Veema Papers

The best teachers recognise and embrace their potential to have a transformative impact on the wider future of the nation, and beyond. By promoting positive values, including tolerance, understanding and inclusion, this sense of moral purpose is the engine that drives the best teachers. It is a privilege to be a teacher, to have the opportunity to impact positively on the lives of so many young people, their families and ultimately their communities. Teachers get to make a difference to the lives of children and young people and improving their life chances and helping them to secure their futures. In this way, teachers have the most important job of all. The greatest of teachers, however, work tirelessly to create a challenging and nurturing environment for their students. Great teaching seems to have less to do with our knowledge and skills than with our attitude towards our students, our subject, and our work. Although, the list below is certainly not all-inclusive, it does narrow down numerous characteristics of great teaching.

When you next doubt yourself or feel exhausted by the job, just remember, YOU make a difference.

1. A great teacher respects students. In a great teacher’s classroom, each person’s ideas and opinions are valued. Students feel safe to express their feelings and learn to respect and listen to others. This teacher creates a welcoming learning environment for all students.
2. A great teacher creates a sense of community and belonging in the classroom. The mutual respect in this teacher’s classroom provides a supportive, collaborative environment. In this small community, there are rules to follow and jobs to be done and each student is aware that he or she is an important, integral part of the group. A great teacher lets students know that they can depend not only on her/him, but also on the entire class.
3. A great teacher is warm, accessible, enthusiastic and caring. This person is approachable, not only to students, but to everyone in the school. This is the teacher to whom students know they can go to with any problems or concerns or even to share a funny story. Great teachers possess good listening skills and take time out of their way too-busy schedules for anyone who needs them. If this teacher is having a bad day, no one ever knows—the teacher leaves personal baggage outside the school doors. These great teachers also need wellbeing support too, so make sure you keep and eye on each other.
4. A great teacher sets high expectations for all students. This teacher realises that the expectations set for students greatly affect their achievement; and knows that students generally give to teachers as much or as little as is expected of them.
5. A great teacher has their own love of learning and inspires students with their passion for education and for the course material. Constantly renewing themselves as a professional on a quest to provide students with the highest quality of education possible.These teachers have no fear of learning new teaching strategies or incorporating new technologies into lessons, and always seem to be the ones who are willing to share what they’ve learned with colleagues.
6. A great teacher is a skilled leader. Different from administrative leaders, effective teachers focus on shared decision-making and teamwork as well as on community building. This great teacher conveys a sense of leadership to students by providing opportunities for each of them to assume leadership roles.
7. A great teacher can “shift-gears” and is flexible when a lesson isn’t working. This teacher assesses teaching throughout the lessons and finds new ways to present material to make sure that every student understands the key concepts.
8. A great teacher collaborates with colleagues on an ongoing basis. Rather than thinking of themselves as weak because they ask for suggestions or help, these teachers view collaboration as a way to learn from a fellow professional. A great teacher uses constructive criticism and advice as an opportunity to grow as an educator.
9. A great teacher maintains professionalism in all areas — from personal appearance to organisational skills and preparedness for each day. Communication skills are exemplary, whether speaking with an administrator, one of the students or a colleague. The respect that the great teacher receives because of their professional manner is obvious to those around them.
10. A great teacher contacts parents with a supportive phone call. Not the phone call to say something has gone wrong or a child has misbehaved, but a call to celebrate achievement, attitude and progression, either academically, emotionally or through showing kindness to others.
11. A great teacher realizes that attending school when they are unwell is not a good idea. As much as we want to be there, make sure the children and young people are safe and secure, spreading your germs is not good for the school. The greatest of teachers will take care of their physical health too in order to protect others from becoming unwell. There are no trophies or medals left in the cabinet for turning up to school sick!
12. A great teacher never stops learning. Every day a learning day.
13. A great teacher also realizes that greatness means having a bad day and that you cannot be 100% brilliant or great all of the time. However, working towards greatness as much as you can is what others will see and value in you. You are not a robot, you are a human being and great human beings have ‘off’ days too. Knowing when things haven’t quite gone to plan is what makes a great teacher a reflective practitioner.
14. Great teachers are collaborators, communicators and creative artists. Sharing your work and skills is as important as putting them into practice. Spread your greatness and in return you will receive thought provoking ideas back from others.

Whilst teaching is a gift that seems to come quite naturally for some, others have to work overtime to achieve great teacher status. Yet the payoff is enormous — for both you and your students. Imagine students thinking of you when they remember that great teacher they had in school or college! YOU can change the future with being a great teacher.

Nina Jackson

Teaching and Learning Consultant, Author and Keynote Speaker

Great CPD programmes inspire you to put into practice what you learn so you become an even better teacher. But effective CPD doesn’t depend on how long you spend listening or engaging in activity. Instead, it’s about the ongoing commitment you make as a school to do things differently.

Here are 8 reasons why CPD is so important:

1. Effective teacher CPD has a direct and measurable impact on student achievement. The Sutton Trust says students learn 40% more when taught by an excellent performer.
2. Good CPD increases staff morale, recruitment and retention. It also empowers staff to grow as pedagogical classroom practitioners.
3. CPD must be based on the latest and most reliable research to ensure you are delivering best practice in your classroom.
4. CPD is about more than just performance management. It creates much more effective teachers who can profoundly affect student outcomes for the better.
5. Great CPD not only grows great leaders but also enables them to coach talented individuals so they become increasingly expert teaching practitioners.
6. Choosing the right CPD will deliver the greatest benefits and value for money, which makes it crucial you select programmes that meet your school’s real needs.
7. Celebrating successes in Continuous Professional Development will create an even more positive experience for all involved.
8. Failing to evaluate CPD means you won’t know what works.

Costa Constantinou (BA, MA, PGCE)

Director of Educational Services

“But… I don’t know how to revise…” Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s a common phrase we hear from our students when it comes to exam prep. It can also serve as a reminder that it is vital we consider not just the content of what we teach, but also how students learn this material. As Dr. John Dunlosky points out in his article ‘Strengthening the student toolbox- study strategies to boost learning’, teaching students how to study is just as important as teaching them the content. Exploring and demonstrating effective learning strategies with students is crucial if we are going to train them to move away from unhelpful practices like last minute ‘cramming’ sessions, caffeine-fueled all-nighters and the highlighting of everything on a worksheet or textbook meaning the re-reading of it almost in its entirety.

Unfortunately, there are no magic tricks I can teach pupils for retaining information for an exam (as much as I would love there to be). Learning is achieved through hard work and continuous effortful practice. However, there are some very useful techniques and tips I would encourage. Strengthening the retrieval capacity of our students is essential and if we manage to store information into longterm memory, we are able to retrieve it again and again and again.

Working with my own pupils as well as planning and delivering the student Brain Booster masterclass workshops I deliver for Veema Education has meant I have developed a deep interest in neuroscience and the science of learning. However, what I feel is sometimes missing from the research papers are simple, practical revision strategies we as teachers can adopt to enable our learners to maximise the impact of their revision. So what follows is a list of the ones that I have found to really effective:

Retrieval practice is one of the most effective ways of learning that leads to fluency. Trying to recall something from memory requires mental strain and effort, which is why low stake-testing rather than simply reading, highlighting and re-reading information is more effective. When reading text from a textbook or worksheet have pupils answer a series of questions to test their knowledge and understanding from memory. These can be questions that have been prepared earlier or questions that you get students to prepare themselves. Knowing that students are about to test each other can be a wonderful engagement tool! To take this a step further, include some more challenging and higher order thinking questions that encourage them to think about how this new learning relates to previous information they have learnt in the past–whether this being yesterday’s lesson or something from last term.

Graphic Organisers such as mind maps, spider maps, sequential thinking and Venn diagrams should be used as much as possible for students to show their thinking and understanding of key ideas and topics from memory. When learning, students need to be active and graphic organisers are a fantastic way of reconstructing information they have been exposed to whilst making useful links and connections to what they already know.

Flashcards are a common resource students use when revising but research tells us that around 30% of people do not use flashcards to self-test (Hartwig and Dunlosky, 2012). This this is real shame as there are great ways flashcards can be used to test knowledge and understanding and memory. For example, you can train students to create flashcards in the following way:

• Write a concept or key term at the front of the flashcard and at the back get students to write down their answer. This can then be checked with the original answer to see how well they have done. This is an effective way of selfquizzing how much you know and where the gaps might be.
• While reading information, highlight key words, concepts, theories and at the same time translate this information to a set of flashcards, which can then be used for self-testing purposes.
• Combine writing with a visual illustration. Students can then test themselves by explaining this in more detail at the back of the flashcard.

One thing I would say with flashcards (and I’ve told this to my students many a time) is be weary of totally dropping from the pack the ones that you feel you are confident with. You should aim to revisit material as often as you can especially in the build-up to exams.

Cornell Note taking. I love the Cornell note taking system and many of my GCSE and A-level students did too. This is an excellent way of getting students to think metacognitively (McCabe 2001), asking questions, noting key terms, and summarising the content being revised at the end of a lesson or during independent study. This method enables students to self-test what they have covered in the lesson as well as piece together previously learnt information. You can download a guide I produced last year of how to use this and it’s a definitely worth exploring with students.

Spacing out your learning and revisiting material as often as possible is so important for embedding. This is one reason why I feel we constantly need to expose students to information they have previously learnt either in the lesson or through homework, mixing up material from different units in class tests or assessments if they are going to hang onto the knowledge they gain.

The key here to effective revision is not the hours of cramming you do in the final few weeks or days before the exam but regular, focused, shorter sessions with regular brain breaks. Cedepa et al (2008) in their research on spacing effects in learning show that the optimal intervals for retaining information between study sessions for say one week should be between one or two days, six months three weeks and 1 year every four weeks. I often put it to my students as ‘the little and often’ approach. Daily lowstakes testing, weekly reviews and cumulative testing is so important for helping students store information into longterm memory.

Past questions. Students need to practice different examination questions, over and over, well-spaced over time, rather than massed practice of the same problem type (and without looking at any notes). Also, the effect of exploring worked examples or exam answers, as well as writing their own, helps students process, practice and refine their revision to meet the parameters of exam success.

The reason many of the following techniques work so well is that they encourage learners to be active agents in their learning, They need to think hard about the information they are faced with. Learning that feels difficult embeds knowledge into memory better compared to learning that feels easy, which soon disappears–hence why we need to train students to avoid passive, superficial and time consuming techniques.

Preparing students for exams is never easy, and if we are going to teach students to be independent learners than we really do need to give some further thought into guiding students on how to revise, rather than simply telling them they should do this or focusing merely on subject content.

Costa Constantinou (BA, MA, PGCE)

Director of Educational Services

This year has again seen a wide variety of reports and case reviews published both in the UK and internationally all identifying the missed opportunities to keep children safe and therefore putting them at risk of abuse or neglect. The children’s commissioner (UK) issued a recent report (July 2017) stating that there are currently about 11 million children in the UK and of those approximately 36% (c4 million) are vulnerable. I would however argue that in our technology led world that all 11 million are vulnerable, as 95% of children now have home access to the internet and a third of 3-4 year olds regularly use it. Do we as adults really know how to keep them safe? Do we as adults put this high enough on our agenda in our ever-demanding world? Do we allocate enough time to ensuring that our children are taught how to take responsibility for keeping themselves safe? Do adults educate themselves to be able to educate the children?

What is “known”

Children are kept safe or put at risk through the action of other adults or children, but in over 90% of all child protection cases the perpetrator is a person that is known to the child, and this in today’s world is where the first of the difficulties arises. Is our definition of “known” a 21st century definition, or one based on our own personal 20th century experience? How many children have a ‘friend’ or follow a person or celebrity that they don’t physically know, but are making themselves known to, this changes significantly the concept of “known”. Just today in the news another case has gone to court where a 46-year-old male pretended to be a 14 year old boy. Friends made online may not be who they say they are and this becomes an increasing difficult concept for young children to understand. Have we as parents, carers and educators moved enough away from the notion of stranger danger to fully understand how to support our children to keep themselves safe. Children need to share in the responsibility to keep themselves safe as we are no longer simultaneously viewing the same material they are. And what about the providers? What is their responsibility? There was a significant time lapse between snap chat launching snap map and it hitting the news alerting parents and schools to the feature that had undoubtedly already allowed many children to be tracked and a picture built up of their daily movements. The digital economy act 2017 will lead to a code of practice for social media providers and their need to respond to in appropriate use of their services, but what about the here and now.

Keeping pace

The landscape around safeguarding and child protection continually evolves as does the legislation and policy. We have seen this week the publication of new legal guidance to ensure that prosecutors treat online hate crimes with the same severity as they would those committed face to face. The terms grooming and child sexual exploitation although not new in practice become prevalent in UK legislation and policy from 2009. Peer on Peer abuse although not new has had its priority increased through the high-profile cases that have been reported with fatal consequences. In the NSPCC’s child bullying report 2016 Cyber bullying was at the top of all the concerns of parents, however in reality still accounts for significantly less instances of bullying than face to face bullying, the biggest difference however is that young people can’t leave it at the door. The reason often given for not reporting this early is the fear of the removal of their technology and therefore feeling punished. Group chat has become an increasing popular medium with many young people running several simultaneously thus creating another route to exposing children to the emotional vulnerability of feeling left out, and creating an unmet need.

Irrespective of your own technical skills; with neologisms like “sexting” appearing with increasing frequency it is impossible for most adults to keep pace with their children, creating an added area of concern for parents that they are far from familiar with. Children need support and guidance in how to remain positive with their online presence and how to keep themselves safe. Do we really allocate the correct proportion of curriculum time to educating our parents and children in how to do this in our digital age. How many of our stake holders know the law about sexting? How many young people know that by receiving an indecent image of another young person they are committing a sexual offence, that could potential place them at risk of prosecution. It takes a matter of minutes for an embarrassing moment to be shared round a school but these minutes can affect the life of a vulnerable young person.

Changing behaviours and habits

Children and young people love technology and Ofcom commissioned a three year tracking report from 2013 to 2015 that looked at the change in use and behavior of young people in relation to their media habits. It was clear that younger children see the internet as a form of entertainment, however as they grow older the social possibilities become key and the opportunities to build social capital are presented. Children in the 12-16 age group are possibly the most vulnerable; as they are in the transition from being a dependent child to being an independent adult. This progression is not linear and during this time the increased vulnerability is heightened by their exposure to change, change in school, change in family make up, change in friendship groups, change in support network and their own emerging sexuality. All young people are emotionally vulnerable by the nature of their place in this transitional phase. This vulnerability often highlights the key issue with any safeguarding situation exposing an unmet need. The report identified that Live streaming is highly appealing to children and young people as it presents the chance for them to be a creator, a presenter and to be seen by a potentially huge audience. Most young people are comfortable communicating and sharing online so it is understandable that they may use the internet to explore sex and relationships. This may be natural but there are some very real risks.

What next?

1. Educate our children and young people, allocate a wider proportion of the curriculum time to exploring the impact and use of digital platforms.
2. Educate our parents, provide a real parenting in the digital world programme.
3. Educate our teachers, provide time for quality CPD focused on this need, not just ticking the safeguarding box of the annual update.

Karen Bell

Safeguarding Consultant

Veema Education

One of the greatest influences on student outcomes is by improving both teaching and learning through effective teacher CPD. Yet few schools evaluate its impact adequately, or even at all. Unless you do so, it is difficult to know to what extent a CPD programme has benefited a school or offered value for money.

The following initial framework will help you go about evaluating CPD:

1. Decide what you want from a CPD programme. If you don’t have set expectations for changing teacher behaviour or other headline objectives, you will never know how successful the programme has been.
2. Determine the tools and criteria you will use to assess progress. These should measure the difference that the CPD programme makes to teacher practice and student outcomes, rather than just evaluate the CPD activity itself. You may be already collecting relevant metrics. If not, you will have to start from scratch.
3. Employ a range of quantitative and qualitative measures, which could be collected by, for example, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, observations, feedback sheets and reflection logs. This will give you holistic view of any changes that are happening.
4. Apply these tools over an extended period. Research shows that most CPD evaluations are based on participants’ reactions immediately or soon after the CPD programme is finished. As a result, assessment is generally brief, subjective and difficult to interpret. So don’t simply tack evaluation to the end of your CPD programme as an add-on.
5. Make evaluation a positive experience. Unfortunately, all too often it is seen as highlighting failure and undesirable outcomes rather than a necessary requirement for ensuring improvement is appropriately targeted and on-going.
6. Take CPD evaluation seriously. Don’t see it as some tickbox exercise to appease governors, inspectors and other external stakeholders. Properly embrace it as a means to develop pupil learning and the quality of teaching in your school.
7. Don’t make CPD evaluation burdensome. With the right training, a practical and collaborative approach, and the use of appropriately rigorous tools, CPD evaluation can be surprisingly straightforward.
8. Involve everyone who will participate in the evaluation process from the start. CPD evaluations should not be left solely to members of the senior team to impose on others.

CPD evaluation is an often neglected step because it is perceived as challenging. And yes, it does require longterm commitment and planning. However, to ensure that your school and its pupils gain maximum benefit from any professional development programme, assessment of training is not a nicety, but a necessity.

If you struggle to measure CPD effectively, seeking advice and guidance is imperative, because only then can you create the long-term training programmes that are so vital to your school’s development.

Costa Constantinou (BA, MA, PGCE)

Director of Educational Services