One of the conclusions from our work with schools supporting their development of CPD programmes, is that it’s incredibly helpful to have a teaching and learning framework that contains within it, a relatively small number of core techniques that everyone knows, understands and, ultimately, uses with real confidence and precision. Having initially found that leaders arrived at this conclusion more or less independently time after time, we are now inclined to suggest it up front: select a set of techniques that most teachers use most days, a set you can call ‘The School Core 8’ (or 5 or 7 or 10 etc) – and work on those to start with.
I often introduce this concept with the tennis player analogy:
If 5 or 50 tennis players meet to discuss their game, they have a shared language for what they do: for the strokes, the tactics and all kinds of details. Every player is an individual who expresses themselves on court but each one knows what forehand, backhand, serve, volley and ‘cross-court passing shot’ mean. This enables them to have meaningful conversations about improvement and personal challenges. However these shots are not ‘basics’ in the sense of being relatively easy; they are ‘core’ in the sense of being absolutely fundamental to the game. Even the very best players work on their core techniques all the time – in fact, especially the best players do this – which is why they are so good.
