 Hello everyone. This is Ross at Teacher Talk at Happy Sunday. It's very cold here in London. I thought I'd come and talk to my Facebook followers live in a live video, so this is unedited. So yeah, high risk here. I've put out a video, not a video, a blog this morning called Dear Santa. It's my annual wish list for presents under the Christmas tree from Santa. So I've taken a bit of time to write it. I hope you have a look at it. But I want to just spend five minutes explaining what's in the video. And hopefully you can share it with your colleagues. Hopefully you can kind of help beat the drum as it were and move schools to a more, you know, just some common sense. So let me get into it. The first one I want to talk about is grading lessons. There are about 45% of schools in England and Wales who still grade lessons, still grade teachers. This is despite research and despite off-stead guidance. So my only assumption is that head teachers who choose to do this still want to beat, sorry there's a fly in my face, still want to beat and bash teachers over the head for particular performance. Now, I've never been a great teacher in my career. I've worked hard. I've got outstanding badges. I've also got inadequate badges. You watch me teaching on Monday morning. It'll be dire. If you watch me teaching on Friday afternoon when I'm exhausted, it'll be pretty dire too. Watch me more year 11s or year 7s, the same thing. Teaching changes all the time. It takes years to refine. And even after you've been teaching 20 plus years like myself, it's still difficult. So if you're not familiar with research, if you look at Professor Robert Coe's blog at the Durham University, or Google a bit of research called Measures of Effective Teaching, the research is clear on teachers that are graded in lessons that it's unreliable and not valid. One example in the research that if I get an outstanding judgment, the likelihood is that about 70% of another observer giving me a different grade. So a top tip if you're graded outstanding, don't ask for a second opinion because it's likely to change. Equally on the other end of the spectrum, if, hi Tom, thanks for watching, if you are judged inadequate, research shows that you're 60% likely to be given a different grade. So if you're graded inadequate, definitely ask for a second opinion because the chances are another observer will give you a different grade. That just shows and highlights the nonsense of it all. So that's Measures of Effective Teaching Project. Dig it out, print it off, email it around your school, leave it on your head of department's chair, leave it on your head of teachers in an envelope in their tray. We need to move on for this dialogue. You know, instead of thankfully moved on, I can't believe 45% of schools still do that. My second ask or manifesto on my Christmas wish is that we need, this will come at a cost, but we need to facilitate a place where all schools can allow teachers to receive coaching. I've received coaching at different points in my career, but for the last four or five years, it's been part of my daily occurrence when I've coached other colleagues or when I've received coaching myself from my peers, not necessarily to be a better deputy headteacher or to want to become a headteacher. Coaching's transformational. I'll give you one little anecdote. I worked with two teachers in Hull just last week. We spent an hour going through theory about what's a good lesson, what's a good teacher, what does your teaching and learning policy say. But when we got into the actual practical application of coaching, we spent about 10 to 20 minutes scripting through a particular process. Hello, Mum. Thanks for watching. We spent 20 minutes walking these two teachers through a specific coaching dialogue, and at the end, the evidence was clear that they were overwhelmed with the impact that this simple conversation had on their teaching practice. It boiled down to being very specific and following a very strict script. So hopefully I've helped those two teachers see the potential for coaching that they can roll out in the schools. I've blogged lots about that, so dig it out on my website. My third wish list for Christmas is marking policies. Now, I want to point out two things here on my list. I've got my little checklist here. It's all on my blog, Dear Santa. The first one is, if you have a teaching and learning policy or a marking policy and it asks your teachers to mark a number of occasions, again, you're banging teachers over the head, because they're more concerned about how many times they are marking rather than the quality of what they're marking for their students. Hi, Roy. Thanks for your comment yet. Coaching is a great tool. So going back to marking policies, remove numbers because if your teachers are worried about how many times they're going to be marking and then Ross, McGill, SLT comes and bangs you over the head because you've only marked two times what the policy says four, that's not creating a culture of development, encouraging teachers to focus on the quality of their marking. They're going to be more concerned about the frequency. The second point I want to make about this is colored pens. The yellow box, which I've advocated, I just want to stress here, it's not about you being yellow, it's about zonal marking, but you might work in a school that has the purple pen of progress and whatever it might be. Use those terms if it wants to be, if it's used to highlight, in particular, a phrase or a terminology such as a common vernacular which I've advocated in the past, to encourage your teachers to get into good habits. If I'm using the purple pen of progress and let's say my ink is run out and I'm suddenly using a blue pen, please don't tell your teachers off because they've used a different color pen. Habits, just like anything in school classrooms, are routines and things that are routines essentially turn into good effective practice from teachers. So if your marking policy has a number of occasions that your teachers must mark and it forces people to mark with a particular pen color and then SOT or middle leaders come round and bang you on the head, that's not very conducive for a good teaching and learning culture. The fourth one, just to kind of sum up that one, creating a teaching and learning policy, I think it will come back to haunt you. It's not statutory, don't have one, create a teaching and learning culture which looks at good practice around the school, develops good habits. The sixth one, which is pretty new to social media dialogue, I've got a hashtag called the differentiation bubble. I've yet to blog about it but essentially is this, if I had 30 students in a classroom or even if I was working with 100 teachers which I am tomorrow down in Kent, I can't meet all their needs. I can't meet their needs if I see them for a week or for an academic term. It's an impossible myth. We have in the teacher standards to adapt to meet the needs of all students. That's fine, we try to adapt. It doesn't mean that we have to meet all their needs all of the time. It's impossible and I guess this frenzy has come from people with checklists in observation lessons, ticking boxes to see if Ross, the teacher, can meet the needs of Ross, Billy and Jane and Brian and Derek, whoever it might be in their class all of the time. So if you work in a school that asks for differentiation in a lesson or progress over time, whether that's a one-off lesson or a series of lessons, that's nonsense. It needs to stop. Let's move to an overtime methodology which I believe is at least an academic year if not a key stage which lasts for two or three years. So we need to pop the differentiation bubble, so to speak. So I'll be blogging about that one shortly. Just popping back to marking. I believe some schools are grading teachers in their work scrutinies. Again, point me to any evidence that suggests work scrutinies raises school outcomes. I'm sure there will be some multi-academy trust that will be adamant that it does. I would like to disagree. Apologize for my evening light. Let me just turn that off. So we need to stop grading work scrutinies. Now I've done all types of work scrutinies in the last decade. Some have been fairly effective. Whether they're reliable and valid, I'm not sure. I would like to think that in my own methodology, there have been occasions where I've got it wrong, I think soon as we widen the net and get 10, 15 other people involved in whole school work scrutinies, then the potential for it to go even more unreliable and ineffective is increased. So I think we need to look at different ways of looking at children's books without grading them. For example, we popped back three or four years ago and the Off-Stead Dialogue moved away from looking for things and lessons to looking at. There's a very small difference. From looking for, you're looking to catch people out. When you're just looking at what's taking place, it's a very different agenda. And I think we need to do that when we look at books. We look at what's happening rather than look for and particularly let's not make a judgment because we don't know the full story and there's a high probability that the person looking at the books does not talk to the teacher or does not talk to the student. And if we don't triangulate those sources, then it's damn sure going to be ineffective. Two more. One, my favorite, one hashtag Off-Stead Banners. Let's pull them down. Only last week I was in a school that got an outstanding grading. Yes, great, pat on the back, cheer, hooray, hooray, hooray. I even spoke to the head teacher before I did a keynote for an event within the school. And I was very coy afterwards, but it didn't change my message. I still stood at the front and said, we need to stop celebrating the machine. We need to move away from four grades. We need to just go for good or not yet good and pull down our Off-Stead Banners. Let's stop putting them on our pencils and letterheads. We work hard, we all work hard, but I think if we're celebrating good or outstanding, what we're doing is sticking two fingers up to teachers who work and requires improvement in special measure skills, tirelessly night and day with high anxiety, you know, stress and whatever else, trying to get something that's probably not achievable in a very challenging school. So I think we need to stop this nonsense. Let's push as much as we can for Off-Stead to remove the graded lessons. The final one, appraisal. Now, I've led whole school appraisal for a decade. And in my entire time doing it, although I've set up fantastic processes to try and measure every parameter where possible, I know it's not possible. I'm reading a fantastic book called The End of Average. I would highly recommend you check it out. It's essentially popping the differentiation bubble that there's no such thing as an average male or an average female or an average British person or whatever it might be. It's fascinating. I've only just started the book, but I will blog about that. What I'd like to say in terms of appraisal is why can't schools just simply move to research inquiry questions? I would be much more engaged in my research appraisal if it was a research stroke MA type inquiry that would benefit me and also my students. So one example could be why the year 12 girls, Bangladeshi girls, drop out of AS history after one year. There could be a particular cultural reason that also impacts on the rest of the school. I'd find that fascinating to research. The school would also benefit, and I think that would be a much better time spent rather than forcing me, banging on the head, that 12 out of 14 kids have to get a particular grade in a subject. I know it's a very complicated thing to unpick, but we need to remove or move appraisal from targets to research inquiry. One example, in Flip the System, from the American Scientific Association, research suggests that a teacher's effect is between one and 15% on student outcomes. So whether it's you or me teaching whatever student, we can only have a certain impact on their outcomes. The key difference here is the other 85%, which is social economic factors. You might work with students in affluent situations, with access to technology, two parents at home. I might work with students in very difficult circumstances, low reading ages, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't matter how good we both are, we can only have a certain impact on their outcomes because the external factors have the biggest difference. So we do talk about that. We don't really consider it much when we look at data or we look at appraisal. Again, we just squash all the schools together, all the teachers together, and we make assumptions and try and create some kind of graph to show these people are better than those people. That's pretty much all I've got to say. There's much more detail on my blog. It's called Dear Santa. I've put it out this morning. It's my manifesto for all schools for 2018. Let's see how many you can tick off and please share it widely with your colleagues. Thank you for watching. I might post the video back before Christmas, but if I don't, thanks for following on Facebook. And happy Christmas.