Toxic Schools and how to avoid running them – ResearchED, 9th Sept 2017

Here’s the slides from David Weston’s talk at ResearchED London, held at Chobham Academy on Saturday, 9th September, 2017.

“Remember, the key thing to remember today is not to let all the ideas come home from the conference and start rotting away in your notebook”.

 

Hirsch tells us that cultural literacy is key. I hope you all understand the deep significance of the picture here. 😉

 

Link for the following two slides: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mkraft/files/kraft_papay_-_prof_env_teacher_development_eepa_full.pdf

These are the six factors that are correlated with whether teachers improve, year-by-year. The darker-coloured factors are more strongly correlated. Notice that cultural and safety factors tend to be stronger than operational ones (as much as I do love talking about professional development procedures!)

Link for this second study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mkraft/files/johnson_kraft_papay_teacher_working_conditions_final.pdf

Darker coloured factors are more strongly correlated.

Link for Robinson study: http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/series/2515/60170

If we’re going to overcome cultural and interpersonal issues then we do need to explore better communication.

I’ve written more about the following in this blogpost including several tips on how to use this in conversation.

We’re looking for high quality conversation so that it allows differing ideas to be discussed, not hidden… and explored, not left to fester.

What the best schools we see are doing: lots of co-creation of school-level and team-level planning.

As ever, curriculum underpins everything. We need to think carefully about the sequence of learning, of assessment, of ideas. This generated coherence in teaching, coherence in teams, and shared, clear goals. Don’t think about lesson plans any more, think about longer schemes of learning and how each concept/skill/idea threads through it (I’m calling them concept arcs here).

The Chartered Institute of Professional Development carried out a Rapid Evidence Review (similar to a systematic review) to identify what works and what doesn’t in performance management and appraisal. Find more in our recent blog, here.

 

I showed this short video about what the Teacher Development Trust does…

…and ran out of time to explain how our schools are reducing toxicity with our help. Find out more about our audits, our training/events, our membership.

Please do contact me/us with any questions!