provide evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the targeted learning is indeed taking place. By thinking, ‘What should learners be able to say or do at this point of the topic to prove their progress?’ they are designing a learning environment based on rigour and clarity.

By thinking and planning in this way, teachers demand that learners clearly demonstrate their learning step by step as they progress through a topic and over an academic year. Outstanding teachers create multiple opportunities to gather quality proofs of progress which enable them to have richer conversations with their learners, and also with colleagues with whom they might happen to share a class. As a result, they are not only able to offer high quality feedback to their learners (for more on feedback see Chapter 6), but also articulate confidently to parents, colleagues, and inspectors exactly where learners currently are in their learning journey, how far they’ve come, and how far there remains for them to go.

In our experience, the best teachers share similar qualities with the finest real and fictional detectives. Using sound strategies, they develop excellent habits for noticing clues and gathering proof. As a result, they are able to find out how well learners are doing as they progress through each lesson, each topic, and over the whole academic year. Their success is based on the fact that they plan which proof-discovering strategies they will use before the teaching starts. These may have to be adjusted based on the feedback that emerges, but they know that pre-planning and flexibility are the essence of teaching backwards.

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