Something I’ve reflected on a lot recently is just how widespread and deeply embedded certain problematic teacher behaviours are and just how unnatural the more effective alternatives can feel to people. Fundamentally, it seems to me, that teaching has just not been hard-wired to be truly inclusive; inclusive teaching is not part of the fabric of what teaching is generally, collectively, considered to be. This is why it can feel to be a big shift for people to change practice in this direction.

I would say that, very generally, the default practice is to switch between two modes:

Lecture/presentation style: the assumption that when we talk, everyone is listening and learning and them being in the room, present while we explain things and completing some tasks constitutes the mainstay of what schooling is. It’s more or less up to the student to pay attention and glean what they can from this process and the mainstay of assessment is through summative testing at the end of a unit.

Tutorial style: the practice of creating individual or very small group scenarios where we address individual concerns close-up with some to and fro of checking for understanding, because there is time and space to do so relatively easily. This isn’t feasible as the main mode because there are too many students; this mode is occasional and reserved for selected students or very occasional in-class interactions.

Crucially, neither of these modes delivers the inclusive teaching that is needed all the time to truly ensure every single individual student is learning successfully. The interactive nature of tutorial style teaching does not generally get translated to a class of 30 – as the default. It takes effort and deliberate decision-making to switch away from the default lecture style. Let me illustrate this with a focus on two specific things:

• Participation (thinking, practising)
• Checking for understanding

Participation:

I would say that the default for participation is to rely on students taking responsibility for it themselves – sink or swim. This leads to teachers accepting that lessons are typically dominated by the most vocal, most confident students. When students opt out or sit back or don’t volunteer- the assumption is that they’ll be thinking – and that really it’s up to them to do this. If I’m speaking into a room of people looking at me, I can assume that what I’m saying or showing, is what they’re thinking about – or least, if they’re not, that’s down to them.

This manifests itself with anything involving talking. Very typically, most students are not invited to talk because the default is that one person talks at a time in the whole space. Teachers ask questions like this all the time:

• Would anyone like to tell me…..?
• Who has an answer to ….?
• Who can tell me….?

Or they pitch a question into the room.. and anyone can call out the answer. It’s up to the students to join in. Or not.

Even with paired or group talk, the assumption is that students will self-direct so that each student in involved in ways that support their learning. You see a lot of groups of 4 or 5 in lessons where it’s obvious that 2 or 3 students are just passively present while the others do the talking and thinking. This mirrors adult behaviours in social groups and in meetings. Socially, people chip in, share or compete for the air time and it’s common for some to dominate and others to sit back. This is our norm. In a team meeting of 6 people or staff meeting of 60, many people do not speak. Generally, again, some people dominate and others sit back – this is very firmly the default pattern and is only different when there’s a deliberate effort to introduce structure to the discourse. It’s so often the case that introducing these structures feels odd to people because they’re just not used to it – eg pair talk in a staff meeting; it’s not the norm. The norm is ‘sit and listen while one or two people offer opinions and ask questions’.

Checking for Understanding

The default is to sample or to accept non-specific self-reports. This approach is ubiquitous:

• Does everyone get that yeah?
• Any questions?
• Does that all make sense?
• Michael, are you ok with that?
• Are we all ready to move on?

If I had a pound for every time …..! This isn’t some glitch in the matrix; I’m not reporting occasional slips. The rhetorical self-report ( does that make sense?) is deep in the pedagogical DNA of teaching and many many teachers. It’s part of how we talk to each other – do you know what I mean? In general conversation, nobody says – ‘ok, Tom, let me hear what you think I was saying so I can check your understanding’.

And of course, as reported by Wiliam and Black in Inside the Black Box , checking for understanding can be very weak indeed:

• Where… a teacher answers her or his own question after only two or three seconds… there is no possibility that a pupil can think out what to say. 
• It is… common that only a few pupils in a class answer teachers’ questions. The rest then leave it to the few, knowing that they cannot respond as quickly and being unwilling to risk making mistakes in public. 
• So the teacher… can keep the lesson going but is actually out of touch with the understanding of most of the class – the question-answer dialogue becomes a ritual… and thoughtful involvement suffers. (my emphasis)

This tendency to rely on the answers of a few is again, deeply hard-wired. It’s the default position. I’d say it’s how most teachers teach most of the time. We seem to take our default social norms and apply them to the classroom even when there are far too many students. One major consequence of this is that teachers seek out and over-emphasise correctness and students making mistakes or failing to understand are hidden; there is not a culture of error where error-seeking is the norm.

So how could it be different?

For this to be turned the right way up, we first need to recognise the need for it; to understand how far short of inclusive teaching the norms and default behaviours fall. Every teacher training course and PD programme would need to build around some very different fundamental ideas. We need to run the room so that:

• the guiding idea is a need to engage with the learning of every single individual student in an interactive manner: teacher-student interactions are designed with this explicit goal considering how to do it across each lesson. This requires a raft of techniques.
• every individual student participates in answering the questions systematically, no volunteers or opting out. Cold Calling is just absolutely standard; the norm; embedded; uncontroversially regarded as a keystone of inclusive teaching.
• when talk is important, it is important for every single student so we structure talk so that this happens systematically; nobody dominates; there’s no competition for air time.
• checks for understanding are informed by all students’ answers – so whole-class response methods need to be deployed routinely alongside sampling methods and active circulation.
• we create a culture of error such that being wrong or unsure is safe and the goal of formative assessment is finding out who does not understand, what they don’t understand and why, rejecting self-report or reliance on partial sampling.
• whenever needed, we reteach. We anticipate this and adapt lessons in real time and over time to ensure we deal with the learning challenges students experience; we vary practice and scaffolds such that we allow all students to move forwards together.

This isn’t easy and for some people it represents a massive shift. Many teachers who project a belief in inclusion do not actually teach inclusively – as I explore here:

I think we need to create this right-way-up model of teaching with some urgency whilst also recognising that it goes against the grain of our social norms. When teaching 30 children inclusively, the way we interact is radically different. Our explicit intention is to engage every learner, to make sure they are all thinking, they are all making meaning with the material and they are all practising using new knowledge. When this becomes embedded:

• teachers would feel foolish and weird saying ‘does everyone get that yeah? ‘. This would be bizarre and silly – nobody would do it.
• teachers wouldn’t take volunteered answers as representative of the whole class’ understanding – again, that would just be ridiculous.
• show-me boards or their tech equivalent are just absolutely ubiquitous – how else can you see all the students’ answers at once?
• pair talk would just always always have enough structure to ensure both participants can and do exchange meaningful answers, practising using the new vocabulary and checking their own understanding. Allowing dominant/passive patterns to emerge would be obviously unacceptable and teachers wouldn’t let that happen.
• we don’t knowingly leave students behind, driven solely by the pace of those who are running ahead; we explore the needs of those finding learning the hardest and adapt our inputs and practice to build their confidence.

Importantly, none of this diminishes students’ capacity to build agency or take responsibility for their learning – in fact it enables more students to develop in that direction because their foundations are stronger. Teaching should never be sink or swim, take it or leave it. Teachers have responsibilities to guide each and every student to success and teaching them together in a room doesn’t change that.

Some of you reading this might respond with – surely everyone does this already? Well, no they don’t. They really don’t. I see aspects of this issue every time I visit a school in any country; sometimes in every single lesson with every single teacher. It’s not a teacher competency question – all teachers are able to make the shift. I think it runs deeper – it’s a system issue – the very essence of how to engage with a whole class of children in an interactive, responsive, inclusive manner just isn’t hard wired into the foundations of what teaching is. It could be and should be but we’re not there yet by a long way.