Effective Teaching Programme (ETP)

Encouraging Reflective Practice

This bespoke programme has been developed by the LTC and over the last 5 years has successfully supported a range of teachers in both primary and secondary schools. It has been seen to have a positive impact upon raising the quality of teaching and learning as evidenced by Ofsted judgements and in a research study undertaken and published by DFE into the role of Teaching School Alliances. 

The programme can be tailored to a school’s requirements.  It comprises 10 face-to-face sessions of 1.5 hours duration.  Following an introductory session, the programme is devised so that a session involving theory, discussion and planning is followed by a session facilitating coaching, reflection and peer review. 

These pairs of sessions focus on the following identified themes:

• Engaging – including focus on review and retrieval practice
• Questioning – including deep questioning
• Challenging – including stretching most able
• Embedding – including making feedback meaningful

The programme introduces a range of tools to support exploration of the themes, including observation tools, and will conclude with planning for the delivery of a lesson.  Participants work in triads to observe learning in action between sessions, and discuss these observations during reflection sessions.  The course content includes discussion of themes raised in “Principles of Instruction” by Barak Rosenshine (American Educator, 2012).

Aims of the programme:

• To explore the relationship between theory and classroom practice
• To narrow the gap between the attainment of boys and girls, and of the disadvantaged and their peers
• To develop evaluative tools to support personal reflection and improvement in teaching
• To be supported by a colleagues within the school to improve the quality of the discussion around teaching and learning
• For this blend of approaches to raise the quality of teaching in a sustainable way through the encouragement of reflective practice