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Tending a garden
7th February 2025
I have never had naturally green fingers. It is a joke within my household that I never seem to do a good job at keeping the house plants alive, yet somehow, I do really enjoy pottering in my garden when the warmer weather comes. I have often thought that striving to be the best teacher is a little like tending a garden - just as a gardener studies the soil, adjusts for the seasons and nurtures each plant's unique needs a teacher refines their methods, embraces new ideas and adapts to the ever-changing needs of the students.
As teachers it is fixed within our DNA that part of everyday school life is having our school leaders walk into our workplace and watch us do our job. I can’t think of many other professions where someone's everyday working life is so consistently under scrutiny, no matter how developmental and supportive this process is. We value the feedback that is given to us of course, because we know that this will make us better teachers. We never stand still, ever evolving, and always striving to do a better job tomorrow than we did today. .
Over the last year at Loseley, we have thought hard about how we should refine the way we undertake our monitoring responsibilities, which is a critical part of our role as leaders. Our teachers are great and our daily classroom visits tell us that our teachers, day after day, deliver high quality teaching and learning. We wanted to find ways that we could floodlight the great practice across the school whilst also trusting the staff to turn a spotlight on their own practice in an effort to make marginal gains across the days, weeks and months ahead. We knew that we needed to move our monitoring processes towards one where our role as leaders became more high frequency but low stakes and that our teachers were actively and purposefully designing their own CPD journey, giving them more autonomy, more control, more trust.
To achieve this, we have invested in training leaders in a model of instructional coaching and in the use of Walkthrus and have been rolling this out across the school to all teachers in our weekly staff meeting time.
We are at the early stages of the implementation of this across the school, but early evidence has shown us that because of the Walkthrus we have implemented, our children are able to talk about the pedagogical approach their teachers have used and most importantly how that technique has supported their learning. It has also helped to develop a Loseley Blueprint of what every child will experience as they move through the school, a set of teaching and learning principles which mean that our children know what to expect, no matter who is teaching them. It is new and exciting and it will be really interesting to see how this strengthens outcomes over time.
I have never had naturally green fingers. It is a joke within my household that I never seem to do a good job at keeping the house plants alive, yet somehow, I do really enjoy pottering in my garden when the warmer weather comes. I have often thought that striving to be the best teacher is a little like tending a garden - just as a gardener studies the soil, adjusts for the seasons and nurtures each plant's unique needs a teacher refines their methods, embraces new ideas and adapts to the ever-changing needs of the students.
As teachers it is fixed within our DNA that part of everyday school life is having our school leaders walk into our workplace and watch us do our job. I can’t think of many other professions where someone's everyday working life is so consistently under scrutiny, no matter how developmental and supportive this process is. We value the feedback that is given to us of course, because we know that this will make us better teachers. We never stand still, ever evolving, and always striving to do a better job tomorrow than we did today. .
Over the last year at Loseley, we have thought hard about how we should refine the way we undertake our monitoring responsibilities, which is a critical part of our role as leaders. Our teachers are great and our daily classroom visits tell us that our teachers, day after day, deliver high quality teaching and learning. We wanted to find ways that we could floodlight the great practice across the school whilst also trusting the staff to turn a spotlight on their own practice in an effort to make marginal gains across the days, weeks and months ahead. We knew that we needed to move our monitoring processes towards one where our role as leaders became more high frequency but low stakes and that our teachers were actively and purposefully designing their own CPD journey, giving them more autonomy, more control, more trust.
To achieve this, we have invested in training leaders in a model of instructional coaching and in the use of Walkthrus and have been rolling this out across the school to all teachers in our weekly staff meeting time.
We are at the early stages of the implementation of this across the school, but early evidence has shown us that because of the Walkthrus we have implemented, our children are able to talk about the pedagogical approach their teachers have used and most importantly how that technique has supported their learning. It has also helped to develop a Loseley Blueprint of what every child will experience as they move through the school, a set of teaching and learning principles which mean that our children know what to expect, no matter who is teaching them. It is new and exciting and it will be really interesting to see how this strengthens outcomes over time.
