One of the conclusions from our work with schools supporting their development of CPD programmes, is that it’s incredibly helpful to have a teaching and learning framework that contains within it, a relatively small number of core techniques that everyone knows, understands and, ultimately, uses with real confidence and precision. Having initially found that leaders arrived at this conclusion more or less independently time after time, we are now inclined to suggest it up front: select a set of techniques that most teachers use most days, a set you can call ‘The School Core 8’ (or 5 or 7 or 10 etc) – and work on those to start with.

I often introduce this concept with the tennis player analogy:

If 5 or 50 tennis players meet to discuss their game, they have a shared language for what they do: for the strokes, the tactics and all kinds of details. Every player is an individual who expresses themselves on court but each one knows what forehand, backhand, serve, volley and ‘cross-court passing shot’ mean. This enables them to have meaningful conversations about improvement and personal challenges. However these shots are not ‘basics’ in the sense of being relatively easy; they are ‘core’ in the sense of being absolutely fundamental to the game. Even the very best players work on their core techniques all the time – in fact, especially the best players do this – which is why they are so good. 

So, the analogy is clear: In a school, it’s really very helpful to have a core set of techniques akin to the core strokes of tennis. The interesting thing however, is that almost no two schools define their core in the same way. Across our hundreds of schools doing this work, when they share their core clusters with us, there are common elements but always lots of interesting variants. Unsurprisingly, the core normally has elements related to:

• Behaviour management: e.g. Signal, Pause, Insist, Rehearse Routines
• Explaining and Modelling: e.g. Live Modelling. I do, We do. You Do
• Questioning: e.g. Cold Calling, Think Pair Share, Show-Me Boards
• Retrieval Practice: e.g. Quizzing, Weekly and Monthly Review,

It’s a useful and important process to involve all staff in selecting this core and, once established, there are multiple benefits. For example, the core might include all the techniques in this combination for questioning. 

Training and Implementation: Every teacher can take part in training on these key modes for checking for understanding. This, for a period, is then the focus for ongoing coaching and team discussion. Quite rapidly, if the focus is strong enough, every teacher in every lesson where they’re appropriate, can be using these core techniques with real fluency, adapting them and combining them responsively – which is always the goal. But they do each one with precision – not just their own half-hearted interpretation

Induction of ECTs and new staff: The core set of techniques can represent ‘the way we do things here’ for a school. Welcome to ABC Academy, these are our core techniques. The core set becomes the content of the induction programme, bringing people up to speed.

It makes a vast difference when across a whole staff body, you encounter strong consistent practice in a few core areas; the students’ habits are stronger, the teachers’ habits are stronger and the learning is enhanced accordingly. It’s just so useful for Cold Call to be totally normal across a school, for Think Pair Share to have commonly understood routines and for Show Me Boards to be a no-fuss daily routine with any faff and novelty overcome. Consistency isn’t a goal in itself – but if you’ve selected techniques because of their fundamental role in strongly effective teaching, it makes sense for everyone to know how to use them, when they need to. In our work, we stress that it’s vital that techniques are known in detail – step by step – not just at the superficial level of knowing the name or only doing the first step.

Subject/Phase Application: With a strong core set of techniques reasonably well embedded, the focus can be much more directed to task design and decision making relevant to a phase or a subject . It’s natural and necessary to move beyond genericism in teaching. However. you don’t need a special History/ Geography or Y2/Y6 version of Think Pair Share or Cold Calling. You start with a generic idea and then with the essential routine well understood, the discussion can largely focus on which specific questions to ask, how to structure or scaffold them, how to respond in a probing manner and how best to capture and respond to ideas, errors or misconceptions from across a class. All techniques must be adapted to be meaningful in their context- but it’s so powerful to start off with a common understanding.

Mileage for Improvement: Lastly, perhaps the main benefit in having a clearly defined common core, is that very often there is so much mileage in improving core techniques in order to maximise learning in classes across a school. In most of my commentary on the core challenges teachers face, the issue is that too often not all students are fully involved in the learning process. These two posts explore this in detail:

If every single teacher was very intentionally, systematically seeking to involve absolutely all students in thinking, responding, practising – with time to make sense of instructional inputs, then a lot more students would be learning a whole lot more. In a lot of schools, the conclusion I reach with leaders is that, until those fundamental techniques are working much better, embedded as teacher habits day after day, there’s little value in being diverted to work on other things. 

Obviously I’m using Walkthrus here because that’s my thing – and our cluster builder tool is a great support for the selection process. But of course the same idea applies using any other source of techniques – such a with Teach Like A Champion or Bruce Robertson’s Powered-Up Pedagogy. The more well defined the techniques are, the better. A core can’t be too big – otherwise you lose focus – so 3-8 techniques seems like a sensible range.