Inspiration for teachers, March 2010 : The AST's role in developing professional practice

last updated:26 Mar 2010

Extracts from a speech by GTC Chair Gail Mortimer given at Wellington College on the role of advanced skills teachers (ASTs) in developing professional practice, 23 March 2010

I get a lot of invitations to speak and I don’t choose all of them. This one though caught my eye. There’s so much packed in.

Today is, as the conference information puts it, ‘a celebration of excellence in teaching’. Celebration is important. We don’t always do it, or do it enough.

Teaching as a profession needs to be forthright about its achievements. It’s our chance to counteract some of the rubbish out there. Sometimes these days you wonder what bright scheme is next going to come forth from the lips of a politician with time on their hands. Unaided, could any of us have come up with the concept of recall ballots for head teachers?

And who knows what inner-city horror story will next be taken out of context in the media/ So, thanks for the opportunity to celebrate excellence in education. I’ll try to help, with some of the examples I’ve encountered in my teaching.

Working together
This conference will also look at how the independent sector can work as one with the state sector. Sometimes, you know, we put all sorts of divides up between us as teachers – I’m secondary, you’re primary, I’ve passed the threshold, you’re still waiting, I’m state, you’re private. And of course the variety of different teaching jobs is legion.

But at root we’re the same. In that classroom, with those children, we have a responsibility that no-one else can take on. That ebb and flow of classroom learning, those instantaneous, experienced, experiential decisions we make moment by moment, in reaction to the unquantifiable dynamics of our relationship to 20 or 30 unpredictable young minds – that’s something that unites us, something quite frankly that if you’ve never done it, it’s all but impossible to understand.

So yes, a conference that stresses our commonalities as teachers, whichever sector we are from, is welcome and will always excite my interest. The GTC of course registers qualified teachers from both sectors, so I hope I’m well-placed to join you in this aspect of the debate.

Two ticks out of two. I always look for three out of three. What clinched it for me?

Well it so happens that I’m an advanced skills teacher too. I’m certainly advanced in years. I have some skills. And I teach.

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I enjoy being an advanced skills teacher, since being accredited eight whole years ago. I relish keeping up my classroom skills, and I delight in working with 57 different varieties of teacher, often at important times in their careers. Being an AST keeps my brain alive – as well as imparting, nudging, supporting, you’re learning too. It’s a great role to be in.

Today’s conference wants to examine how we ASTs can help take the profession forward. Good idea. Third tick. Here I am.

Mind you, being chair of the GTC and an AST in my own right does set me a bit of a challenge. Which perspective to use? Well the trick of course is to find some overarching metaphor which allows me to speak from both perspectives at once.

You probably don’t want to listen to me practising rhetorical tricks for the next 40 minutes, so what I plan to do is briefly develop some themes, first from my own experience as an AST, then from the work of the GTC. In between and afterwards, there will be opportunity for your open discussion.

Those two open discussions will be a useful reality check for me. Conferences can sometimes have a ‘so what’ factor. You go to the conference, enjoy the day in new surroundings, meet some interesting colleagues, get a free meal … and then you go away.

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There’s marking or lesson prep tonight. Or both. Tomorrow, Year 9 – or the third form in Wellington-speak – have an off day. What happened today is a memory very quickly. Well, I don’t want today to be like that. I want to take home useful stuff I can use both with the GTC and in my own teaching.

And I want you to have food for thought – either to reinforce something in which you believe deeply, or to challenge your views and lead you to new ideas that work for you.

A bit about me
Before I became an advanced skills teacher I was head of a large English faculty in a comprehensive school in Rochdale. For the last two years I’ve been working in Kent. Becoming chair of the GTC has had an effect on my work pattern, as you can imagine.

Before I was elected, I was working as an AST visiting different schools every day. Since becoming Chair there are a lot more demands on my time, so now I’m based in one school, where I work for two or three days each week.

What's it like as an AST?
That still gives room for much variety day-to-day. Take one example. We will call her Beth, just for today. She had taught for six years quietly and competently, and while she was never going to win Teacher of the Year, she was conscientious, well-liked and effective.

She wasn’t in an easy context. Many schools in Kent are not – it’s well-known we have many National Challenge schools, for example, and even the most fervent advocate of Kent’s grammar / secondary modern divide is aware of the pressures that there can be on schools where the students have suffered an early rejection. I don’t want to make too much of this. The teacher’s job is to work with the kids that they are given – indeed, both private and state sectors are united here, none of us choose the particular pupils we work with.

Perhaps Beth’s school was in a bit of drift. It got to Beth. There was a bit of ‘saminess’ to her teaching. Then Ofsted called. They said her teaching was ‘unsatisfactory’, and indeed the school as a whole was under notice to improve.

This whole-school judgment put considerable pressure on staff to perform, and inevitably stress levels were rising. She became subject to 'drop-ins' (when you are observed without notice) and, floored by Ofsted’s description of her, she was close to giving up. She was in something of a cycle of despair; lack of motivation – hit to morale – stress – further unsatisfactory observations – morale hit again, more stress. Not a nice place to be.

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The school were however aware that she had the ability to be good, and that's why I was brought in – to coach and mentor her. Coaching and mentoring is a big part of the role for many ASTs. It’s certainly a big part of mine, having run a large English faculty.

But one thing it isn’t is riding to the rescue, ‘Guide me O thou great redeemer’. Beth and I worked together on improving resources, the structure of her lessons. Beth and I team-taught part of the English GCSE syllabus. Beth and I decluttered her classroom, shifted the furniture about and improved the learning environment all round. This was a case of me standing back, encouraging her to look at her classroom afresh, not coming in 'Kim and Aggie' style with fixed ideas about a classroom deep clean founded on an unanswerable urge for order.

There were things I led on, and why not. I modelled lessons for her. I encouraged her to reclaim her classroom. Teachers, use your space! Beth was hiding, a by-product of the drip drip disillusion she had been fed. I got her to greet the students at the door – a little non-plussed they were to start with, but they soon got over it – and to come out from behind her desk, walk round the room, engage more closely with the students.

It’s all good classroom practice, of course, and it wasn’t so much teaching new tricks, but reawakening the old ones that she no longer used. Little things can lead to improvement! The drop-in observations continued, sometimes bringing back the nerves, but then the breakthrough – a ‘good’ rating. Her confidence flowed back. It was very moving to see, and in terms of job satisfaction for me it was worth a host of A*s from talented students.

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I worked with Beth for two terms. At the end of that time, Ofsted rated Beth’s teaching as having ‘elements of good’, and soon afterwards she gained a promotion at a neighbouring school. It was a very satisfying experience and I felt privileged to have had the opportunity to work with her.

Being an AST is not just fire-fighting of course. I am working now with a newly-appointed young Director of English who needs support in how to manage a core department – setting the structures in place to monitor staff, and develop and implement policy.

I’m sure all of us as ASTs can give similar experiences. The other side of the coin is work with individual pupils. I’m proud of my intervention work with ‘target pupils’ – those who are capable of getting a grade C at GCSE but working below that. As I’ve mentioned, Kent has a number of National Challenge Schools, so the pressure to get pupils up to grade C, especially in English and maths, is enormous. I do a lot of work with such pupils – withdrawing them from class and getting them up to spec. This is one aspect of my work that I never want to lose.

The role of an AST
What’s going on here, with these three very different types of work? There’s something in there I think about the inheritance of strong traditions and practices, the profession passing down its knowledge to a new generation.

And it’s especially good that there’s a cross-fertilisation between areas as a result of the AST role. It’s important enough that there’s exchange between different parts of Kent. In my case, I’m able to bring aspects of practice from the frozen north. Though having ploughed through a few Kentish snowdrifts in the past benighted winter, I’m sure it snows just as much down here.

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There’s a wealth of different ideas here but as I’m sure you can tell there are some broad categories which inform them. That’s what you’d expect, isn’t it? We’re not working in the dark; the AST scheme is well-led and -administered, and as experienced teachers we’re confident in our interpretation of it, however different our own local contexts might be.

What it boils down to at the whole-school level, I believe, is the importance of ASTs in raising the quality of teaching and learning. and it’s now that I must make the leap, draw the parallel with, the role of the General Teaching Council for England.

The role of the GTC
The GTC operates on a variety of levels, but at heart it is concerned with the quality of the teaching and learning experience. Even our regulatory work, where sometimes we have to take very difficult decisions about the personal career of a teacher whose conduct or competence falls below the standards the public have a right to expect, is relevant here. It is in the interests of no-one, especially not those teachers with whom they interact on a daily basis, that those who do not exhibit the profession’s overall high standards should remain in it. But regulation affects small numbers of teachers each year, this itself being a reflection of those high standards.

We at the GTC define ourselves as working ‘for children, through teachers’. Our interest is the public interest. It is not the interest of the teacher, specifically – otherwise we would be the general teachers’ council – but there is a clear commonality. If you like, the ‘for children, through teachers’ duality is another side of the ‘teaching and learning’ coin.

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And to put another dimension on that, it’s not just pupils who are learners. Teachers are learners too – all their life. Anyone who has taught for more than five minutes will know how fast-changing the education world is, from so many perspectives:

• society’s goals (will they change with the election?)
• scope of the curriculum
• research findings on what works
• our inter-relationships with the many other adults who now work in schools and in classrooms.

These are just some of the outside influences on the art and science of teaching, or to reclaim that largely continental concept now due for re-appropriation in Britain, pedagogy.

The Code
It was this range of change that inspired the new Code for teaching, launched by the GTC last October. It provides the profession with the chance to show what binds teachers together. In eight short principles, it sets out the values which teachers share and which guide their behaviour and practice.

Principle number one is that teachers put the well-being, development and progress of children and young people first. ‘For children, through teachers’ made real. I’m talking about inspiring teaching, but the point of inspiring teaching is that we inspire young minds.

Principle number two is that teachers take responsibility for maintaining the quality of their teaching practice. That’s not an instruction, it’s a fact. They maintain the quality of their teaching practice because they want to ‘help children and young people become confident and successful learners’ (which, by the way, is principle three), and as a corollary develop their own careers.

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But as I’ve shown you with Beth, and you have shown me from your examples, sometimes a helping, inspiring hand is needed, and the AST is particularly well-placed to lead, to inspire, that maintenance of quality – or, to give a less automotive metaphor, that flourishing of professional practice.

Teaching’s Code is, we firmly believe, a wonderful thing, and can have practical application at school and teacher level, but I’d be the first to admit that it’s superstructural rather than day-by-day practical. It sets out and defines, though, the role of a teacher as a professional. And if the GTC has one mission, it’s to encourage teachers to see themselves as professionals.

Some practical help
I want to give two examples of how we at the GTC have translated this into practical things that any registered teacher, state or private, can use. One is Research for Teachers, the other is the Teacher Learning Academy. I’d recommend them both to ASTs.

Teaching is, or should be, a research-informed profession. It is, in other words, a profession that can build on the inspirations of others – an individual teacher doesn’t expect to work in isolation, building their practice only on their experience.

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To reflect that, Research for Teachers is a key resource on our website. In it, we select and summarise published research in key areas of professional practice, backed up by teacher case studies which illustrate the findings. It’s immensely practical, can be adopted by teachers at all levels of experience, and can inspire serious professional thought into what makes effective teachers effective.

For example, what approaches to the teaching of dyslexic pupils have been proven to work? HMI undertook an important literature review in 2007. It’s a pretty detailed and complex read, but Research for Teachers has filleted it, bolstered it by real-life case studies from a wide variety of schools, and then left teachers to draw their own conclusions. Plenty of opportunity for getting inspired, in other words, without actually being told what to do. Suitable for use, then, for ASTs looking for research-validated good practice, for teachers with whom ASTs work, to inspire their future practice.

The role of the Teacher Learning Academy
That’s one side of the coin – making academic research real for teachers. The Teacher Learning Academy is the other – through the TLA, teachers become researchers. They examine their own practice and share it with their own education community, for the benefit of pupils.

The TLA was developed and is led by the GTC. It’s the first national system to offer public and professional recognition for the learning and development that occurs in the daily professional life of teachers. It is a tangible expression of the GTC’s commitment to contributing to improved standards of teaching and learning, and it aligns well with the commitment to a Masters-level profession.

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The Teacher Learning Academy has attracted widespread partnership support from national organisations and agencies, ranging from subject associations to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. 25 higher education institutions offer Masters-level credits for TLA recognition. To date 20,000 teachers have enrolled in the TLA, and more than 400 teachers act as local TLA leaders. It’s an outstanding example of how teachers can take their own practice, examine it critically, refine and develop it, for the good of pupils.

Here’s an example, from a Staffordshire primary school. The teacher, Nikki, had found that many boys in her class were struggling with sentence structure. She peer-partnered the pupils to help children learn about sentence structure by using topics which represented their own interests, and developed a ‘learning wall’ which gave a dynamic display of success criteria. End-of-year test analysis demonstrated significant improvement.

Nikki summarised this work in her presentation to the TLA, where it is teacher-verified and moderated. One of TLA’s requirements is that the work is shared with colleagues. As she said, “it doesn’t feel like extra work because you’re exploring something you’re passionate about”. So for ASTs, the TLA could be a useful opportunity for teachers that they work with to demonstrate on a wider stage the quality of their learning.

What I’m not trying to say is that Research for Teachers and the Teacher Learning Academy are the sole routes to professionalism. That would be silly. There are many ways to enlightenment! What I am saying is that the GTC’s mission, to maintain and develop teaching as a profession, is as one with our aim as ASTs, to strengthen teaching and learning through better leadership, better training and better support.

Some final words
In closing, I’d just like to look back at the three conference themes that intrigued me so much.

Today we’re looking at how the independent sector can work as one with the state sector. I hope I’ve shown how the GTC has a role here, for its services are open to all registered teachers, and any qualified teacher can register. True, in the state sector it’s compulsory, for the very good reason that part of our work is regulation.

As the independent sector is, well, independent, and QTS is not a pre-requisite to teach, GTC membership has always been voluntary. More and more independent sector teachers are choosing to register – their numbers have increased by 30% in a year, and now stand at around 10,000. Professionalism and the independent sector go hand-in-hand, of course, and what better way to show it than by registering – possibly the best £36.50 – per year – investment that you can make.

Enough of the saleswoman. I hope we’ve helped celebrate teaching, both in the classroom-based particular and the profession-wide general. And if I’ve not, then you certainly have, with your wide range of examples from your roles as ASTs, and in so doing have given great thought to the role of the AST and where it might head. Now, I’m looking forward very much to more discussion with and questions from you, before moving on to my fellow Kent AST Dan Walton. Inspiration made flesh, believe you me.