The 4Ps offer a shared language for consistent high quality teaching. In this five-part series, Matt Bromley breaks down each one and offers practical strategies for teachers. In part five, he breaks down the last P – progress
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My 4Ps framework has been formulated to help one of the schools I support in its mission to improve the quality of teaching.

The idea of the framework is that we want a simple way of capturing all the key actions on the school improvement plan, a means of teachers self-evaluating their current practice to identify their professional development needs, and a shared language with which to articulate their vision and values.

The Ps in question are purpose, pitch, pace, and progress.

 

Explore this SecEd series: The 4Ps of high-quality teaching

 

Introducing progress

As I explained in the first part of this series, there are five teacher self-evaluation criteria associated with progress:

  1. My students know how, when, and why they will be assessed and how prior learning will be activated and built upon.
  2. The results of assessments are used as learning opportunities – often in the form of whole class feedback on the most common errors.
  3. My students are given planned opportunities to extend their experiences including keeping themselves healthy and safe, and developing their plans for their next steps.
  4. My students receive effective advice and guidance to help ensure they follow a relevant pathway and are prepared for the future.
  5. My students make good in-year progress from their individual starting points and those identified as being at risk of not making enough progress are supported in a timely manner and interventions are impactful.

 

Progress in practice

Earlier in this series, I argued that we should share our planning with students so that they know what they are learning, why they are learning it and how they will apply that learning later. The same applies to assessment.

We should share with students how their progress will be assessed, when their progress will be assessed, and what we – and they – will do with the outcomes of these assessments. We need them to understand why assessment matters.

Before we can do that, however, we need to be confident that all our assessments are purposeful, that the process of assessment is efficient and effective, and that the resultant data will be valid and reliable.

 

Purpose, process, validity

When it comes to assessments being purposeful, as a handy rule of thumb, whenever we engage in any form of assessment we should ask: Why? What is the point of this assessment? How will this assessment (and the data we collect from it) help students to make better progress?

If an assessment or data collection exercise is solely for management purposes rather than to help students make progress then it should stop.

When it comes to efficiency, as well as considering the purpose of assessment, we should think about the process by which we will assess, input data, and report the outcomes of assessment.

Here, it is useful to ask whether the process is as efficient as it can be or if it is unnecessarily burdensome. Consider also: when and how often are we expected to assess and input data? Are we expected to engineer a test for students or can data be gathered in a more holistic, synoptic way? How is the data inputted? If it requires the use of technology, do we have easy access to it? What will be the outcome of this data collection exercise? What will be done with the data afterwards and by whom?

And when it comes to the outcomes of assessments, we should consider how valid the data will be. By this, I mean how accurate and useable it will be. In other words, although we may have confidence that the data will be useful in helping students to make progress, the actual data we mine might not be as accurate as we hope and so all our subsequent actions may be futile or misguided as a result.

To help answer this question of accuracy, we may wish to consider what is being assessed and if indeed that thing is assessable in a meaningful way.

What, for example, are we comparing a student outcome to? Are those two things indeed comparable? Is the data we draw reliable? Is it, for example, possible at this stage to assess progress, or might we be measuring a poor proxy for progress instead?

 

Meaningful, manageable, motivating

Next, we want to make sure that all our assessments of progress are meaningful, manageable, and motivating…

 

1, Meaningful

Marking and feedback have but one purpose: to help students make better progress and achieve good outcomes. They might do this directly by providing cues to the student about what to improve, or indirectly by providing assessment information to the teacher to guide their planning and teaching.

Marking and feedback carried out for any other purpose are not meaningful activities and as well as being a waste of time, they can distract and indeed detract from this important goal.

Although a school’s assessment policy may set broad guidelines about how often students’ work should be marked to ensure no student falls through the net, it also needs to build in sufficient flexibility so that we can decide how to do it.

The nature and volume of marking and feedback necessarily varies by age group, subject, and what works best for the individual student and for the piece of work being assessed.

 

2, Manageable

Marking and feedback should be proportionate. Any expectation on the frequency of marking should consider the complexity of marking and the volume of marking required in any given subject, qualification type, and phase and key stage of education.

There is no doubt that feedback is valuable, but if we are spending more time marking and giving feedback than students are spending on a piece of work then our priorities are skewed.

We need to be selective in what we mark. Marking everything is time-consuming and counterproductive. Feedback becomes a single grain of sand on a beach, ignored by the student because of its sheer ubiquity.

Therefore, we should identify the best assessment opportunities in each topic or module – this might be a synoptic piece that demonstrates students’ knowledge and understanding across a range of areas, or it might be the exam questions that garner the most marks.

 

3, Motivating

Marking can help motivate students to make better progress. Short verbal feedback is often more motivational than long written comments on students’ work.

Too much feedback is not only harmful to teacher workload, but it can also become a disincentive for students because there is too much information on which to focus and respond. What is more, too much feedback can reduce a students’ long-term retention and harm resilience.

To build retention and resilience, students need to be taught to check their own work and make improvements before the teacher marks it and gives feedback. Feedback should also prompt further thinking and drafting, perhaps by posing questions on which the student must ruminate and act, as opposed to ready-made suggestions and solutions.

Feedback can be more motivating if it requires students to think. For example, we might use comment-only marking more often as this engages students because it requires them to act. Rather than correcting a students’ spelling, punctuation, and grammar, for instance, we might place a letter in the margin for each error in that line. For the higher performing students, we might simply put a dot in the margin for each error.

We might also make use of whole-class feedback rather than give individual comments. Whole-class feedback identifies the most common errors and uses these as teaching opportunities that engage all students, rather than allowing some to sit passively while others are getting feedback.

 

Start at the end

Progress is also about preparing students for future success and this requires us to think deeply about the purpose of education.

The best teachers understand what their students need to know and do to progress and be successful. One way to do this is to ask what students will need to know and do in our subject in five or 10 years’ time. What do we want them to remember and be able to apply – fluently and in multiple contexts – in order to consider ourselves successful?

This process is not meant to be reductive; it’s not – or at least not solely – about the functionality of our subject discipline. Knowledge is important for its own sake because knowledge begets knowledge, and we want to create cultured young people who know about the world and how it works.

Biesta (2015) argues that the purpose of education is to "recognise (each student's) unique characteristics and potentials, and (to develop) their ability to act autonomously and independently".

So one purpose of education might be to develop our students’ characters, to bequeath them the attitudes, behaviours and values that will enable them to become happy and healthy, and kind and caring citizens of the world.

We might also conclude that another purpose of education is to equip students with a broad range of knowledge that helps them become, not just happy and healthy, and kind and caring, but also informed citizens of the world.

In his SSAT pamphlet on Principled Curriculum (2013), Professor Dylan Wiliam set out four purposes of education which we might also find useful in terms of articulating what success will look like at the end. These are:

  1. Personal empowerment: Wiliam argues that the most important aim of education is to allow young people to take greater control of their own lives, helping them – in the words of Shaull (1970) – to “deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world”.
  2. Cultural transmission: Wiliam says the purpose of education was also to pass on from one generation to the next, in the words of Arnold (1869), “the best that has been thought and known in the world” because those who do not know what people are expected to know are regarded as ignorant – not stupid, but simply lacking the knowledge expected of them.
  3. Preparation for citizenship: Wiliam argues that democratic citizenship works only if those who are voting understand the choices they are given. The purpose of education, therefore, is to help students make informed decisions about their participation in democratic society.
  4. Preparation for work: Wiliam cites OECD research showing that more educated workers are more productive. Educational achievement is therefore inextricably linked with economic prosperity. Good qualification outcomes remain vital to students’ chances of finding meaningful and fulfilling employment and to earning more in later life.

Finally, good progress and outcomes are achieved by providing opportunities for students to acquire academic knowledge (a curriculum of the head), practical skills and talents, including in the arts (a curriculum of the hand), and personal skills and attributes (a curriculum of the heart).

Peter Hyman, in an article entitled Success in the 21st century (2017), defined the head, hand and heart as follows:

  • Head: An academic education (that) gives people in-depth knowledge of key concepts and ways of thinking in science, maths and design, as well as history and culture. This knowledge should be empowering knowledge … but importantly it should be shaped and applied to the needs of the present and future.
  • Hand: A can-do education that nurtures creativity and problem-solving, that gives young people the chance to respond to client briefs, to understand design thinking, to apply knowledge and conceptual understanding to new situations – to be able to make and do and produce work through craftsmanship that is of genuine value beyond the classroom.
  • Heart: A character education that provides the experiences and situations from which young people can develop a set of ethical underpinnings, well-honed character traits of resilience, kindness and tolerance, and a subtle, open mind.

 

  • Matt Bromley is an education journalist, author, and advisor with 25 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher. He remains a practising teacher. Matt is the author of numerous books on education and co-host of the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Find him on X @mj_bromley. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/matt-bromley

 

Further information & resources

  • Arnold: Culture and Anarchy, Start Publishing, 2017 (1869).
  • Biesta: The Beautiful Risk of Education, Routledge, 2015.
  • Hyman: Education of head, heart and hand, Curious Minds (blog), 2017:https://curiousminds.org.uk/curious-thoughts-education-of-head-heart-and-hand/ 
  • Shaull: The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, 1970.
  • Wiliam: Principled Curriculum Design, In Redesigning Schooling 3, SSAT, 2013.