There’s nothing that fires me up more than talking about great teaching, so one of my biggest frustrations with education in Scotland is the apparent loss of a focus on this. There are just too many competing priorities and the wrong things are prioritised.

Here’s a quick experiment. Hands up if your school-improvement plan makes reference to one or more of the following: inclusion, equity, health and wellbeing, outdoor learning, tracking skills, moderation. All of you? Just as I thought.

Now, hands up if your school-improvement plan makes reference to specific pedagogy, teacher subject knowledge or development of a knowledge-rich curriculum? Usually, that means a few arms tentatively uncoiling themselves at the back of the room. But everyone’s hand should be up. If not, I’d ask you to consider why not. It’s probably because you are either focusing on too many things or on the wrong things. But it might not be your fault - perhaps it’s what you’re being told and expected to do.

Education in Scotland should have the same goal as education across the world: to transform lives. Education transforms lives when it leads to young people becoming educated. That seems pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people working in education today seem to have lost sight of this.

To become educated, students have to learn: learning is the purpose of school. To support, challenge and inspire students to learn, teachers and school leaders need to first determine what it is that students need to learn, and then how best to teach them this. Really, that’s what everything in a school should boil down to: the curriculum and pedagogy.

When Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was introduced in Scotland, the aim was to create “confident individuals”, “responsible citizens”, “effective contributors” and “successful learners”. A focus on curriculum and pedagogy should achieve all of this, but only if we focus on them in the right way. Engaging with educational literature and research is the best thing we can do to become clear about what this right way is.

Teaching isn’t a “do as you like” profession. Educational literature and research - which is more readily available to teachers and school leaders than ever before - makes clear that, while almost everything can work to some extent, not everything works equally well. There are particular things that are more valuable for us to be teaching than others; there are particular teaching practices that are generally more effective than others. The more we engage in professional reading, the more confident we will become in our understanding of such matters.

Last month, I delivered the keynote address at the inaugural ScotEd conference, an online event expertly organised by teachers Fiona Leadbeater and Darren Leslie, where I set out three fundamental pedagogical principles.

Pedagogical principle 1: The most important consideration is the extent to which all students are learning what we plan for them to learn

When we plan lessons, the most important consideration should be what - specifically - we want our students to learn. Before we start to plan any learning activities, we need to be crystal clear about what this is.

If we are clear about this, then our learning intentions and success criteria will be clear. Learning activities will be carefully designed and executed to ensure that all students are learning precisely what we planned for them to learn. However, if we aren’t clear in our own minds about what we want our students to learn, then the opposite will be true.

Learning intentions and success criteria will be vague and unfocused. Learning activities might engage students and keep them busy, but they won’t really drive them towards a specific learning goal. A fog of uncertainty will permeate our classrooms. Clarity in the specific content to be taught influences everything that follows.

Just as essential is the need to continually check that the content we are teaching is being learned - teachers “covering” content and students learning it are not the same thing. A teaching-learning gap is inevitable, and the key to measuring and bridging this is continuous, low-stakes assessment.

The words “assessment”, “test” and “check” are effectively synonymous. As we teach, it is essential that we continually check the extent to which all students are learning what they are supposed to be learning. One, two or a few students aren’t good enough: it needs to be everyone. The learning of each student is just as important as that of every other student. Allowing some students to learn some things while others don’t is the fastest way to create learning and attainment gaps between students.

The best way to check student learning is often to ask a specific question designed to gauge this. Checking the learning of 30 students in a class is far easier than it might first appear - all we need is the right tools. In fact, all we really need is one specific tool: the “show-me board” (or mini whiteboard, to give it a more prosaic name).

When we ask a question, all students should be expected to write their answer on a show-me board. Doing so achieves three things:

• It makes all students think.
• It makes all students commit to a specific answer.
• It makes the learning of all students visible to the teacher.

Show-me boards offer an invaluable means to measure and address the teaching-learning gap.

Pedagogical principle 2: Being busy and learning are not the same thing

Any activity that gets students to think hard about the specific things we want them to learn is likely to be useful. That idea should be central when we plan learning activities for lessons, if we want to include all students.

As teachers, what students are thinking about during a lesson should be a primary concern for us. Paying attention isn’t enough - students need to be thinking.

More than that, they need to be thinking about the specific things we want them to learn. This is what we mean (or should mean) when we talk about “active learning”. Active learning doesn’t mean students running around the room or cutting things out. It should mean “active engagement” - basically, thinking hard.

Active learning is often confused with what I call “being-busy” activities. Being-busy activities are those that are good at getting students to “do” something, but not to think about the things that they should be thinking about. Here are some of the most common being-busy activities I see in lessons:

• Copying notes from the board or a book.
• Transferring information from one place to another, without having to think about it.
• Moving around the room for no apparent reason.
• Watching something or listening to something for extended periods with no interaction.
• Group discussion, when no one in the group has enough knowledge to benefit anyone else.

The biggest mistake we can make when we plan lessons is to plan for enjoyment. Planning for enjoyment is what should happen in a youth club or for a party, not for lessons in a school. This is not to say that we don’t want our lessons to be enjoyable - we do. But enjoyment will come from learning and success in learning; enjoyment is a by-product of learning. The reverse, however, often doesn’t hold true.

Pedagogical principle 3: ‘Novices’ and ‘experts’ think and learn differently

Whenever anyone learns anything new, they are novices in that area. This is independent of age and stage. A P1 student who can’t read is a novice reader; a sixth-year secondary student who has never learned anything about quantum mechanics is a novice.

The best way to teach novices is through what I term “specific teaching”. By this, I mean direct/interactive instruction and formative assessment.

In specific teaching, we set a clear learning goal (the learning intention); we make clear what we are looking for (success criteria); we present content clearly and interactively; we provide adequate opportunities for practice; there are frequent checks for understanding; and there is specific feedback. This is the sort of teaching we should be doing 80 to 90 per cent of the time in lessons.

Specific teaching is unapologetically teacher-led. The teacher is the expert in what they are teaching; students, for the most part, are novices. We can’t let novices lead their learning: they don’t know what they are doing. It’s the equivalent of going on a cookery course and turning up to find that you are going to learn by following a recipe - you could have done that at home. The whole point of going on the course was that your learning would be better than it would have been at home. The same principle holds true for learning in schools.

Specific teaching should be learning led: it is diagnostic and responsive, and different from being learner led. Based on continuous evidence of what students know and don’t know, or what they can and can’t do, the teacher adjusts their teaching. This is very different from letting students lead the learning themselves.

Once students become more expert in a particular area, then (and only then) can teaching start to look different. “Non-specific teaching”, which involves students applying their learning, including through discovery and inquiry, is an appropriate approach once students have sufficient subject knowledge in a particular area. Used appropriately, non-specific teaching can help to deepen and enrich learning. It is the sort of teaching we should be utilising 10 to 20 per cent of the time in lessons.

Where a lot of teachers and school leaders are going wrong is by getting the balance of specific and non-specific teaching approaches the wrong way around. If we correct this and get it right, teaching in schools across the country really will start to transform lives.

Bruce Robertson is rector at Berwickshire High School and author of The Teaching Delusion

This article originally appeared in the 23 October 2020 issue under the headline “Teaching is as easy as 1, 2, 3”