In my early career teacher years, I attended a morning professional development session where an experienced senior leader demonstrated how he provided targeted support to pupils during whole-class teaching.

His message was straightforward: when setting the class off on a task, provide focused support to a few pupils every lesson, rather than doing the more typical scan of the entire class from the front.

Despite his thoughtful consideration and guidance, most of us in the room raised our eyebrows. His advice revealed a disparity between the classroom contexts he operated in as a school leader and our own. Our inexperience affected the way pupils behaved in our classrooms, particularly when they weren’t being surveyed from the front.

While the technique this senior leader was describing was ostensibly good teaching practice, his suggestion simply wasn’t feasible for many of us newbies.

Situational judgement in the classroom

Psychologist James Stigler argues that teaching happens within complex and highly contextualised systems, which frame how teachers think and act, and how pupils respond. This can make the classroom of an early career teacher a very different environment to that of an experienced leader who is well known throughout the school community.

Knowing the principles of effective teaching practices and how to execute them is essential to becoming a good teacher, but it isn’t sufficient on its own. To make best use of strategies, teachers need to make good judgments about what techniques to implement, when to use them, and how to do so.

In other words, effective teaching isn’t only about the principle, method or strategy but also about understanding the subtleties around its deployment.

For instance, is the lesson in the morning or at the end of the day, and how might this affect pupils’ readiness to learn? Did anything happen in the playground at lunch that unsettled pupils? Are pupils anxious about an upcoming assessment, and how might this affect their attention?

Supporting good judgement

Teacher professional development must recognise the importance of context and build adaptable expertise. It’s not enough to just cover what we know about effective practices. Good teacher CPD must also help trainee and early career teachers understand how to apply those practices within the specific contexts in which they work.

Teaching is, after all, a game of trade-offs and compromises, where the possible benefits of one action must be constantly assessed against the potential risks.

In the middle of a lesson, teachers are repeatedly faced with in-the-moment dilemmas. For example:

• Should I move the lesson on even if I suspect that a few pupils haven’t grasped the concept fully?
• Should I address a pupil’s inappropriate remark immediately and risk disrupting the lesson, or wait until the class ends, potentially cutting into my preparation time for the next lesson?
• Should I provide individual support to one student and risk others getting off track?

In these situations, experienced teachers make effective “micro” and more significant adaptations to their behaviour, according to what they see in front of them.

But how can we help all teachers to make increasingly sound decisions?

The answer to this question may lie in the evidence on teacher “noticing” - as summarised by Johannes König and colleagues in a 2022 review.

Practising better noticing might help teachers to hone their judgement skills, allowing them to more effectively adapt in the moment.

While there is little large-scale generalisable evidence on improving teacher noticing, teachers could do well to consider two key steps in the noticing process:

Improving teacher ‘noticing’: 2 key steps

Attending: understand your pupils and their experiences of school and learning

This starts with posing a series of questions and taking note of the answers:

• How did pupils enter the classroom at the beginning of the lesson, and what did it suggest about their readiness to learn?
• How does this classroom culture differ to my colleague’s?
• How has a pupil’s attitude and communication changed over previous weeks?

Reasoning: interpret your own prior experiences and consider how your decisions may shape learning

Teachers should ask themselves questions like:

• Is this the appropriate level of challenge for my class during this lesson?
• If I intervene and provide support during this independent task, what is the most likely outcome?
• If I provide a scaffold for all pupils, how will this impact those who I think could do this without the additional support?

Teachers can’t anticipate and plan for every single situation that they face in a normal day’s work. But they can challenge themselves to think explicitly about the contexts in which they and their colleagues function, and consider what might be the likely impact of the different decisions they make.

Underpinning this practice, we need teacher CPD that doesn’t assume that early career teachers are operating in the same context as a senior leader, but that instead takes the realities of their classroom environments into account.

Harry Madgwick is a research and policy manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and author of several book chapters on teacher professional development and evidence use in education

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