How one teaches often feels like a very personal thing. I believe this is primarily due to a lack of structured teacher training across the world. Teachers normally get a year or two of training at the very beginning of their career, mostly in basic classroom management, organisation, and survival. They are then thrown into a classroom with minimal support to work out the craft for themselves over the first few years. This leads to individual teachers crafting a very personal way of functioning and surviving the school day.

Some teachers develop a love for participating directly with students to negotiate learning, while some develop a comfort for having more direct control of the room with strict rules and guidelines to help get them through the day. The vast majority of teachers make these decisions based on gut feeling and personal preference rather than any reading or research into what has been proven as best practice.

Knowing that one’s approach is different to one’s colleagues is a norm and so leads teachers to not want to tread on one another’s toes and also often feel threatened by any teaching suggestions as they mean a break in one’s very personal routines and habits.

To add to this, over a career, teachers experience ad-hoc PLD and training and so rarely have shared the same development journey. This further compounds the individual nature of any teacher’s daily classroom habits and choices. Over time, teachers lack shared training experiences and so have less shared understanding of what works and what doesn’t to drive professional dialogue. This makes many teachers shy to discuss teaching through a combination of professional courtesy and lack of conviction to argue for one approach over another.

However, most teachers are aware that a variety in pedagogy is key to serving the most students but many admit that as the years go by, teachers tend to reduce their classroom experience to only 2 or 3 activity types. The longer they go without trying new things, the more risky a new idea seems.

A pedagogical reflection tool.

A few posts ago, I wrote about a pedagogical framework to help teachers consider types of learning activity and how important it was that getting a balance between these categories was key to successful learning. The four major categories were:

• Exercise (Core knowledge and skills)
• Application (of knowledge and skills)
• Open (larger scale work – application of multiple skills and knowledge – i.e. projects)
• Unfamiliar (Puzzle, Wonderings, new contexts)

Adding another layer to each of these categories was the consideration of if they were individual or group tasks. All four categories of activity could be planned for either one or a group of students. This created 4 quarter quadrants of the framework.

To help teachers in my school reflect on pedagogy and which quadrant/s their students spent most of their week inside, I produced this classroom pedagogy balancing tool for a team of teachers to use to reflect on how a topic in any discipline could be tackled in at least 16 different activities. In the framework tool, I added math examples to help teachers understand the type of activity differences but any topic from any discipline can be learned through an activity within any quadrant.

By sharing or inventing activities to match the quadrant, teachers hopefully become more aware of the importance each quadrant has to types of thinking and socialising. The strategic targeting of these skills develops stronger learners who can gain confidence through a shared collective efficacy.

Another thing to reflect on is how choice of pedagogy impact on competencies acquired by learners. The world is increasingly looking for group skills over individual skills. The world is also becoming more complex, which in turn demands more comfort with open and unfamiliar situations. To me this means that where as all the quadrants are important, a decent exposure to the bottom-right quadrant is particularly important but can be rare in high schools due to fixed assessment cultures dominating over learning cultures.

Have a go at the framework challenge to devise 16 approaches to the same topic and take the challenge to your teams.