Teaching and learning are at the forefront of everyone’s minds, as the new inspection framework is now firmly in place. With managers and teachers wondering what the delivery of T-Levels will mean for teaching practice, here are ten tips for ensuring delivering great teaching in the current regulatory climate.
- Get qualified and regularly update your teaching practice. Taking part in annual professional updating with current employers and engaging in good quality CPD activity will help you to be the ‘Dual Professional’ that the sector requires.
- Make sure that you design and sequence your curriculum delivery in a way that clearly builds learners’ knowledge, skills and behaviours over time towards challenging curricular goals.
- Use teaching techniques that help learners commit new learning to long term memory – regular reviews, self-testing, use of memory cues and ‘memorable teaching’ all help in committing new concepts to learners’ long-term memory.
- Be explicit when teaching skills – aim for automaticity and transfer. I.e. getting learners to a point where they can practise skills fluently and where they can apply and adapt new skills to different contexts.
- Assess your learners regularly and be responsive to their starting points and needs.
- Give good quality feedback regularly – both verbally and in writing. Make sure learners understand what they are doing well and what they need to do to improve further. And as important, make sure that learners are given plenty of opportunities to act on this feedback to improve.
- Develop independence, autonomy and resilience in your learners. For example, get them to write their own targets in their ILP which they own and are accountable for. If you are a Learning Support Assistant or mentor, can you rephrase a difficult question or put a concept in a different way which helps a learner overcome a learning barrier for themselves?
- Ensure that learners and apprentices gain from high-quality work experience and on-the-job training. Help them to see how theory (knowledge) relates to practice (skills) and that they get the opportunity to reflect on how they are developing their behaviours and skills through such settings.
- Focus on the wider development of the learner or apprentice beyond the qualification. How are you helping them to develop as citizens and gain the powerful knowledge that they need to be successful lifelong learners.
- Coming back to point 1, develop your ability as a teacher to explain and show difficult concepts, theories and skills. The fundamental truth of any good lesson is – have the students understood what is being taught?
For further reading on this topic, take a look at the Further Education and Skills Inspection Handbook from Ofsted. You may also like my blog Are your Quality Improvement Plans measuring the right things?