Our Six Principles

This blog has been brewing for a while. Pretty much a year in fact. The genesis was my visit to the brilliant Forest Gate Community School in November 2023. Several things stuck with with me following my conversation with inspirational executive headteacher Thahmina Begum, but one key takeaway was the “playbooks” the school was using for teaching and leadership.

At Durrington we’ve been using our six principles of challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, questioning and feedback to codify great teaching for more than a decade. They are a special feature of our school. However, Forest Gate’s playbooks highlighted to me that the principles needed to evolve. What our principles were missing, which the playbooks provided, was precision. One of our go to phrases over the years has been “tight but loose”: overarching principles interpreted at a subject and classroom level. While this principle remains broadly intact, we have recognised that greater consistency for some common teaching routines in fact supports subject specific pedagogy. In other words we’ve had another look at where and to what degree we need to be tight and loose.

Part of the reason for the change is that since the six principles arrived, the conversation around great teaching has moved on. An example has been how the adoption of many of Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion techniques has supported teachers in enacting classroom routines that find the shortest route to effective learning. You will find many TLAC routines in both the Forest Gate playbook and our Principles in Practice documents.

It is not necessarily that the underpinning research evidence has vastly changed (although there has of course been new thinking to take account of, such as our understanding of applied metacognition) it is more that we have seen different interpretations of the evidence, and as such have more of this exemplification to draw on.

What we decided we needed was an enhancement of the six principles to better support our teachers in enacting them. So was born our Teaching: Principles in Practice document. It is one of three such documents that now exist here, with the other covering leadership and behaviour & systems respectively.

Essentially, the teaching document provides detailed guidance on 15 teaching routines that support, but do not replace, the delivery of rich subject specific pedagogy. Essentially, by using these principles as our core teaching routines, our subject specific pedagogy can flourish. Pupils will understand expectations in aspects such as how they start lessons, attend to our explanations and experience questioning. As a result, lessons are smoother, calmer and allow learning to take place effectively and efficiently in a subject specific manner. To develop that point further, how an art and history teacher model will be subject specific and therefore different, but how they cold call question pupils during the modelling will be the same. Our principles in practice (PiPs) are:

1. Do now
2. Secure attention
3. Means of participation
4. Drive thought
5. Build on prior knowledge
6. Think and participation ratio
7. Cold calling
8. Vocabulary instruction
9. Paired talk
10. Guided practice: I do, we do, you do
11. Live marking
12. Gathering responses
13. Whole-class feedback
14. Presentation of work
15. Orderly dismissals

These are presented in a single document that all our teachers have a paper and electronic copy of. Within the document are guidance cards like the one below:

Each guidance card is comprised of six parts:

• What: A short description of the teaching practice with links to video exemplification of Durrington teachers enacting it in their classrooms.
• Vignette: A Durrington house-style element, where we craft a short story to exemplify either an example or (in this case) a non-example.
• Connection to the six principles: For each PiP we highlight which of the six principles it directly connects to (the green dots).
• Why: This is to clarify the purpose of the PiP to support teachers in implementing it with fidelity and not in a performative “tick box” manner.
• How: Here there is detailed guidance on the procedure for enacting the PiP. The parts in green are the parts where we expect consistency to build common routines across the school. There are also mini-script examples of what to say.
• High frequency errors: The most common slip-ups that teachers are likely to make (so they can avoid them).

It would be fair to call the creation of these PiPs a labour of love. We certainly took our time over them, spending all of the spring term and most of the summer term writing and re-drafting them as we put them through several pairs of eyes. Here the recently updated implementation guidance was hugely useful. I was aware of the need to engage and unite teachers and leaders around them and include them in the initial formation of the PiPs so they belonged to everyone. For example giving curriculum leaders time to critique and discuss the PiPs long before any were set in stone was crucial to them feeling ownership of them and therefore able to include them within their own improvement priorities. Added to this was time with the whole staff body explaining the purpose of the PiPs and how they would be useful to busy classroom teachers.

Here then we get to the implementation of the Teaching PiPs, which is ultimately where they succeed or fail. Writing them is one thing, but seeing them enacted with consistency is quite another. Of course, not all of the PiPs are designed to be all used in every lesson. However, it is the expectation that eventually Durrington teachers become experts in them to the point of automaticity.

As a result, much of our focus at the moment is on all of our teachers, no matter their level of experience, getting better at our PiPs. The last part of the summer term was all about knowledge building, engaging and uniting around the PiPs. This year is about consistent classroom enactment, a theme that is certainly in the current national conversation. In fact the push to write this blog was Pep McCrea’s recent thread about collective acceleration (nicely summarised in the image below).

This reinforced the importance of implementing our PiPs in such a way that sees them collectively realised. Ultimately, this is the idea that a teacher successfully applying a routine like vocabulary instruction during period two, is directly supporting their colleague who will do the same later that day. As students become more familiar with the routines, they are easier for teachers to enact, thereby making everyone’s lives easier.

To achieve this you have to pull every lever you have available to you when it comes to implementation. Again, the EEF and Jonathan Sharples’ guidance has been hugely helpful here. It was not about designing new systems and structures to realise the PiPs but instead ensuring that all of our existing systems and structures were doing at least some heavy lifting and had evolved to incorporate the PiPs. This image articulates the structures we have for teacher development:

To avoid this blog getting any longer, I won’t describe how every feature above has shifted to incorporate the PiPs, but I will give a couple of examples. Our teacher inquiry questions, are a form of disciplined inquiry that we have been working at for a few years. I recently blogged about it here. These have shifted so that they all directly reference one of the PiPs. Here are a selection from the maths department:

Probably most crucial was how we ensured PiPs appeared on department improvement priorities. The first part of this was a summer auditing process where curriculum leaders and line managers assessed where the department was against the different PiPs. They then selected which PiPs they would be working on during the autumn term connected to four key areas: curriculum, teaching, assessment and routines & relationships. For example this is the science teaching section:

These documents are discussed every fortnight during line management, updated at the end of every term and are quality assured by me. Almost all our PD is directed through subject teams and is subject specific. Subject teams work on the PiPs identified as priorities at fortnightly subject planning and development sessions (SPDS) with an emphasis on seeing models and engaging in low stakes rehearsal. The exemplification videos are really important here and we are continuing to build our library of these.

I also use other levers such as the DIP reviews, INSET, instructional coaching and daily drop-ins to direct work on PiPs beyond and in addition to the detailed work in departments. Steplab has been very useful for this, providing a platform to provide both affirmation for and formative feedback on use of the PiPs following time in lessons. This is through both general drop-ins and detailed instructional coaching.

I feel I could go on, as there are many, many other things going on this year to support the process of collective acceleration. We are certainly not there yet, and part of this is a cultural shift which will inevitably take time. It is also worth saying that I don’t see the PiPs as finished, and in the summer will be conducting a full review to see if any changes or additions are required. However, seeing routines like paired talk and the gathering of responses from mini-whiteboards become smoother, more automatic and ultimately supporting both teaching and learning more effectively is spurring us on to continue evolving.