Description: 

How can we use lesson observations to enhance teacher instruction? Some significant progress is occurring in schools, with a real impact. When applied effectively, lesson observations can be a valuable tool for improving classroom practice rather than hindering it through high-quality feedback. In this short 90-minute session, Costa and Lisa will share their insights into strategies that truly influence the provision of feedback following a lesson observation, fostering reflection and critical thinking. By attending the session, you will gain practical tips that you can implement in your schools to shift away from regarding lesson observations as isolated, one-off events.

About Costa Constantinou:

Costa is a passionate and driven educator with over 16 years’ of experience teaching in London and international schools. He is also a director of Veema Education. With his many years in the classroom and at leadership level, Costa understands first-hand the needs and priorities of today’s schools, not least the necessity of every educationalist to take responsibility for their learning. This is a philosophy he communicates through national and international keynote speeches. It is also very much part of the workshops he leads on improving teaching, learning and school leadership, and the implementation and effective management of change. To enable schools to better evaluate the impact of their professional development training, Costa has developed Veema’s unique four-step CPD model — ‘Consult, Tailor, Deliver, Reflect’. Costa is particularly adept at using collaboration to create the conditions for effective leadership and to encourage the attainment of ambitious educational goals. Throughout his career, he has led successful teams and been proactive in school improvement initiatives. Known for the warmth, humanity, honesty and fun he brings to every educational situation, Costa is motivated by a desire to create the best possible opportunities for the young people in his care so they come to recognise their own potential and are inspired to achieve it. The strategies he has developed to boost student progression and increase student attainment have been formally recognised by Ofsted.

About Lisa Jane Ashes:

Lisa believes that education is about developing minds for the future. She also believes that many schools fall short of producing a fully rounded end product’ because they fail to coordinate learning across their departments. She has therefore made it her mission to transform how teachers think about the curriculum so that they can begin to deliver a whole school approach to education. To achieve this, she helps teachers develop personally and professionally by empowering them to collaborate with others within and outside their particular department. In Lisa’s most recent book, ‘Teacher in the Cupboard,’ she helps teachers examine their approaches to the many problems educators face. Tried and tested solutions to myriad issues are examined from all perspectives. This book provides a mindset to facing problems and is a human approach that can be adopted to solve them. Lisa’s first book ‘Manglish’, considers how English and Maths can be creatively brought together to improve literacy and numeracy throughout the school, providing practical ideas and strategies. Lisa is passionate about writing and appears in many teaching and learning publications such as: ‘There Is Another Way and ‘Don’t Change the light bulbs — A Compendium of Expertise from the UK’s most switched-on Educators’. She has also written many articles to help reflect on her work in education and share her evolving ideas as she goes. Lisa takes her message of curriculum collaboration around the world. Through her work with the charity ‘Reach Out to Schools,’ Lisa has developed teams in Ghana and Nepal where she uses her strategies to help create a culture of continual self-improvement among the country’s teachers.