I observe a lot of teachers teaching in a lot of different contexts and it’s interesting to me to see how common the challenges are from one context to another. Teaching multiple people all at once is inherently challenging and it’s no surprise that some children seem to struggle more than others or they fall through the net of the teacher’s focus and awareness. At the same time as empathising with the challenge, I also see a wide variation in how successful teachers can be in addressing the common issues.
In fact, I would say that, in general across the system, there is huge capacity to improve routine classroom practice in ways that would narrow gaps and start to shift the curve. My sense is that if more teachers routinely used the most effective practices, we’d see a significant impact – far greater than we might achieve through other areas such as tutoring, interventions and various generic whole-school initiatives.
