It is one of the accepted norms of classroom etiquette - if you want to answer a question during a lesson, you put your hand up.

But this isn’t the case at Eyemouth High, a secondary school of around 450 pupils in the south-east of Scotland, just a few miles from the border with England. It “just isn’t really done”, explains principal teacher of English Kelly Fairbairn.

Instead, when it comes to answering questions, the teachers select the student they want to answer by name or by using lollipop sticks drawn at random. The school has also embraced the idea of using miniature whiteboards, so that an entire class can answer a question at the same time, holding up the answers on their individual boards. The teacher can then scan the room to check that everyone understands.

The change has come about as a result of four years of unrelenting focus on what makes for a high-quality lesson - something that Eyemouth High teachers have tried to pin down through their “lesson evaluation toolkit”. The toolkit talks about the need for teachers to set out precise learning goals; to present clearly; to give pupils lots of opportunities to master the content; to ensure all pupils are challenged appropriately; to build relationships; to have high expectations; and to give good feedback.

The teachers’ professional development is then linked to working on those very qualities they have homed in on as important in classrooms. Teachers who have mastered aspects of the toolkit deliver workshops to their colleagues.

Staff say this approach - where professional development is done with them, not to them, and has a clear focus on improving what they do every day in the classroom - has kept their practice fresh and “fired up”.

It is also why you are unlikely to witness a sea of raised hands in Eyemouth High’s classrooms, given the work teachers here have done on using questioning to make pupils think and to check that students are following the lesson. There is, in other words, a clear practical impact in classrooms stemming from the focus on teachers’ professional learning.

“It is about feedback to the teacher,” explains Fairbairn. “If you just ask a question and go to the person who always puts their hand up, as a teacher, you think the class know the answer and you can move on. But if you go round some of the students who don’t traditionally put their hand up, you are more likely to be able to gauge if you have covered something clearly enough and if they have understood it.”

The Eyemouth approach also ensures that there are “no passengers” and that everyone in the class is engaging with the lesson, Fairbairn adds. “If you think you could be called on at any point to answer, you have to engage and listen,” she says. “It gets everybody in the class thinking.”

S5 pupil Ellis agrees, although he describes the situation slightly differently: “Yeah, it’s the fear factor,” he says.

The first iteration of the lesson-evaluation toolkit was launched after a staff in-service back in 2015. Since then, it has been updated by the school’s “learning and teaching improvement group”, which is led by modern languages principal teacher Caroline Martin and has around a dozen members, with a teacher from each of the school’s faculties sitting on it.

The school’s focus on a coherent approach to teachers’ professional learning and classroom practice has been motivated by the push in Scotland to close the “attainment gap” between pupils from different social backgrounds. Improving the quality of teaching might not seem like the most obvious way of counteracting the impact of poverty on pupils, but it is the single most important driver of pupil attainment, says headteacher Robin Chapman.

The school is not looking for all elements in the toolkit - which come under 13 broad headings - to be present in every lesson, but what it is trying to do is spread the word about the kinds of things a teacher can focus on if they want to get better at what they do.

“It’s not a checklist that we expect teachers to tick off,” says depute head Bruce Robertson. “It’s an evaluative framework and a way to support self-evaluation of practice, to support planning or reflection.

“We are definitely not saying, ‘This or that must be there.’”

Later this month, the school will receive the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s school award for excellence in professional learning. The school’s latest inspection report, published in January, highlighted the “clear commitment” of the school’s teachers “to improving the learning experiences of all young people”, adding that they took part in “considerable professional learning”.

Robertson says: “All schools have really high-quality learning and teaching happening - the challenge is how you share that practice. For us, there are two components to it: creating the shared understanding of what we mean by ‘good learning and teaching’, and the development of a professional learning culture.”

The school has invested in a library for staff stocked with key books on educational research and thinking - from Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan to Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov. There is a professional-reading book club with about 10 teachers meeting every two weeks in the English department’s base.

Meanwhile, head of PE Colin Richardson also has the role of principal teacher of teaching and learning. He carries out lesson observations and supports colleagues who are keen to get his help in honing a particular part of their practice.

Teachers at Eyemouth High are observed at least once a term. In its report for the professional learning award, the GTCS highlighted “the extensive use of lesson observation” at the school, adding that these observations were “enhanced through a coaching approach to feedback”.

Richardson’s role, however, was born out of the most difficult of circumstances. He was involved in a rallying accident in 2010 that left him paralysed from the chest down and was unable to lead lessons five days a week.

Now, though, the school has been able to tap into “a career’s worth of coaching skills”, as Chapman puts it. Richardson - along with Robertson, the depute head responsible for teaching and learning - shares the good classroom practice he sees through regular programmes of teacher-led workshops, and by posting about them on the school’s teaching and learning website.

This sharing of good practice is encouraged among teachers at all levels. For example, English teacher Ruth Alder-Bateman delivered a workshop on Kahoot! - the online tool that allows teachers to host surveys and quizzes - just six months into the job.

This sharing of teaching ideas also prompted modern languages principal teacher Martin, who has been at the school for 20 years, to become interested in “entry and exit passes”, short quizzes that test pupils’ understanding at the beginning and end of lessons. She knows these are used well by some of the school’s young social subjects teachers - probationer Alice Chamberlain and Matt Corfield, a teacher of two years - so, when Tes Scotland visits just before the summer holiday, she is in the process of setting up a time to observe them.

“We know from the likes of Doug Lemov that a lot of professional learning has no impact, so what we are desperate to do is make it relevant and enjoyable and something people could quickly transfer,” says Robertson. “So people could pick it up and use it the following week if they wanted to.”

The teachers agree that their professional learning here does have an impact. Viv Sumerling, a learning support teacher in the school, says she worked in the college sector for more than 20 years and remembers going to professional development sessions there to learn things that she never had the chance to implement - or even properly process. Here, professional learning isn’t something that is done to the teachers; rather they are fully involved, she says. “It’s quite empowering,” she adds. “You can be part of it - you can share views and exchange ideas.”

Pupils also have a say. An accusation often levied at schools is that they might ask pupils about the state of the toilets, but shy away from asking them for feedback on more fundamental aspects of schools, such as lessons. Not here: at Eyemouth High, pupils use a traffic-light system every year to evaluate their experience of teaching and learning, subject by subject.

In the past, unions have expressed concern that teachers could be undermined if pupils were able to pass judgement on their lessons. However, the results of pupil surveys and lesson observations are “not a stick to beat you with” but “a way of making you better”, says Mark Alexander, a PE teacher at the school. English teacher Fairbairn points out that reading pupils’ comments can, in fact, be a really heartening and uplifting process.

Alexander did his teacher training almost 20 years ago now and says that the approach to professional learning at Eyemouth has helped him to keep his passion for the job.

“If you have a lot going on in your life, these things can take priority and sometimes you are not as enthusiastic coming to school. But I feel fired up - it’s a nice place to come in the morning,” he says.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 6 September 2019 issue under the headline “Breaking down borders in CPD”