It was John Hattie who awakened me to what we needed to do. I was sitting in a CPD session, discussing his research, and we had just reached one of the most important effects he cites for pupil success: collective teacher self-efficacy.

“Hardly ground-breaking,” I thought, “but actually…who is taking this seriously enough to do something about it?”

The more I thought about it, the clearer the answer became: not enough people in education are considering this and we are suffering retention issues as a result. So, how could we turn things around?

In the past few years, my college has become a research school, which has given us the opportunity to observe and reflect upon different school systems. One particular system caught my eye: Leadership Lite.

It’s a two-year leadership and culture change programme developed by the Carmel Education Trust, which aims to reduce teacher workload by removing practices such as overly complicated marking policies and individual planning and, in particular, changing how observations are conducted within the school setting.

It struck a chord with me as it provides schools with the necessary tools to promote self-efficacy, giving teachers the opportunity to improve classroom practice because they want to and giving them the autonomy to trial new practice without fear of being judged. It also instructs leaders how to manage change effectively and transparently.

We decided to trial the approach, and rolled it out within our science department: a large department made up of 17 teachers.

As a department, we had no particular issues other than our size and the fact that we have three sub-departments, which means that we teach some common aspects of science in quite different ways, with mixed success. Wider department consistency is difficult to achieve when we are delivering four different A levels and have large triple science GCSE groups, along with combined science and key stage 3 science.

We are very fortunate to have enough specialists for each of us to teach within our own specialism, but this can come at a cost: a lack of sharing ideas because of a fear that they aren’t “useful” to our colleagues and the danger of a certain insularity.

So, how did Leadership Lite help us? Firstly, the programme encourages staff to look at their own practice and to “buddy up” with their colleagues to conduct small research-led investigations.

Following the Japanese study model “lesson study”, we began to collaboratively plan, observe and discuss what we found.

We chose lesson study because we felt it would give us a structure to legitimise the type of conversations we have every day. Teachers are always reflecting on outcomes, behaviour or curriculum changes, but we don’t always give our reflections the credit they deserve; we rarely have time to think about the impact those casual chats over coffee might have on our practice.

Secondly, Leadership Lite tells us that all observations should be peer-to-peer and have a mutually agreed development focus. This will usually be informed by whole-school CPD and result in teachers putting suggested strategies into practice. For example, some people in our department decided to focus on the use of metacognition in lessons, whereas others looked at literacy within science.

This format is based on the idea that observations are a learning experience for the observers and not a judgement on those being observed. The focus is on observing others’ interpretations of collaborative planning, celebrating successes and reflecting on weaknesses - and thinking about the impact of this on the practice of the observer.

For this to be successful, we had to be really honest about our own practice, both positive and negative, and what we wanted to see in each other. This potentially puts a department in a vulnerable place, but we found real benefits to giving teachers more autonomy to treat themselves as professionals.

Once the vast majority of the department was fully on board with this approach, it was time for the final challenge. We had to be realistic about what we could feasibly do, and decide what we needed to sacrifice in order to make the necessary space for us to reflect on our professional practice.

Leadership Lite gives recommendations around how to decide which sacrifices will be the least costly. For example, we decided to sacrifice our existing key stage 4 revision interventions and replace these with a new approach to revision based on an evidence-informed skills programme (Dunlosky, 2013).

Dunlosky’s meta-analysis looks into 10 learning techniques and gives recommendations for their relative uses. The criteria for the techniques are that they are all easy to adopt and are things that students tend to do regularly already, such as the dreaded “I’ve read the revision guide and highlighted it”.

We looked at which techniques had better outcomes and then set about using spaced revision, grounding this with practice testing, elaborative interrogation (using questions such as “how?” or “why?” to help students memorise information) and self-explanation using SOLO taxonomy (a system for classifying learning outcomes according to their complexity). We essentially made the students into mini-examiners. By trialling this relatively easy new approach, we were left with enough time to do research into our own practice.

We also decided to sacrifice some of our more traditional practices, in favour of new teacher-led approaches. For example, we stopped senior leadership observations and instead scheduled our own observations and stuck to them, using a shared online document (which showed the aim of the observation, who completed it and when) to hold ourselves accountable.

In addition, we streamlined our CPD practices in line with the Leadership Lite programme, which tailors development depending on your role within the department (head of department, senior leader and teacher of science). This meant we were able to opt out of certain whole-school CPD sessions that weren’t relevant for our role, allowing us the time to discuss practice and to plan our next moves.

However, it is important to point out that the Leadership Lite approach is not always easy. It relies on teachers wanting to be part of the process, and even though you are sacrificing some of the more cumbersome tasks, there is still plenty of work to be done - it is just done in a way that gives more autonomy to teaching staff. Commitment is needed to ensure that the process is consistent and collaborative.

This approach might also be a challenge for some leaders, as they are required to be much more “hands-off”. Yet it has been a career-defining moment to see how this approach has left teachers in my department feeling able to breathe again, and beginning to rediscover their love for their practice as a result.

Stripping out the unnecessary tasks and asking leaders to take a step back has given teachers the chance to reflect on the impact of what they do in the classroom. They are now able to use wider evidence, not just assessment data, to inform their practice. Our department is now more collaborative than it has ever been and both teachers and pupils are benefiting.

Rachael Hardcastle is assistant head of sixth form and a science teacher at Carmel RC College, in Darlington, part of the Bishop Hogarth Catholic Education Trust

This article originally appeared in the 14 August 2020 issue under the headline “‘Light’ leadership adds weight to your teaching”