‘Teaching should be a rewarding profession where teachers are empowered and supported to the best creative professionals they can be. The overwhelming body of research finds that the most important factor in improving pupil outcomes is good teaching. Therefore, helping teachers become better is the most important responsibility we have as educational leaders, as it is the best way to help learners fulfil their potential’. Dr T Stobie – Great Teaching Toolkit, Evidence Review June 2020.

Effective teaching and learning is at the heart of what we do at Lydiate Primary and Nursery School. Our supportive ethos and atmosphere, together with a real sense of team work, allows all staff to develop professionally through high quality, relevant CPD and on-going professional dialogue. We use the most pertinent and up to date research to inform our pedagogy, principles and practice. This encourages all teaching staff to reflect in an informed manner about the best strategies to help pupils of Lydiate Primary and Nursery School to learn effectively.

Teaching and Learning strategies are discussed weekly as a staff team. All leaders contribute to and/or spearhead the professional development of staff and regularly evaluate the effectiveness and impact of this training on pupil’s development over the year, using a variety of supportive methods. This includes team teaching, joint planning, on-going professional dialogue between colleagues, sharing the latest good practice and research, providing opportunities to observe peers, and accessing internal and external training opportunities.

As a school, we know that keeping in touch with the latest curriculum developments is extremely important. Of equal importance, we believe, is that we develop a clear, unified vision and understanding of what constitutes high quality teaching and learning. As part of this research, the staff team developed a model policy of effective teaching. We call this our ‘Active Teaching and Learning Policy’. This policy works in conjunction with research we have studied using the ‘Great Teaching Toolkit – Evidence Review, 2020’. This is based on four overarching dimensions, which we use a model for helping pupils learn and remember more. The 4 dimensions are –

1. Understanding the Content
2. Creating a supportive environment
3. Maximising opportunity to learn
4. Activating hard thinking.

The document does not imply that classroom teaching can be reduced to a set of isolated techniques. The Great Teaching toolkit aims to help teachers make better decisions about what they can best do to improve their effectiveness.

‘We know that, as with other kinds of learning, teacher’s professional learning is most effective when the content and activities are targeted and appropriate for the needs and existing capabilities of the learner’. The model can be used to help teachers make more evidence-based, individualised decisions to get the biggest return in enhanced pupil learning’ – GTT – 2020.

As a school, we have recently adopted the 5-a-day teaching approach which builds on the Great Teaching Toolkit. This is research that the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation)

has undertaken.

Supporting every pupil to succeed academically is a significant challenge for teachers and teaching assistants. The EEF’s research evidence suggests there is a set of five core practices that can support all pupils, including those with SEND, to do just that.

The ​‘Five-a-day’ approach allows educators to embed a set of teaching habits that feel manageable in reality. And best of all, these approaches come out of evidence review that looked specifically at the impact on academic progress for pupils with SEND in mainstream settings. EEF 2022

For more information on this research, please download the document links.

The next tab will give more information about how we have used this research and pedagogy to design our curriculum.