S5E22: Adam Robbins on the challenge of improving teaching

[0:00:04] Zach Groshell

Welcome back, everyone, to Progressively Incorrect. My name is Zach Groeschel, and this is a podcast all about teaching, especially the explicit type of stuff, and instructional coaching and developing better schools.

I’m going to talk about some of our sponsors really quickly before we head on over to Adam Robbins, my guest for today. The first is John Katt from Hashet Learning, which is an education publisher and If you are looking to publish your own book, I really recommend you reach out to these folks. They are really great at getting teachers to get started with the publishing process. And I will put in the show notes a link to the catalog so you can check out all those amazing John Capp books.

I also want to mention the other sponsor, which is StepLab. I am the director of StepLab North America, and we provide schools with an infrastructure for getting instructional coaching done up and running and using evidence-based teaching steps. It’s just an excellent way to really supercharge your instructional coaching program. Go ahead and message me, use my contact form, check out the links in the show notes, and we can talk about Steplab.

Adam, it is so great to finally have you on the podcast. How are you doing, man?

[0:01:16] Adam Robbins

I’m great, thanks for having me.

[0:01:18] Zach Groshell

Oh, where are you calling in from? Because you are clearly not from these parts.

[0:01:23] Adam Robbins

I’m from the wonderful world of Great Britain. No, I live in a place called Bognor Regis, which is a bit like Baltimore, I would say, in the US where it’s like an ongoing joke. It’s like a seaside town. It was big in the Victorian period. It’s not very big anymore. It’s a bit rundown. Everyone’s struggling a little bit. We haven’t quite got the wire. We can’t film that, but we have the same kind of challenges maybe on a more English scale.

[0:01:51] Zach Groshell

You started as a teacher or are you still teaching?

[0:01:53] Adam Robbins

Yeah, I still teach. Actually, until last week, I was teaching four days a week, but I’ve had to go back up to five days a week because some of my friends selfishly went and had children. And so they needed the time off. And so we’re a bit short on science teachers.

So I’ve been a science teacher for about 22 years and always taught in kind of areas of coastal deprivation, always taught mainly white working class kids in the UK, which is an area where traditionally we’ve really struggled to kind of move kids performance on with these students. They’re kind of a bit of a stuck group that generally trail behind the national average on a lot of performance measures.

In the UK, we have a lot of middle management within schools. There’s not school boards and things like that. It’s quite disaggregated. And so I became part of my school’s leadership team. And then I was fortunate enough to write a book on leadership and started to get some kind of independent work as a bit of an educational improvement consultant.

And the last couple of years, I’ve been To blend those two jobs together. Keeping my feet firmly in the classroom. But kind of visiting other schools and trying to help them out and running like online workshops and things like that, that’s awesome.

[0:03:02] Zach Groshell

I’m really looking forward to digging into your book, this podcast. It’s been sitting here, uh, becoming dog-eared with all these different sticky notes and such. Because it’s called unlocking Teacher Development, a guide to implementing Effective professional development. All the sections are questions, and these questions are the questions I’ve had myself. It makes for a very great podcast conversation.

Before we kind of jump over there, I wanted to ask you about what you just said about working in rural areas, white working class kids, other side of the tracks, you know, kind of situation. This is interesting to me. I recently talked to John Hutchinson. I’ve talked to Joe Kirby about the Athena Trust.

In my mind, how the English education system, which I feel like I, in my mind, it’s almost the reverse of what everyone would think in that there actually is a lot of talent that is pooled in London, like teaching talent and universities and so on. And there are, I guess a lot of what I say, like maybe more competition between models maybe. And in such a way that some very successful schools end up being in a very, in a very urban area and, where a lot of the struggles are actually on the edges, I guess. Am I right in characterizing it that way?

[0:04:22] Adam Robbins

Yeah, I think so. I think in all the major cities in the UK, well, not all of them maybe, but especially London, Manchester, Sheffield and places like that, there’s been a huge amount of work put in to reverse the kind of standards that were declining in the late 90s, early 2000s. And some of those worked and some of them didn’t. But I think what they did do is breed a huge amount of ambition

And then also in inner cities in the UK, there’s been a huge demographic shift. And that has kind of powered a cultural change in the way schools can approach how they work. And I think the one thing that characterizes the British system that I think people that listen to your podcast might not be aware of is the huge discrepancy in what goes on in school A compared to school B just around the corner. There is very different approaches to how people want to teach.

I mean, me and you are on the same kind of the fence there. You know, I tend to teach by a kind of maybe not fully direct instruction model, but definitely an explicit model, a kind of quote unquote trad model, want of a better phrase. And in the UK, you can go to other schools around the corner and see wildly different things going on.

[0:05:27] Zach Groshell

What ends up happening too, I think, is you have this kind of infrastructure, this inspectorate, this Ofsted inspectorate, which we don’t, we don’t have anything even, even remotely similar.

And so it creates, it creates this weird thing that happens when you visit, like I’m on the top of a red, a red bus in London, like living my best life, looking over, you know, hitting branches and stuff, you know, having the best time of my life. And then you go by one school and they’re proudly like, like displaying, like they’re like grade or they’re like their letter. And then the next school I’m looking for it. And then maybe, you know, maybe it’s not as obvious.

And, It’s controversial, isn’t it? This inspectorate or what it is and how it’s evolved and which government is in place. Like maybe tell us a little more about that.

[0:06:16] Adam Robbins

Yeah, so it’s very much double-edged sword because I’m very fortunate to have some friends that teach in like the Republic of Ireland as a comparison. In the Republic of Ireland, you have no inspectorate, no oversight, very, very stable teaching population, and therefore very, very hard to make progress.

I was coaching like a, A woman who had set up her own like development network within a range of schools that are in a location and managed to convince them to kind of fund it. And it’s basically the first network of professional development in the, in the country ever, you know, because those kinds of things that just never been done.

And in the UK, what you have is the kind of other approach where everything is very, very, very high stakes, crazy levels of accountability, crazy levels of consequences to the people leading schools if they dip from one measure to the other measure and have to take down their championship banner type things from there. And so this grading system that politicians always say parents want, it can be quite toxic for, that’s probably one of the main reasons why schools in UK are really struggling to recruit principals to run them.

It’s a very, very challenging job. Most principals only stay in the role for about six years and then they leave. And so we lack that kind of institutional stability But the one thing we do have is a very, very nimble system. So last week, they released some propositions about what they think the curriculum will look like in 2027 to be examined in 2031. And that week, leaders were already like, I’m prepping for this change. You know, I am and kind of talking about what they were doing and because they’re just so anxious that they can’t afford to miss the boat on these things because the stakes are so high.

But on the other hand, They’re very, very keen to try new things, to push the envelope, to try and squeeze the orange a little bit more to get a little bit more performance out of their staff. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword. Originally, it started years ago by the wonderful conservative government led by Maggie Thatcher. And it was just about kind of ensuring the national curriculum was enacted because that came in in the late 80s.

And then it kind of mutated into this very harsh inspectorate. And they’ve tried to soften it. But in doing that, People have become very confused about what its purpose is. And because it’s so high stakes, you’re always working on this theory that what if you get the bad inspector? Like, yeah, the good inspectors can look at any school and see the context and see the work that’s going on and appreciate everything. But what if you get that duff one on his last job of the week? And so you have to kind of prep for that level.

And that kind of leads to schools doing some absolutely crazy things sometimes that really… can grind on staff and tie them out. And hence why most teachers leave within five years in the UK.

[0:09:03] Zach Groshell

And then, I mean, am I right too, that like every time there’s a change, cause you say it’s, you know, there’s, you could sort of have this nimble thing where we softened it and then we harden it and we emphasize this part or we change how, I keep seeing like all of these reports, like this, the reports may become like the social media, uh, like event to read these reports.

But, and then it almost creates this cottage industry of consultants who can constantly say, well, this is how you get a better grade on, uh, with the new framework or with this new report. And, and then you’re bringing people in to, to really distract you from what you already started. And like, am I, does that sound right? How I’m characterizing that?

[0:09:40] Adam Robbins

Yeah, I mean, the UK, one of the traditions of the UK is kind of nepotism and kind of secret handshakes behind their back. And there was a long time that, you know, inspectors could work freelance as advisors for the inspection process. That’s been stopped now, thankfully.

So now what schools tend to do is just try and train some of their own staff up as inspectors. Or if you’re in a trust, maybe they get advice centrally from one or two of them. But there does become a game of like, you can’t miss out, you know, and so people will leaflet you, email you and be like, want to prepare for your inspection? This is our two-day event that will get you ready for your next inspection. And those people probably haven’t been in a classroom for 10 years, at least. But yeah, people want to make money. They got to put food on the table.

[0:10:28] Zach Groshell

Well, I’m really curious about your thoughts about improving schools. I think that there’s more commonality here than almost anything in the sense that there are superficial differences between these education systems, but ultimately we’re talking about humans, groups, groups of humans together to cooperate on, on agreed upon stuff.

And it seems like, it seems like this book is like this. It just has a lot of answers in here that I, I really, I really enjoyed. Let’s start with this kind of broad question, which is why is it so hard to improve education? Teaching like you, you’d think you’d think if we, we could just all agree on a few best bets, and we could just move teaching fast. And it never happens that way.

[0:11:15] Adam Robbins

I think it’s hard for a number of reasons, I think. First of all, if we look at it just from a cognitive perspective, like teaching is a very challenging profession. So cognitively, even if everyone in the room, like, agrees on what they should do and wants to get better, then cognitively, actually, physically developing those habits, undoing habits that are probably quite successful.

Like Dylan William famously says, you know, the problem you have with developing teachers is they’ve got to give up something good to replace it with something great. And that’s really difficult to do, especially if that good thing has been keeping them alive in the classroom for the last decade. You know, it’s something they’ve developed themselves. It’s something that has come from a kind of need.

So I think one thing, first of all, like cognitive is very, very hard to develop teachers. And that’s kind of where like step lab instructional coaching model can really help break that down and make it much more concrete. And I’m currently training three people. So one of the things that happens in the UK now that’s been very successful is we now kind of do on the job training. So instead of just going down a academic route, they will kind of interview with the school and the school will take them on as a kind of unqualified teacher, but then qualify them on the job. Um, with kind of day to day training and mentoring and things like this. And that’s been a model that’s ended up working very, very well at producing some really, really high quality teachers because they’re kind of start like in the building and kind of learn straight away what they need to do to be successful in that context.

So I think that’s really, really useful, but then you’ve got two more problems. One, like you said, no one can agree on teaching, you know, and the lengths at which people will go to, to kind of fulfill their own belief in what they think teaching can be is, is, is incredibly extreme. Um, and it’s really quite strange because when you look at other professions, they don’t suffer from that. You know, most people can agree, you know, most surgeons will sit around the table and understand what the criteria for success of a, of a surgery is, you know, most lawyers will sit around and agree what, how a case should be argued, you know, in principle and things like this.

But in education, that’s where we often fall flat because there are really, really strong, you know, opinions. And they are, you know, people very passionate about this. And then also the evidence is so unhelpful sometimes because it lacks precision and robustness that we end up having nothing that is without criticism.

So take cognitive load theory, a theory that is generally considered robust. The Education Endowment Foundation, which is a kind of nonprofit in England, ran an analysis of all the studies that have been done on cognitive load theory, and they found strong like irrefutable evidence for kind of like three things. I think what worked examples, chunking information and you know, the modality effect, dual coding or whatever version you want to call it. They’re like, they strong, robust evidence for these three things and everything else there was relatively limited educational evidence for.

Now as a classroom practitioner, I’m going to take those three and the rest of them, and I’m going to run with them because I’ve seen them be really effective in my own experience. But does that mean I can’t call myself evidence informed? And is someone else going to be able to pull out a few studies that say it’s not effective? And so we get caught up in this kind of infernal debate about what is the right thing to do with lots of people that have, you know, various opinions and skin in the game in various different theories and things like this.

And all the people that really suffer are the students at the end of the day, because you can get to good learning in lots of different ways with the kids that are really, really good. You know, you can you can get a high ability student and you can teach in whichever way you want and they’ll probably be fine. I know I visited some really, really high achieving schools and, you know, looked at their lessons and not been like overwhelmed of how impressive they are. But the kids are doing great because they’re good kids and anything the school doesn’t provide, the parents will fix, you know, either through tutoring or just being involved in motivation and things like this.

When we’re talking about these disadvantaged students, they’re the ones that really suffer. And so we’ve got this cognitive issue. We’ve got this kind of habitual issue of trying to train people. We’ve got this issue where we’re trying to decide on exactly what we should teach them.

And then you have this third issue, which is one that I think people don’t really appreciate, which is teachers’ prior knowledge. If we take a student and we’re going to train them, a student teacher, they’ve never been in a classroom as a teacher. And you ask them what a good teacher is. they will be able to write something down because they have been a student. They may have one particular teacher that is very, very specific to them about what a good teacher is, and they might model themselves on that role. And it might be good, it might not be. We know students are terrible judges of their own education in general. They love to take the easy way out. They love to take familiarity over respect and things like this.

So we have this third problem, which is how do we manage the level of familiarity people that are training have with certain techniques. Like I used mini whiteboards in 2004, and then I started using them again in let’s say 2020, roughly. Let’s just say kind of roughly pandemic sign. Perfect opportunity, you know, in the middle of a global pandemic to introduce a piece of plastic that everyone’s touching. But you know, that kind of period.

And if you’d asked me about mini whiteboards between those two periods, for most of that time, I would have hated them because I had in my mind way I was trained to use them in 04, because it’s not the piece of technology, it’s not the piece of plastic, it’s the routines. It’s like Doug Lamov’s work on Show Me and it’s on expectations and those kinds of things that transform it.

But if I’m sitting there in a training session and I already have a small amount of knowledge, that can be a really dangerous thing because all of a sudden I go, oh, I know this, put my feet up, switch my brain off, start thinking about lunch. But And then I never get a chance to be introduced to the truth, you know, to that kind of the technique that’s going to change my life.

So I think those three main things really bring a challenge, even if the person wants to improve. And there are a lot of people that don’t want to improve.

[0:17:22] Zach Groshell

And it seems like how you set it up that it would be impossible then to change anybody’s habits or skills. And so… I suppose you can kind of go down the negative side of like, let’s just give up on it. And a lot of times that’s what happens on X is, you know, you get teachers that have had so much bad PD, so much bad leadership experience, like experience from really bad leaders, really terrible working conditions and so on.

And they just conclude that what you need to do is just leave me alone. Like if you allow me to be by myself, I can adjust and manage my sphere of influence much better than if I work with other people or if we adopt similar teaching techniques. Why is that ultimately not the best perspective to take when it comes to teaching?

[0:18:13] Adam Robbins

It always breaks me down to the kind of you don’t know what you don’t know. There are some things that other people come up with, especially things I do now that in my classroom that I consider routine and things I do all the time. There’s no way if I was given 100, 200 iterations of trying to solve that problem, I would have come up with that version.

Partly because fundamentally, at a kind of personal level, I don’t necessarily agree with them. As the way I want to be as an individual, I don’t agree with some of the things that I use all the time. And the reason I have to use them is because they work. And it’s not about me. They work for the students.

I’ll give you an example. One of the TLAC techniques that’s really powerful is making compliance visible. In my school, we don’t do a lot of teachers marking the students’ work. They do a lot of self-marking. And yes, that has some problems, but in general, the time saved, we can develop it for professional development and kind of wellbeing and things like this. So we think it’s the right choice for us.

To make sure we know what the students have done, they mark their work in a different color pen. And in our school, we use a green pen. And so one of the things we ask students to do when we’re going into correcting work is we ask them to show us their green pen. And I spend a lot of my time teaching what would be for you guys, like junior and senior high school students, like AP classes.

But every once in a while, I’ll teach like a freshman class. When I’m with those older students, I don’t want to make a big song and dance out of this. I can trust them to find their pen and I don’t really care that much about making compliance visible. They’re self-motivated. They’re at this point in their career.

But with the other students, I went in thinking, oh, this is, you know, this is infantilizing what they’re doing. You know, how patronizing of me to be so controlling over their bodies that I’m asking them to hold this green pen in the air. And so I wasn’t doing it at the beginning. And instead I was just asking them saying swap to green.

And what happened was the students were showing me their pens and sticking it high up in the air because they don’t see it as patronizing because it’s normal for them. They understand it comes from a place of warmth. It comes from a place of usefulness. They understand the purpose of it. And so it really changed my perspective.

And now I use it with all of them. I even use it with my older students now because it’s really useful for me to know that everyone’s got their pen and see really quickly and not start marking. And then all of a sudden a student go, oh, I’ve forgotten my pencil and have to stop to fix that problem. I can see that problem before I start.

And so teaching is not a natural thing. It’s not how we normally talk to individuals. We’re not talking to them. We’re talking to a class of students. And that requires us to behave in some ways artificially. And we have to kind of accept that, I think, as individuals.

And I think once we make that decision, we become a bit more open to trying things out. that if other people say they work, we might be more willing to try them. And when we try them, we tend to find that they’re pretty good. That’s the reason people told us about them. People generally don’t share stuff that didn’t transform their life.

[0:21:26] Zach Groshell

Teaching is like this technology that was invented for 30 kids. And you can see that it’s not a skill that everybody naturally understands when you go to someone’s birthday party and you see the parents running the birthday party and you go, I can’t believe you, you don’t know how to do this, right?

[0:21:44] Adam Robbins

You don’t know how to do it.

[0:21:45] Zach Groshell

It’s because I’ve also adopted certain moves and techniques that can manage kids and groups of people. I always use the example of like in my house, I would never say, and I need everybody sitting on the couch for movie night in three minutes. two, one eyes on me and craning. I’m craning my neck in a ridiculous way right now. And looking around, thank you. Let’s begin movie night.

Right. And like, but, but you do you, these things sort of, you know, this is the craft of teaching and they do feel weird. Maybe that’s why there’s some, there’s some friction there maybe with the teacher development.

[0:22:25] Adam Robbins

I think so.

[0:22:26] Zach Groshell

So let’s start with lesson observations. You have a whole chapter on it and want one important element of like a system, like an ecosystem of PD. How do we get the most out of these observations if you’re a principal or someone who’s kind of tasked to do these drop-ins or walkthroughs?

[0:22:45] Adam Robbins

Yeah, I think it’s hugely difficult. When I first started visiting other schools, one of the challenges I came across is I started visiting outside of my own subject, which is the sciences, essentially. And I suddenly realized I knew very, very little about teaching English.

And I want to point out, if you’re an English teacher, My hat goes off to you. It’s witchcraft still to me to a certain degree. I have no idea how you make students have these really interesting thoughts about, you know, the crucible or something. I think it’s amazing what you guys do.

So you have to kind of look beyond the substance a little bit. If you’re not observing within specialism, you can’t necessarily look at the curriculum necessarily that’s been taught and the explanation. You have to kind of think of them on broader themes.

And so I kind of think in terms of three perspectives, I call them three lenses because then it’s nice and kind of pithy. And I think everyone uses the first one, which is the kind of cultural lens. You know, you walk into the classroom. Does this classroom have a nice feel to it? Does it look like the students have a strong relationship with the teacher? Is the teacher kind of warm to the students, but also strict?

Is there, you know, we have a big push in the UK, in a lot of schools at the moment about trying to stamp out low-level disruption. So our students able to kind of sit quietly and work silently if they’re asked to respond quickly, all those kind of things. And is the teacher using the system that the school has devised in some classrooms I go into, in some schools? No, it is a mess, you know?

And if that’s not right, then pretty much everything else is not going to work. Doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t. You know, like you’re saying, controlling the party. If they can’t control the children at the party. My youngest is 12. She had a kind of K-pop Demon Hunters kind of like escape room party that we invented for her. And so 11, we planned it for nine and there was 11 and two more turned up. So 13 children in our modest house. And so, yeah, I was like in silence, eyes on me in three, two, one, you know, because I wanted I had to get them to pay attention. And if I waited for them to calm down at a 12-year-old’s party, it was just never going to happen.

And so we kind of have these tools we can lean on. I think after climate, the thing I’m always really fascinated about is attention. I’ve always been really interested in how teachers gain attention, how they maintain attention. If we believe in Willingham’s simple model of the mind, then we know that attention is the gateway to learning, essentially.

And it’s really fascinating when you look at how different teachers try to Gain attention, maintain that attention, direct it as well in explanations is something that’s often a bit all over the place. You know, especially when we have things on PowerPoint, we tend to have quite a lot of distractions involved and students being unsure about exactly what they’re focusing on. And these things can all create simple barriers.

And then the other thing I like to think of, I call the cognitive lens, which is just simply asking myself the question, what are the students thinking about right now? What is the question actually driving? What is the kind of ratio of thought and participation in that room? And is it being driven towards the things that the teachers expected it to?

When you look at kind of their planning or when you understand what they’re trying to achieve with their lesson objectives, are they actually making students think about the right thing? Or are they doing the content? They’re doing science or whatever, but they’re actually rethinking about moving around the room or collecting pieces for the puzzle or how to stick, you know, them in together to make the picture. All things that I have done in my career, you know, but things that nowadays I probably wouldn’t do because they’re not driving the thought.

The other one that’s quite common is teachers forgetting the need to kind of establish the fundamentals before they jump straight to the application. So you’ll go into the lesson and things will be going well. The explanation will be going fine. But then the first question the students have is like, evaluate these things. And the teacher hasn’t thought about kind of giving them a warm up to that process, you know, getting them a few easy questions, you know, just like basketball players hitting a few layups and warm up before they start playing the match, you know, and build their motivation, build their confidence.

We see that quite a lot sometimes because of the pressure that teachers are under to get through the curriculum within the time that’s given to them.

[0:27:03] Zach Groshell

If you don’t have this schema to apply to a lesson observation, what you’re going to have is you kind of go in there and stuff’s all over the place. It’s hard to, you know, what you know determines what you see. And so you just don’t have, you don’t have the prior knowledge to connect what to do.

And if you do recognize a problem, you don’t really know what to do about it necessarily. How would you engineer a system in which, which would be scalable so that those who are doing these lesson observations have the mental models and the frameworks that would enable them to see the things that, so that they can respond in a variety of ways.

[0:27:41] Adam Robbins

Yeah. And I think this is where you get a kind of another internal tension. So the easiest way to make sure everyone knows what they’re looking for is everyone do the same things. And so schools often create things. The current phrase, I think for them is the playbooks, which is where they essentially take a text like TLAC and a text like Rosenshine and kind of mash them together and And then come up with their, like, this is how we teach in our school.

And I think a level of clarity is really, really important. And everyone having a name for something and the same name for something makes conversations really, really quick and feedback, especially, you know, when we start getting onto that phase of the lesson observation, you know, fundamentally much more powerful because everyone knows what each other’s talking about.

However, the downside of that is in the hands of a novice, in the hands of someone who doesn’t have a deep understanding of what the science of learning or how a subject should be taught, it can become a bit of a tick list. And that’s the danger, you know, of these processes is are the people that are observing the lessons experienced enough in what these things look like in a variety of contexts that when they see something in action, they’re not thinking this teacher is or isn’t doing cold call, for want of a better phrase.

And instead thinking, what was the purpose of what they were doing and what impact does it have on students? So Adam Boxer has this great model called the hypothesis model, which other people have kind of started talking about as well. But when we see something happening, can we kind of predict what we think the impact of that would be? And then can we gather the evidence to see if that actually was the impact?

Because it might be that they didn’t use cold call. They used something else. But it might be that in that class, it didn’t have that much impact. So if I choose that to be the focus of their improvement, I may seem a little disingenuous in my feedback. Like my aim is to find my tick list instead of to solve their problems.

So I kind of owe it to them. If I’m going to ask them to change, to try and pick something that I can tangibly say, if you do X instead of Y, it’s going to solve this problem that I have noticed in your class. Like if we have a teacher who is struggling to gain knowledge students’ attention in the class, and we say to them, if you do a countdown and then you scan the room in silence, insisting on it, and then you use these two strategies when students are talking, Then we’re solving their problem.

But if we find out that their room is calm because they put their hand up like a scout leader and everyone follows, then telling them to do the countdown, they’re just going to look at us and be like, why are you trying to make me do this? This is performative. And then that kind of destroys their trust, I think.

[0:30:35] Zach Groshell

Yeah, the example I heard recently from Gene Tavernetti, who was on the podcast, he was saying how he really wanted the teacher to use mini whiteboards.

[0:30:45] Adam Robbins

He really did.

[0:30:46] Zach Groshell

It was just like, it’s just, that’s all he wanted her to do. And the teacher, you know, had a, in a coaching interaction, just was like, look what I do. I walk around, I actively observe. I put my finger on each paper, watch me do it in the lesson. And he goes, all right, you’re not, I’m not, you’re not gonna be able to see it all.

And he watched it and he went, this isn’t the highest leverage thing. Honestly, this guy has a very, a slicks, you know, but that does kind of butt into like whether or not the student’s experience across all teachers is consistent enough. You mentioned before with students that are more disadvantaged settings, the predictability and the precision of the teaching becomes so much more important. You know, so how do you navigate, you know, that tension?

[0:31:32] Adam Robbins

Yeah, and I think, So there’s a power, isn’t there, in kind of having common rituals and certainty to things, especially when it comes to things around climate and behavior. You know, if they know that every teacher is going to abide by the same rules, then for certain students, that helps them understand that there is a kind of cause and response that happens in the system.

And it helps them become much better at self-regulating because they can predict the outcome. And so when they get it wrong, they have their consequence and they’re like, yeah, fair enough. because when I did it last week, the same thing happened. And when we think about students, especially with kind of certain educational needs, certainty is a really powerful tool for them in reducing their anxiety.

And then I think there’s this other issue with reflex that if you’re all doing roughly the same thing, you can refine that. It’s a bit of a side, so forgive me for this, but the UK is famous for essentially having the world’s first nuclear power station. Maybe not that famous, but anyway, now you know. But my point is we have seven nuclear power stations in this country. That’s not many. Every single one of them is designed differently and built differently and has a different type of technology.

France has essentially 30 nuclear power stations and they’re all identical. So every year they gain 30 man hours of experience and training in their staff and they can move them around. And they have that level of flexibility and their discussions about improving the nuclear power stations are really refined because they don’t have to convert them from one type of technology to another. And their safety is excellent because if they find a problem in A, it can be transferred to all of the other power stations, you know, with an email.

And I think that’s the power of routines in teaching. You know, if you have your whole school doing the same particular routines, like my entire school, we use many whiteboards to check for understanding. That is amazing. Very, very robust. And I couldn’t stop people using mini whiteboards, even if I wanted to, because it’s been really well established for a number of years. So that means that when students come into the school after the first lesson, they know our expectations for using mini whiteboards. And that means that everyone can use mini whiteboards without any issues.

Because the students don’t even it does, they don’t even think to do it differently, you know, they’re not. I don’t know if you know this about teenagers, not actually deep original thinkers generally. They’re quite predictable in their nature. Some of them are characters, but 99% of them are just going to try and get through the day and get home. That’s their main aim.

And so if you make the path you want them to follow to be really easy and obvious, then 99% of them are going to go down that path. And so I think that’s where centralized routines can feel really awkward to the individual. But it’s like having your teammates back. It’s it’s that kind份 powerful thing where, you know, we do all do this together. This is our thing. And it kind of becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

[0:34:31] Zach Groshell

Yeah. I am. I’m curious as we, before we kind of leave the realm of a lesson observations, that if you see there being a role for peer observations for peer, peer drop-ins to observe each other. And if so, like what kind of structures do, need to be in place?

Because if we’re going to have that issue with senior leaders and principals who largely have been teaching for longer, how are we going to get a first year teacher, a second year teacher to see these things when in a kind of a peer observation type of scheme?

[0:35:08] Adam Robbins

Yeah, I think peer observation is really problematic because the person that is coming to observe you is not necessarily either very experienced or very familiar with your subject. And they like to a hammer, everything’s a nail. And I think, you know, if you, if you have a music teacher come in to watch a history lesson, you know, they’re, they’re gonna, they’re gonna have some opinions, but how, how valid are they?

So we tend to fall into genericism again, because that’s how we can find find a solution for these problems. So we have our, our tool book of tool book of strategies, but instead of our more experienced, more nuanced stuff, kind of understanding we’re relying on our more novice staff to have a granular understanding of each of those strategies. They may not have that.

So I think it’s a really good solution when you’re trying to change the culture. Like if you have a school that’s had quite an oppressive leadership structure in place and the staff feel very scared when people come into the room to observe and you want to kind of break down that wall, then having people just observe each other is probably a really, really good thing culturally. But the payoff for that is the quality of the feedback people are going to get is probably going to be inconsistent.

[0:36:21] Zach Groshell

Absolutely. So many situations in schools are not set up for subject specific training. The slow grind of like working together to like. to figure out what’s the best way to explain this one thing, right? And sometimes even the people in the room, like we really need to structure that talk so that it’s the best use of their time anyway.

And then, but everything’s kind of set up for like, I’m not the leader of that subject, but I am in charge and I have the time to be able to visit. And we’re all getting together on a Friday or a Monday. Let’s just do something that we can all do together. How do you as a science teacher understand advocate for yourself and for your department to make sure that there is ample time to be subject specific, like have subject specific kind of training or professional development?

[0:37:14] Adam Robbins

Yeah, this is something that is really varied in the UK for the record, but my particular school, we’re really fortunate. So we have essentially an hour protected every two weeks of time to spend together as a department.

And one of my job roles in my current school is kind of training the people to deliver that training essentially. Because one of the tensions we have is you still have to have this generic toolkit covered. So what we tend to do is we tend to say, we’re going to kind of dual channel this. We’re going to look at a persistent area of kind of pedagogical content knowledge, as we might call it, like a strategy that we’re really struggling with. And then we’re also going to look at a piece of content and we’re going to use that content as the kind of context for working on this strategy.

So in my science department this year, our big thing was after we do retrieval practice, right at the beginning of the lesson, we do like a quick quiz on six things that have been covered. We go to mini whiteboards and we activate prior knowledge because sometimes there’s been gaps of days and days between lessons. And we know there’s evidence that suggests that kind of activating prior knowledge helps learn new things.

We go to a quick mini white ball quiz and we quiz them on things that kind of lead up that have been covered in the topic so far. So that when we start the lesson, we’ve both reminded them of the key things, maybe checked a few of the things we think they might already know from a previous year, because our curriculum is very spiral in nature. So things come up again and again, and they’re kind of warmed up and ready to go for the next piece of new knowledge.

So I can’t just introduce that strategy. I need to introduce that strategy in a context. So we’ll look at the topic we’re teaching. for one of our years that, you know, a lot of people are teaching and we’ll say, okay, so we’re going to design and kind of deliberate practice, co-plan the questions for one of the topics we start with in September is the history of the atom through the, through the years kind of thing.

So what would the questions, what, what might they know in previous years? What’s the atom made of, you know, all these, all these other things and people start kind of brainstorming or kind of spider diagram drafting questions. And and so we’re constantly looking at our session as trying to get two things happening simultaneously: improving subject knowledge, and also how we use that strategy within our own subject.

[0:39:34] Zach Groshell

And you mentioned up like, what review are we doing is a great place to start. But then I’m just thinking, what examples do we use? You said, what questions do we ask? What models do we use?

And you sort of, we all know at a very a very basic level, those things matter. Modeling matters. Questioning matters. And talking about it over and over again without actually designing the information that you’re specifically supposed to teach, I think it just has diminishing returns. It seems like you need to, at some point in time, get to the level of what are we going to do with the content we actually teach, is what it sounds like.

[0:40:14] Adam Robbins

Yeah, I think if you don’t come out of an hour’s time with concrete work done, things that you can literally use the next day, how are you ever going to start forming that new habit? Because the resource is the artifact, but it’s the thinking that we want, which is exactly the same as the students.

What they write down in their book or on their paper, that’s not what we’re trying to do as teachers. We’re trying to construct something in their brain because that’s the only thing they can take into the next year of their education or into their future careers is the knowledge they actually have stored. That what they write on the page is, is a way of motivating them to think about the things we think are really important for them to think about.

And it’s the same with the teachers. They’re planning the questions, but they’re essentially building a schema of how do I construct questions on a topic? And hopefully because it’s a topic they got a certain level of familiarity with, they can contrast that model in their head with what they were previously thinking and kind of start to build this new habit in place.

[0:41:18] Zach Groshell

Yeah. Yeah, well, so every two weeks, every two weeks meet protected science planning time, but then there’s certain scaffolds in place that make this, is that what it is? Like they make this, so it’s doubly, you’re sort of doubling up on two things.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, so we mentioned sort of different, we’ve already kind of mentioned a few different ways to kind of move schools forward. And one of those that’s really important to me is feedback and coaching. And it gets a bad rap for a variety of reasons. I feel like we created some of the models that you associate with some of the bad forms of the coaching, and it’s just a big mess in most schools. How do we develop teaching through effective coaching?

[0:42:08] Adam Robbins

Yeah, and I think the first thing is to be really clear about what type of coaching you’re doing. So there’s a big debate, isn’t there, at the moment about who owns this word coaching. And it’s it’s kind of it’s very ubiquitous.

And I think as long as you’re clear about what you’re trying to achieve, which essentially the word coach means just help get better, you know. And so if you’re doing an instructional coaching model, which the model I use with my trainee teachers, highly effective for novices, I think. The danger you have when you get to experience teachers is it doesn’t recognize their preexistent knowledge necessarily very well. And that’s where, you know, being a bit more responsive can be useful and kind of shifting.

So in the book, I tend to talk about like a continuum. A lot of, you know, we talk about it as like kind of the literature. If you ask them about the kind of instructional coaching model would probably catify that as mentoring, you know, in kind of the context. the kind of ILM coaching matrices or whatever it is. So that kind of instructional coaching kind of sits more towards that side.

And then at the other end, you’ve got a kind of coaching that is pretty useless for teachers. I call it pure coaching or some people call it like executive coaching, but absolutely gold dust for leaders, people trying to make kind of decisions and dealing with relationships and that people find that very, very useful.

And then in the middle, you have kind of experienced teachers who need a little bit of freedom in terms of kind of recognizing their knowledge, but we need to still kind of be in control of the direction that’s going. And we don’t want to give them free reign because they might waste their time by going down some kind of impossible direction that’s really ineffective.

In the book, I use a lot of kind of vignettes of different leaders in different situations. And in one of them, they have opened up their training, their professional development to whatever topic people want to follow. It’s very open and the staff love it. But one of their teachers is gone on a trauma-informed behavior practice, which is against the school’s policy. So she’s kind of got that tension to deal with as a leader and it’s about how she manages that tension.

So I think a model that’s quite nice is one that’s come out from A couple of Brits, Adam Kohlberg and Sarah Cottingham, have a model called Cognitive Coaching, which has got a nice structure to it. And Josh Goodrich, the StepLab CEO, has got a nice model called Responsive Coaching.

And with those experienced staff, they basically train people to probe first and establish what the teacher already understands and kind of unpack the decision-making the teacher was doing and then try to explore alternatives afterwards. And try and say, okay, well, if you were going to do it this way, what would be the strengths and the weaknesses?

And I think giving teachers a chance to play with the ideas and evaluate them on their own in a controlled environment is one of the secret things. And I think that comes into coaching, you know, because it’s whether it be a whole cohort of people looking at a scenario and discussing with the person next to them what the strengths and the weaknesses are of that particular fictional situation, or whether it be a coach sitting next to you, a teacher and watching a video of their lesson and discussing what was going through their mind at that moment, all these things were getting the teachers to kind of model different possible alternative actions they could have taken and weigh them against the decision they made.

And it establishes one thing that I think is really important: it depersonalizes. Because one of the problems teachers can have is because teaching is not particularly well-paid profession, a lot of people have an identity as a teacher. They are like an educator. They are a changer of lives. And when you say, have you tried using mini whiteboards? They hear you’re a bad person. Um, and, um, and that can be a real barrier that we need to try and diffuse as we’re, as we’re working with them. And I think using these kinds of coaching approaches can be one of the ways to solve that.

[0:46:10] Zach Groshell

My experience with having been, um, uh, a full-time instructional coach, which I know is like not, not really a model anywhere in the UK, but it’s like, it gives you a lot more time to like trial and error.

These models is that, is that basically I came to this conclusion, uh, pretty soon you do, if you do eight of these puppies a day, right. And you do that over 180 days, right. After a while, you start to go, look, I’ve got this teacher literally in tears who’s like, here’s my keys. I’m going to be out of here in the next moment. I never learned anything in my university program.

And I go, come with me outside. I’m going to show you how we’re going to do a controlled entry. And here’s the threshold. And I will be right next to you, right? But then you move into, you know, Miss Smith, who… She’s tried everything at some point in time. She has seen it all and it’s come down.

This is where it’s like, how do I activate you as a resource for others? How do I involve you in future PD so that you can lead it? And honestly, like, how can I, I love how you said, how can I kind column get you to weigh the choices so that when you’re in the moment, you sort of were developing that adaptive expertise, I suppose, where you’re like, I can choose between these things because I see the relationships between all of them and all these other things. I think that’s you said it, right.

[0:47:31] Adam Robbins

And I think, crucially, one of the things to remember for, like leaders and people that run schools, is teachers spend most of their time completely unsupervised.

So you, you can get them to say buy-in and they’ll say everything they want to end the conversation. Because they know that’s how the game is played. But if you, if you actually want them to meaningfully change, that takes, that takes a lot more time and energy. But the best thing about that is then when the doors close, they behave exactly the same way as they do in front of you. And that’s like incredibly powerful.

[0:48:02] Zach Groshell

I love it. I’m curious about your views on whole school PD. Cause at the moment we’ve kind of get to, we’ve gotten to the level that’s more and more pertains to individuals and to groups, you know, we’ve talked about coaching and also, you know, using sort of kind of teacher, teacher groups for subject specific stuff. Like, is there a role for whole school? PD? Does it help?

[0:48:27] Adam Robbins

I think it can do, although, crucially, I think no PD is better than bad PD. Because I think when we so…

One of the people that has been really influential for me and he’s he takes a big part in the book is a man called Damon Centola, uh, who’s at the University of Wisconsin, I think, if I remember. And he talks about how people change behaviors and why behaviors are really complicated things to change in people.

And one of the things he’s really clear on is like awareness is only useful if it’s part of the process of developing the person. Just telling them and raising awareness can actually be counteractive because they can become quite resistant to it. So I think anytime you’re bringing your whole staff together for training, you need to kind of be really clear on that. what that process is for and why it’s there.

You know, you mentioned persistent problems. I think problem solving is a huge secret to kind of running any session, but especially whole school sessions. If you can frame the start of it as a, isn’t it, isn’t it annoying when type situation, you know, you talked about your controlled entry, you know, isn’t it really annoying when the class is all settled and then little Stevie comes bursting through the door full of energy and happy to see you, but disrupts the whole process that you’ve just got, you know, and everyone will be like, oh yeah, that’s definitely happened to me.

And instantly you’ve got that window, that opportunity to kind of build those bridges of everyone. I think deliberate practice is often shied away from in a, in kind of whole group settings, people that are delivering feel rightfully like very nervous about doing that. But I think done with the right attitude, it’s actually incredibly important to build culture that these kind of things are normalized.

We introduced a call response thing across our school and I was very fortunate to deliver the training. And we we did do call response. And we did it as a whole cohort, and they were the students and I was the teacher. And yes, it’s patronizing, but it’s also a lot of fun because we did the male reproductive system. And that’s a really interesting topic to do the core response on.

But those kind of things build bridges between people. I think that’s really important to nail the whole school CPD. It can’t just be about information given. It has to be about embedding. It has to be about exploring. It has to be about practicing. I like to give people lots of scenarios to kind of look at the edges of things. the technique. So when you would do it, when you wouldn’t do it, good examples, bad examples, just like if you’re teaching children in some ways, the only difference is you’re, you’re teaching relative experts most of the time.

So you need to kind of move along that novice expert kind of spectrum and give them more problems to solve and give them more challenges to kind of weigh on because they’ll be sitting there thinking, well, this happened in my lesson. What would I do in this scenario? So by having a range of scenarios that people can discuss and debate, people can form those kind of strong ties between each other. And that really supports the adoption of the new behavior.

[0:51:29] Zach Groshell

And so maybe then the professional development that started with something that was perhaps too divorced from their context, maybe initiates or establishes the conditions for lesson observations or for coaching or for subject-specific stuff.

I almost wonder… Uh, if we often don’t think like your book does this, it basically links all these together in a, in a web, right? I always, we think about these things as separate, separate ways. And we’re, we’re a PLC school and you’re a coaching school and we’re this and that. And we don’t see how these things interrelate into an ecosystem is kind of, kind of what my takeaway was when I read this and that you, you, you did the, you did the job of, of showing how they relate.

[0:52:14] Adam Robbins

Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. And it is, So I’ve been to loads of different schools and I’ve seen two schools run exactly the same system and get very different results out of them.

And so it’s very much kind of like a hardware software issue where you may have all the hardware in place, but if you don’t have the right software, you can’t take advantage of it and vice versa. If you don’t have the right conditions culturally in place, if you don’t have the right people, I think one of the things that I’m becoming really aware of with this explosion of people sharing coaching, which is really, really good, that people are kind of sharing these things.

They’re a lot braver than me, but also it just makes me realize the percentage of people that actually understand teaching at a granular level is smaller than maybe we initially thought. Because sometimes you see people do some coaching and you look at the advice they’re given and you just think, no, that’s probably not, there’s probably, you’re probably 80% there, but you probably just haven’t quite nailed the landing.

There’s like, there’s actually another thing you know, because they’re, because they’re sharing lessons, you know, that’s great. People are so brave of them. And a lot of them coming out of the US, you know, it seems to be a nice guerrilla network of teachers that are trying to help each other by being brave and putting their, their lessons up in front of, you know, millions of trolls, essentially. And it takes a lot of courage, you know.

[0:53:38] Zach Groshell

I’m proud of these folks. Underneath, by the way, underneath this guerrilla network are these same teachers who, doing like kind of secret coaching right now.

I’m telling you, there’s a bit of a like, hey, so can you actually tell me what you really thought about this? And then we’re all talking, you know, online and Zoom and so on. Like, I love what you did and I love how brave you were, but there was this one thing that I noticed and now we’re sort of coaching each other. It’s kind of cool, you know?

[0:54:05] Adam Robbins

And I think, you know, if we go back seven, eight years in the UK, exactly the same thing, graph level, you know, even, you know, some people anonymously because they’re worried about the consequences to their own career and things like that.

But people activate in social media, build in networks. I’m fortunate enough to run a group called Cog Sci Sci, which is completely grassroots, completely about kind of sharing the ideas of cognitive science. Probably got about 2000 people on our mailing list, 500 active members in a discord, you know, sharing problems, just trying to help each other. And that’s, I think that’s absolutely fundamental to improve in education.

[0:54:43] Zach Groshell

I love it. Well, what is next for you and what would you like the listeners to, to, to, to hear about before we close out this episode?

[0:54:52] Adam Robbins

Um, so I suppose I’ve got two things coming up. One, I’m hoping to be in research ed, uh, New York in may. If anyone’s around and wants to say hello, I’ll be the person brave enough to walk through New York city with a 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers NBA championship hat. Um, and, uh, probably being chased down the street.

And the other thing is I’ve got a webinar coming up in January. So if you find your students are copying information a bit too much, I’ve got one on a thing that I’ve decided to call cancelling copying, how we can use rehearsal, paired talk and things like that to reduce the amount of students having to kind of cognitively just waste time copying and kind of doing a bit more thinking in the classroom.

[0:55:35] Zach Groshell

Super excited. Hey, when that comes out, let me know. I’ll definitely post it on my website.

Listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. I feel like these ideas keep just building on each other and building on each other. And I’m just afraid to ever look back at the earlier episodes and think, what dumb thing did I used to think? Thank you so much for following and keeping with me on this journey. Take care.

Thanks for having me.