Teaching Walkthrus

If there has been anything modestly positive about the global experience with moving out of classrooms in March and setting up ‘virtually’, it has been how powerfully it confirmed for teachers this central principle: clarity. 

Without immediate physical proximity, we were deprived of many of the subtle and scarcely-conscious tools we used to guide and assess our pupils (more in my review of Daisy Christodoulou’s recent Teachers vs Tech). We can get lazy or complacent in the classroom: from March we needed to be particularly clear about what we were doing, what our expectations were, and how they might be achieved by those we teach. All this was being done in a medium in which virtually no teachers had any experience. Now we’re about to head back into classrooms (touch wood) after six months, and clarity will be still more important in every area of our practice.

Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli’s latest project, Teaching Walkthrus: five-step guides to instructional coaching was planned without any of this in mind, but it is perfectly timed. Its is just what is needed by both new teachers uncertain about their practice and more experienced teachers who want to sharpen and re-invigorate theirs. This is one of those books that now seems obvious: why has no-one done this before? (Perhaps Doug Lemov’s books and videos are the closest).  It is a marvel of precision, with every page laying out a series of five steps, the illustrations and words working effectively together. The layout itself is a pleasure, skilfully making the most of a limited palette, with yellow to the fore (it would be great to see Oliver Caviglioli designing a contemporary English textbook: so many now are cognitive nightmares of clashing fonts, colours and images). By the way, it renders particularly well on an iPad in portrait mode.

An example of precision (and concision): The pages ‘Deliver core; signpost hinterland’ help teachers in just two pages think about how they might approach material which deepens ‘the background against which the core content exists’. This is complex stuff, but the five steps (as always, five short paragraphs, five vivid illustrations) guide the reader clearly through it, culminating in step 5: 

Perhaps more than any other strategy - adopt a mindset that it is always worthwhile adding depth to the learning by telling stories, responding to events and sharing ideas as they come up - even if they are not directly covered in the curriculum. This could be a news story, the history behind a scientific discovery, a passage from another Dickens novel to contrast with the one you are reading or the story of Dickens as a person. A rich range of hinterland experiences tells students that all this is out there to learn about, adding curricular texture to the current core focus or to explore in the future.

This is just what most of us are in teaching are here for (the section Mode B Teaching continues to explore this).

Three core chapters have a lot of amount of valuable guidance: Explaining and Modelling, Questioning and Feedback, Practice & Retrieval. For anyone not familiar with the principles of cold-calling, how to use show-me boards, or how to guide pupils to use a knowledge organiser, for instance, these pages lay them out coherently.

At the start of the book the authors mention Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto (by the way Gawande, a superb writer on medical matters, is one of the most interesting writers also for teachers, such as in his book Better). They point out that checklists don’t have to be inflexible. They recognise that some kind of scaffolding is very helpful for teachers, but that it needs to be adaptable. And at the bottom of every page is the mantra - Attempt | Develop | Adapt | Practise | Test. Literally the central word here is ‘Adapt’.  

This is an excellent resource for all teachers. I wish I had had it when I started to teach (cough) years ago.

There is also a suite of supports for subscribing schools, and more books are planned. A short video below gives a good sense of the layout).