Skip to main content

Good to outstanding

Some discussion in the department recently on the question of what constitutes an "outstanding" lesson - OFSTED's adjective, not mine. Funny how we take on board an imposed term and assume it makes sense. It's all part of a national drive to increas the number of really good lessons. Maybe "really good" would be a better term - firstly because, by definition, an "outstanding" lesson should be a fairly rare one (am I being pedantic there?); secondly it is actually not that easy to define what a "really good" lesson is.

When we talked about this we came up with a number of features which might (I stress might) be part of a really good lesson. Interested? Well, here they are:
  • Enjoyment (not necessarily fun)
  • Large amounts of target language
  • Progress being made according to the ability of each pupil, which implies...
  • Differentiation
  • Participation of many
  • A cultural element
  • Variety of tasks
  • Pace
  • Challenge
  • Pupils recognising their own progress
  • A collective feeling of support for each other and from the teacher
  • Appropriate homework where relevant
I may have forgotten something, but that is pretty much what we came up with. We felt it was hard to define an "outstanding" lesson, but that we might recognise it when we saw it. There is also an element of subjectivity involved because we may have different views on how a second language is best learned.

We wondered whether the following could be called "outstanding":
  • A lesson spent translating sentences
  • Doing a dictation
  • Watching a foreign language film
  • Spending a lesson in the ICT room doing an interactive listening task with almost no teacher input
My guess is that we would not plan any of those lessons for an inspector even though they are all perfectly valid lessons which would further the progress of a student.

One problem with any generic set of descriptors for a good lesson is that they do not take account of individual subject needs. In a language lesson, notably the need for plenty of target language input.

Anyway, I reckon we should keep teaching lots of good lessons and hope that some of them are "really good". That would be a decent average in a job where we have too many lessons and too many pupils in each classroom.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
Post a Comment
Read more

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics
5 comments
Read more

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,
1 comment
Read more