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To understand great teaching, consider diamonds.

Raw diamonds are unpolished, full of unrecognised potential. But when they’re cut, they’re transformed. They shine. They’re also all different, cut to reflect their inherent qualities. It takes skill and understanding to take an unformed jewel and develop its particular brilliance.

This is how we think about teaching and professional development at Chiltern Learning Trust.

What makes you sparkle

Inspired by the Teacher Development Trust’s work on didagogy, we have looked carefully at the ways in which we understand, talk about and think about teaching, and how we develop teachers.

We brought together some of the most successful teachers in the sector from within our trust, and talked to them about what they believe about great teaching.

This allowed us to brush the dust away from the diamonds so we could see their sparkle - and they didn’t disappoint.

It was very clear, very quickly, that our brilliant teachers didn’t follow one set recipe.

Classrooms are complex systems, and expertise in such systems depends on being a skilled decision maker who exercises high levels of agency, supported by a clear professional identity.

Our teachers had these ingredients in abundance. All that was left to do, then, was to ask them about their decision-making, and we’d have the solution to great teaching.

But when we asked them what they were doing, they didn’t really know. And this difficulty in articulating expertise makes perfect sense.

Acting in the moment

Teachers aren’t making decisions by weighing alternatives in the moment; they are cued by their purpose, mediated by their available repertoire of techniques and the context of the moment, and filtered through their professional identities - their beliefs and values.

If, then, we wanted to understand teacher decision-making, we would need to help the teachers themselves understand it.

To do that, we used the construct of mental models - internal maps of how situations or systems work, underpinned by a sense of purpose that shapes decision-making.

Over the course of nine months, we worked together to construct a framework of core purposes that are fluid and interchangeable, ensuring that anything a teacher does is in the service of one or more of them.

Great teaching - a framework

The framework we created contains the following core purposes, each of which can apply to any moment in a classroom, and often to two or three at the same time:

• Securing, maintaining and regaining student attention
• Communicating meaning
• Driving hard thinking
• Enabling and scaffolding practice and feedback
• Utilising memory
• Checking for understanding

The aim of each is to cover the interactivity of purpose, technique and context that great teachers use - and it explains why a repertoire of techniques alone isn’t enough to develop brilliance.

This is where the wider sector has devoted much of its energy in recent years. Of course, the cognitive science revolution has been a net positive, and extremely helpful in helping us talk about practice.

For example, having the shared understanding of what “cold call” means allows us to talk about what we’re doing in depth.

However, problems arise if we start to believe that the proceduralisation of techniques is what makes great teaching, and expect all teachers to use them identically.

This kind of “teaching by numbers” takes the shine off the diamond - and the professionalism out of teaching.

Of course, early career teachers need structures; they need to develop the language of techniques. But they also need to develop an understanding of context, professional identity and purpose that will cultivate an adaptive mindset from day one.

Without this, they can’t hope to achieve brilliance.

The next frontier

Didagogy is the next frontier of teacher development. It is about co-construction; it’s about surfacing teachers’ understanding and using that to develop together.

Our aim is to implement the framework we have built in a way that enables us to share the work - and the thinking underpinning it - across the sector, via the TDT. This will, we hope, enable schools nationwide to help their teachers understand more about their own teaching, and how to hone their practice further.

Professional development is not about fixing broken techniques; it’s about developing professionals. That’s how we get our diamonds to shine.

Sufian Sadiq is chief talent and transformation officer at Chiltern Learning Trust

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