 I believe grading teachers is nonsense and I also think most lesson observations are a waste of time. Now obviously they're provocative things to say and there is lots of nuance required so I would ask you in this video underneath you'll see the blog where I've explained this in greater depth but here's the key slide and I just want to take a moment to go through it with you. I guess the question I posed to school leaders is this question here are you in the business of measuring teachers or nurturing them growing them to develop? Now of course most teachers most school leaders want to grow their teachers and when we can't think about school accountability we want teachers to be held to account we want the highest standards we can't leave learning to chance people outcomes etc so it's a fine balance and I guess in terms of lesson observation this is how I view the current challenge. Now graded lessons for people watching here in England you know that was quashed 2013 the research by Blue Sky and the Mike Travel Experiences particularly in FE settings is that about 30% of schools and colleges in England still choose to grade their teachers for whatever reason my provocation is don't work in those types of institutions if you can there are 25,000 other schools that you can work in so on the left hand side graded schools and grade in one off lesson observations versus ungraded teacher reflection diaries in terms of frequency the measuring side is three times a year often want to turn formally with lots of learning walks lots of drop-ins and I'm no saint here I've done all this myself and my career now I've seen the light I suppose proportionate to teacher time I guess you know part-time teachers how many lessons I teach if we can build in regular conversations and of course there's a lot more detail in here and in the blog then I can make micro observations that are proportionate to the teachers time table and how much time I have as an observer or as a coach will know that in this landscape that feedback is often a regular compared to if it's structured built into a teacher's time then it can be a regular conversation again a micro conversation most of these formal observations tend to be 15 20 30 minutes sometimes 60 minutes often imposed on by the line manager there's often a checklist and we all know these types of scenarios when they become quite toxic they then lead to attrition not good for anyone really and compared to the other side where if we can become more research informed develop teacher reflection teacher starts to think carefully about the things that they want to improve then it's teacher led and I guess this one from my good friend Chris Moise who first posed this idea to me I can understand the concept now and I've been through every lesson observation performer known to mankind and working on a blank piece of paper again needs a lot of context behind this but where a coach mentor composed questions record evidence through photographs of children's work voice recordings of what the teacher says and then it builds particularly in today's world with technology adding in dot into an online document that then can be exported as a PDF this requires a lot of structure behind the scenes for an observer observer to be able to do this reliably but that would be your observation form or you're at least your starting point and I think this again please read the blog a lot more detail and depth behind the scenes but this model is going to support your teachers so I guess the crux of it is do you want to work in a school that grows teachers and colleagues alongside you or do you want this side I know I prefer I suspect I know what most of you prefer and so which ones are going to be