Unlocking High-Quality Teaching

Teaching has long been seen as a "black box". Practice has historically remained a very private space, with classroom doors largely closed to the observation and scrutiny of colleagues. It has been challenging for researchers to directly measure what happens in the classroom and build a detailed picture of what truly matters for high-quality teaching and learning. Reforms at the system-level have often failed to make a meaningful impact in the classroom and substantially improve student outcomes. If anything, these challenges have, however, led to a recognition of the inherent complexity of teaching.

This chapter explores ways for schools and system leaders to support teachers in growing their practice and providing environments that enable high-quality teaching, and how these two might intersect. It does so by looking into what makes individual practices complex through the lenses of the teacher and the school context in order to shed light on moving towards more targeted, concerted improvement efforts.

This report has looked into five key teaching goals, examining the best evidence available for 20 practices that teachers can draw upon to achieve them and exploring how they are enacted to fully understand their complexity. The insights shared by the participating expert schools have shown that the complexity lies both in the teachers’ ability to enact the practice and the wider school environment. While it may seem counterintuitive to separate these two elements, this approach has already been well-established in fields requiring a similar "clinical" methodology. In sports, for example, athletes train based on a detailed understanding of their abilities, as well as the specific contexts in which they compete. In medicine, significant advances have been made by separately studying the functioning of various body systems from environmental factors.

Understanding which practices are particularly difficult and why can help to support efforts, both from teachers and school leaders, as well as wider policy makers or teacher educators, to improve these practices. The difficulty of teaching stems from its unpredictability. It is highly relational, hinging upon the interactions of the teacher and students, as well as between students themselves. Even with extensive planning, teachers cannot anticipate how these interactions will unfold (Clough, Berg and Olson, 2009[1]; Jackson, 1990[2]). There is thus an inevitable degree of flexibility and adaptiveness demanded in teaching. This means that teaching is characterised by a need to make decisions ‘on-the-go’ in the classroom, with little time for deliberation or reflection. These decisions are thus contingent on the particular context and learning unfolding in the classroom and cannot be fully informed by research or prescribed. Moreover, these decisions come in high numbers (Jackson, 1990[2]), further adding to the challenge of teaching.

Some teaching practices are inherently more difficult to enact than others. To determine the level of difficulty, 132 teachers and school leaders of Schools+ participating schools were asked to provide an expert rating on the difficulty of enacting each of the 20 practices examined for a master teacher. Teachers and school leaders were asked to consider the extent that each practice was dependant on a high level of professional knowledge, adapting to and addressing evolving student needs, and engaging in cognitively demanding multitasking and balancing different sources of information.

Table 8.1 presents practices according to their level of difficulty, based on expert ratings provided by schools. There was reasonable consensus among schools on the relative difficulty of practices, with schools identifying certain practices that are less difficult to effectively enact, and others that were more difficult. These groups indicate the typical inherent difficulty of a practice. However, it is helpful to view the boundaries between groups as flexible, as difficulty can vary; some practices may be especially challenging with a particular class or on certain days, for example. Similarly, caution is required when interpreting the level of difficulty; there might be issues with how practices are conceptualised or how challenging it is to isolate that particular practice from the context.

Environmental factors set the boundaries of educational possibilities in the classroom. When uncovering the complexities of teaching and the difficulty of different practices, a clearer picture can also emerge of the differing extents to which these practices are shaped by contextual factors. No matter how skilled and experienced the teacher, the school environment still shapes the quality of teaching that is possible in their classroom.

School leaders play an important role in shaping teaching and learning in schools (Rodrigues and Ávila de Lima, 2021[3]). School-level policies and practices can support or hinder high-quality teaching. Meanwhile, it should not be forgotten that impactful school leadership – just like impactful teaching – does not happen in a vacuum but is shaped by a range – and increasing range – of wider stakeholders too. Such stakeholders are also important actors when it comes to reflecting and discussing how to build even better schools that will, in turn, be characterised by better teaching too.

Table 8.2 presents practices based on how much they are influenced by context, according to expert ratings from schools. The context seems to have a particularly high level of influence on building student-student relationships, ensuring appropriate levels of challenge, explicitly teaching and actively practising social-emotional skills, and facilitating first-hand experiences. However, these levels of influence are only indicative, and variations in how practices are conceptualised, along with the complex interactions of different contextual factors, could alter their influence on teaching.

Together, the teacher and the environment, shape what type of teaching is possible in the classroom. Table 8.3 presents the ratings for both the level of difficulty of practices and the level of influence of contextual factors, which are bookended by two extremes:

• Embraceable anywhere: Practices that are not too inherently difficult to implement, and that are not heavily influenced by the role of contextual factors. These are practices such as setting clear learning goals. Novice teachers 4are likely to master them regardless of their school context.

• Difficult and context-bound: Practices that are inherently difficult to implement and heavily influenced by a supportive environment. The effective implementation of these practices in a high-quality form depends at least on master teachers who have had opportunities to reflect and grow their skillset, as well as school leaders who enable them through a supportive environment.

In between, there are practices that are more or less likely to be enacted in their highest quality form depending on the teacher and the context. Combining the difficulty of practices and the influence of wider environmental factors can build a more granular understanding of the efforts needed for improvement. For instance, for schools struggling to build healthy, positive student-to-student relationships in their classrooms, there may be a need to thoroughly examine what contextual levers at the school level may help transform the wider environment and help teachers with this practice. Alternatively, those schools seeking to further students’ metacognition in their classrooms may need to dedicate more attention to both the wider school environment and how to engage teachers in a sustained, iterative way in refining this practice due to the specific challenges it poses. Similarly, concentrated efforts to support teachers’ mastery of particular practices may be particularly relevant for schools seeking to support how teachers enact practices such as diagnosing student learning in real-time teaching.

Underlying the deeper reflection and analysis of practices that these groups can prompt is a shared appreciation of what different practices offer. A practice being less difficult does not mean that it is not an important part of the teacher’s repertoire. After all, the 20 practices have been identified based on their contribution to student cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. Understanding the difficulty of different practices is not trying to erase or diminish the role of certain practices. Rather, it is a case of understanding more about where and what types of support may be assigned that can better reflect some of the differences between what practices entail and demand.

Numerous studies have explored ways to build a high-quality profession ensuring that teachers are the best prepared possible for their classroom challenges (OECD, 2016[4]; Ulferts, 2021[5]; Schleicher, 2011[6]). This building process is a collective endeavour in which multiple stakeholders are involved and that stretches over time, beginning at initial teacher education and recruitment into the profession, and running through to the ongoing cycle of learning and professional growth in and outside of schools.

In general, this rests, however, upon a primarily blanket approach to teaching practices which assumes that each practice places the same type of demands on teachers. For instance, a considerable area of attention has been what particular features or mechanisms of in-service professional learning may support higher-quality teaching, with it proving challenging to build strong, consistent evidence on improving practice and/or student outcomes (Gore et al., 2017[7]; Sims et al., 2021[8]). Despite calls to tie professional learning opportunities more closely to school contexts (Armour and Yelling, 2007[9]; Desimone, 2009[10]) and the teaching of specific content (Hill, Beisiegel and Jacob, 2013[11]), it is rarer to see consideration of what different features or mechanisms may mean in terms of their development of specific practices. As understanding of the value of certain features or mechanisms grows, such as modelling of new practices or rehearsing them (Sims et al., 2021[8]), this raises the question of how these may interact with the different demands of practices. Moving towards a more granular examination of the different challenges that practices present can help to build a more nuanced understanding of what the further refinement of these practices by teachers entails.

Teachers’ levels of knowledge have a considerable influence on their teaching and, in turn, student learning (Hill, Rowan and Ball, 2005[12]; Ulferts, 2019[13]; Baumert et al., 2010[14]; Keller, Neumann and Fischer, 2016[15]). Their knowledge is dynamic and malleable; it is informed by their learning prior to entering the profession and by their Initial Teacher Education programmes, but also continues to change through different formal and informal learning experiences. Knowledge is typically organised in terms of a teachers’ content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Ulferts, 2019[13]):

• Content knowledge may, for instance, shape how a teacher brings in the nature of their subject, or how they make connections that are rich and detailed between the content matter. Importantly, this is also true in terms of their ‘wider’ content knowledge, such as how social-emotional skills function; it is challenging to explicitly teach social-emotional skills without a solid foundation in what these skills consist of.

• General pedagogical knowledge may manifest in how they go about nurturing a supportive classroom climate to motivate students and ensure they feel a sense of belonging, or in how they use questioning and responding strategies to probe for justifications. This type of knowledge may also manifest in the teacher’s role as a facilitator during different forms of classroom interaction, such as student collaboration and whole-class discussion.

• Pedagogical content knowledge, which is often seen as how a teacher integrates their knowledge of content in a particular subject with their teaching strategies, could influence a practice such as ensuring appropriate levels of challenge or working with multiple approaches and representations. In both cases, the teacher may need to carefully consider students’ prior learning and how to appropriately progress students, as well as considering real-time scaffolds to adapt to students.

Teachers also bring to the classroom their own beliefs, attitudes and values. After all, teaching is a profession which over 90% enter from a position of purpose and mission (OECD, 2019[16]). Teachers’ perceptions of students and education might play a role in setting expectations from students might also be linked to the levels of challenge that are considered appropriate or the extent to which teachers’ draw on classroom diversity to ensure meaningful contexts. Teachers’ own socio-emotional skills may also have an influence in how they go about explicitly teaching certain skills and sometimes even whether they consider this as part of their job when it is not prescribed in the curriculum.

Another important category of beliefs is the teacher’s beliefs about him or herself. Their sense of self-efficacy may play a large role in shaping certain practices. For instance, those that demand a higher degree of student agency and less teacher control, such as student collaboration or first-hand experiences, may be informed by a teacher’s sense of self-efficacy and, specifically, their levels of confidence when it comes to managing the classroom space. More broadly, teachers’ mindsets can determine their level of openness to unlearn and relearn the same practices or to embrace new ones.

Opportunities for professional development and growth play an important role in taking teachers’ foundational knowledge, skills and attitudes further. Taking into consideration the level of challenge that each practice might pose to each individual teacher and the schools’ teaching staff can lead to a deeper discussion around what type of professional development and support might be most effective to enhance them.

The practices considered of lower difficulty – which, as mentioned though it warrants being reiterated, does not mean unimportant – present different demands when it comes to supporting these practices to be effectively enacted. These are practices where system policies as well as the early years support for novice teachers can make a difference:

• Ensuring basic content knowledge is present: One pattern that characterises some of these practices is primarily a need for adequate levels of content knowledge. For instance, crafting explanations and expositions heavily depends on having recourse to appropriate content knowledge. Whilst they may require some adaptation and in-class decision-making, for instance based on the contributions of students during an explanation, their successful implementation, and thus difficulty, hinges upon teachers’ full mastery of what they are explaining or the content they are seeking to connect.

• Investing early on in getting to know students and developing routines: Whilst a detailed knowledge of students takes time (e.g. their individual and collective strengths etc.), there may be scope for teachers to rapidly and intensely build their knowledge of students and, accordingly, effective foundational relationships with students, say with a new class or a new arriving student. Similarly, certain practices may be a focus with a new class to ensure the early establishment of routines. Hence, as these are practices that are typically less difficult, they may be open to becoming more routinised. For example, practising entering and exiting from student collaboration or the types of questions that students can pose one another when collaborating may become more regular features of lessons through particular routines. In particular, teachers may be supported to adopt routines that are already in place for certain practices across the school. The latter can draw upon the existing habits of students and collective expectations to ensure effective implementation, which may also create more cognitive space for the teacher to focus more attentively on more difficult practices.

• Ensuring that teachers are up-to-date with the latest scientific knowledge: Practices like learning goals or whole-class discussion, whilst not challenging to implement, require teachers to understand what it actually looks like in its highest quality form. For instance, teachers need to be aware of motivational theory and how learning goals may impose a ceiling on students if communicated in a certain way. Similarly, understanding research on different forms of dialogue and the types of norms or prompts that can stimulate richer learning interactions is highly relevant. Whilst effectively mobilising the latest research evidence on fundamental practices will always be relevant, certain areas may be particularly in need of this type of mobilisation.

In contrast, there are other practices that are more situated, highly relational, and highly sensitive to student needs, helping teachers to master these practices is about a more nuanced, responsive and sustained approach that helps teachers build and hone their situational judgement. One characteristic of some of these more difficult practices is a strong need for in-class decision-making in response to evolving student needs. Take ensuring appropriate levels of challenge or adapting to student thinking as examples, both demand being highly attuned to immediate dynamics of the classroom. Another notable characteristics is that practices demand a specific type of robust knowledge coupled with a flexibility to respond to student needs; for instance, choosing when and where to make appropriate connections between the content as learning progresses, or to bring in additional representations and approaches that stretch but do not overwhelm students, or identifying opportunities to integrate alongside content the teaching and practising of social-emotional skills.

The innate difficulty of these practices suggests that an ongoing focus to develop these is important. Whilst teachers can never exhaustively prepare for such situations and all the permutations they may present, there is nevertheless an argument for a sustained focus on these practices to support teachers to consider a range of different situations that they may encounter. Some examples of ways opportunities for teachers to reflect on practice include:

• Classroom observation: Opportunities for teachers to observe their peers and to collaboratively discuss about particular instances where situational judgement arises may be highly relevant. This is something that had already been found to be effective when it comes to teachers’ noticing of student learning through the form of video clubs observing practice (Gamoran Sherin and van Es, 2008[17]; Kersting et al., 2012[18]). This is highly relevant for thinking about practices such as diagnosing student learning and adapting to student thinking. Similarly, it may be highly relevant for considering how teachers provide in the moment progression of challenge. Where classroom observation is not possible, case studies or vignettes might be a promising way to develop teachers’ ability to perceive and interpret features of the classroom (Atanasova et al., 2024).

• Mentoring: Mentoring between teachers, particularly for those new to the profession, is an area of promise for improving teaching (Rockoff, 2008[19]). Particularly demanding practices may serve as particularly fruitful areas of focus for mentoring efforts between more accomplished teachers and those that are new to the profession. This may enable the thinking process behind teachers’ judgement to be more clearly elucidated and imparted. In particular, this may help some of the necessary conditions for effective mentoring to be met, such as clear understanding on the purposes and scope of the mentoring (Spooner-Lane, 2016[20]). Moreover, it is worth noting how mentoring relies on the existing resources that exist in a school or system, making it a potentially very efficient strategy.

• Professional reflection and collaboration opportunities: Ensuring that there are periodical opportunities for teachers to exchange on these difficult practices. For instance, planning for professional learning or exchange around these practices across the school year to sustain attention but also respond to evolving levels of skills in these practices. This may manifest in terms of dedicated space for department colleagues to interrogate how they make connections or work with multiple representations and approaches, including the scaffolding of these and their progression.

• Research their own practice: Teachers can also engage in more formal inquiry into their practice. This has been an area of increasing attention in recent years, including so-called ‘action research’ initiatives that see teachers examine specific research questions – on their own or in collaboration with colleagues or external actors (e.g., researchers, community actors) – in their particular classroom context (Feldman et al., 2018[21]), as well as more school-level initiatives such as data-driven professional learning communities to address self-identified school problems (van den Boom-Muilenburg et al., 2023[22]). Some notable features include an iterative and adaptive inquiry process as understanding of the issues at hand evolves, high levels of teacher ownership, and a focus on bridging theory with practice. Whilst a broad field, efforts to evaluate the effects of such teacher-led inquiry initiatives have shown promising results, including in terms of teacher learning and changes to practice (Kamarudin and Mat Noor, 2023[23]; Poortman and Schildkamp, 2016[24]; Manfra, 2019[25]).

It is important to note, as illustrated by the above examples, that most forms of professional reflection on challenging practices involve engaging in professional dialogue with colleagues. This collaborative approach to improving teaching enables educators to challenge and support each other, fostering collective professional growth. The benefits of a school-based approach to professional learning extend beyond mutual support; they are particularly effective due to their direct relevance to teachers’ daily challenges and their sustained presence over time. Although the idea of professional communities learning together in their particular school setting is a long-standing concept, its realisation still remains limited in many contexts (Mészáros, 2024[26]).

While improving teaching might be a collective effort, it is also important not to lose sight of teachers’ individual needs. Teacher professional development plans, integrating consideration of these practices into formative observations and professional goal setting, may help to keep an attentive lens on these practices and reinforce the message of the need for regular reflection around their effectiveness. It may be that these more challenging practices are encouraged as a focus for teachers’ self-inquiry in self-initiated research projects, so that they self-examine their challenges and concentrate attention on their refinement. Similarly, this may help build greater understanding between stakeholders around what are the different needs on these more challenging practices.

School leaders play a key role in shaping policies and practices that enhance teaching quality, ensuring consistent delivery across every classroom, every day. Every teaching practice is influenced to some extent by the environment, and documenting each of these influences across the external factors is impractical with such variability. The examples below can help illustrate how school level policies might facilitate or hinder their enactment in the classroom.

The ultimate goal of impactful instructional leadership is to support high-quality teaching in every lesson, every day. This is a goal motivated by students, and their needs. These needs can be very variable and stretch well beyond the control of schools and their leaders and teachers. But understanding these different needs well can be an important step to ensuring that they are properly accommodated into how instructional leadership is provided.

The profile of learners plays a considerable role in shaping the implementation of practices. Students differ in numerous ways that are essential to learning: their prior knowledge, abilities, conceptions of learning, learning styles and strategies, interests, motivation, self-efficacy beliefs, and emotions, as well as socio-environmental factors like linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds. However, the greater the differences among students, the richer the opportunities for peer learning, though it also becomes more difficult to teach them effectively as a group.

Parental involvement plays a crucial role in shaping students’ development, in particular that of young children and their cognitive and social skills. Accordingly, student success can be highly shaped by their family and background experiences and the sources of learning these have provided. It is, in essence, not just a question of what the school provides. The extent to which schools have in place strong parental engagement strategies – grounded in a good understanding of the ecosystem that surrounds the school and the relevant needs of parents and the community – can help ensure that teaching aligns to the influences and expectations from home, and vice versa. These can help bridge the fragmented worlds and experiences of students in and outside of school. Moreover, it may help build consistency between students’ school and home lives, which may reinforce their learning and skill development (e.g. actively practising social-emotional skills).

It has long been established that a key feature of instructional leadership in schools is how learning time is organised (Hallinger and Murphy, 1985[28]; Hallinger, Wang and Chen, 2013[29]). This is a broad and complex demand on leaders. One facet demands consideration of the different human elements.

The class size has a considerable impact on practices which are logistically intensive, for instance student collaboration or whole-class discussion. The same can be seen for a practice like building teacher-student relationships, where time with students is important for the development of these relationships.

A second, connected consideration is the composition of the class and how different learner profiles are organised. For instance, the diversity of prior knowledge in the classroom plays a large role in shaping how a teacher ensures appropriate levels of challenge across a range of students. Similarly, it may influence the pacing of lessons and the time invested in ensuring clarity, accuracy and coherence, or how teachers approach crafting explanations and expositions. At the same time, the ability to exchange different ideas may be significant in shaping how practices like whole-class discussion or a practice like working with multiple approaches and representations unfolds. The composition may be a particularly significant question for school leaders as they approach the integration of new teachers into the school, and the types of practices that they want them to successfully master initially.

One further consideration is how staff are assigned to certain classes. Schools may make decisions around whether or not there is continuity between certain classes and certain teachers. For instance, schools may choose to assign teachers the same class, or to assign students to a new teacher or teachers periodically. This decision point impacts how teacher-student relationships develop, due to how assignment shapes teachers’ knowledge of students as individuals. This type of knowledge also matters for practices that help to make learning relevant to students, such as meaningful context and real-world connections, or the communication of learning goals.

A final consideration is whether teachers can get specific support from teaching aids for some specific or all lessons. This may take the form of a second teacher in the classroom or temporary support sessions for students in need of targeted assistance. For instance, the former may inform how a practice such as adapting to student thinking unfolds, while the latter may be significant for practices such as metacognition.

Attention to the organisation of learning time also demands particular attention to curricula and their coordination across a school (Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2008[30]), as well as attention to the more literal teaching and learning conditions (Day et al., 2010[31]).

The coverage and degree of prescription in the curriculum shapes what practices the teacher can draw upon; from an extreme where it determines what is covered on a lesson-by-lesson basis to another extreme where teachers have agency in determining the learning goals that a teacher derives for a lesson or how learning is sequenced over time for clarity, accuracy and coherence. Notably, some practices may or may not be part of the curriculum such as explicitly teach social-emotional skills or metacognition. Indeed, these are two pertinent examples, as they also highlight how practices may be shaped by the adoption – by a system or a school – of a specific programme in certain areas, which may mean there are distinct resources on say social-emotional learning that teachers are expected to use in their lessons.

The organisation of student learning time, such as the length of lessons, or how they are organised (e.g. back-to-back lessons, spaced out) can play a significant role in shaping practices. For example, practices such as facilitating first-hand experiences or working with multiple approaches and representations that may be more time intensive could be significantly impacted by the availability of time for certain experiences. Similarly, practices that are related to high cognitive effort, such as appropriate levels of challenge, or that relate to socio-emotional aspects (student-student or teacher-student relationships, and explicitly teaching and actively practising social-emotional skills) might be influenced by students’ levels of anxiety, attention and fatigue under an overloaded timetable.

A further consideration is that of the ‘raw’ physical materials that shape learning. For instance, learning materials and tools. Teachers may or may not have recourse to certain resources that influence practices. These may take a digital form. For instance, when a teacher aims to craft explanations and expositions of a topic which are clear and accessible to students, or to model working with multiple approaches and representations, the teacher may find that different types of instructional software are significant. This may also be the case for physical resources, such as those that facilitate a demonstration, or resources for formative assessment like mini-whiteboards for diagnosing student learning or feedback.

Connected to this idea of the raw materials that teachers have access to is that of learning spaces. Classroom spaces shape how certain practices unfold, interacting with the class size and what the physical space does or does not afford. This can be seen as particularly relevant in terms of classroom interaction, where the nature of the physical space may inform how student collaboration or whole-class discussion unfold, as well as the transitions between them. It is worth noting this type of physical space and how it can be used is significant for how a teacher may or may not be able to facilitate the building of student-student relationships too. Again, this may also be a digital consideration, with certain online learning spaces have manifestations for certain practices such as crafting explanations and expositions – which may see students independently learning or revisiting certain content in advance of a whole-class discussion in an online space.

Building strong relationships within a school’s teaching staff may be one important manifestation of high-quality instructional leadership (Day et al., 2010[31]). This also hinges upon wider leadership activities such as the important questions of how teachers’ reflection and professional growth opportunities are provided for (Hallinger and Murphy, 1985[28]; Rodrigues and Ávila de Lima, 2021[3]; Blase and Blase, 2000[34]), as well as the degree of trust that leaders place in teachers to direct a high-quality teaching and learning agenda in the school (Day et al., 2010[31]).

The individual preparation time for teachers to plan lessons and learning opportunities plays an important role. This time is a space for thinking hard and reflecting about what practices might be more effective for a specific class. This can be significant for determining the immediate learning opportunities of lessons, being of particular relevance, for example, for practices that hinge upon students’ prior learning, such as having time to ensure the levels of challenge are appropriate to the students at hand or that students are ready for making certain connections between the subject-matter. It is also particularly pertinent for considering the wider sequencing of learning opportunities and ensuring clarity, accuracy and coherence. It is also significant for not only shaping the learning opportunities but also how they are monitored; time to reflect and plan in advance may also be significant for a practice such as diagnosing student learning so teachers can strategically consider where they may need to engage in more formal formative assessment opportunities.

Another manifestation of preparation time may be that with colleagues, such as subject-department collaboration. For instance, practices like meaningful context and real-world connections or nature of the subject may be time intensive, demanding that teachers undertake a degree of research for the most relevant resources or examples to use, or be enriched by the ability to exchange ideas with other subject experts like their colleagues. The ability across a department to exchange and adapt one another’s learning materials and ideas may be a significant enabler of these practices happening.

The same may also be true for a further manifestation of preparation, that of whole-school collaboration. If there is alignment across subjects on a certain topic, they may be able to mutually reinforce each other in their lesson planning, such as through the use of aligned summaries or plenaries leading to more clarity, accuracy and coherence. It may also mean the implementation of first-hand experiences that are inter-disciplinary. School leaders may organise and take responsibility for the success of such peer-learning and collaboration sessions.

The values and ethos that pervade a school are difficult to concretely capture but have an important impact on the interactions that occur across the school on a daily basis, be it those interactions between students or those among teachers and leaders. A key feature of instructional leadership and the work of school leaders is defining and building this vision and ethos that will permeate the school (Day et al., 2010[31]; Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2008[30]).

The school vision and values shape how teachers implement practices. Some schools might even have a specific pedagogic vision and ethos that drives the recruitment of teachers on the basis of their adherence to a specific pedagogical approach. Regardless of the adherence to a specific pedagogical approach, the school values and ethos tend to permeate into concrete norms and expectations that guide the interactions of the entire school community. This type of norm-building can shape the form of practices across classrooms, such as how teachers nurture a supportive classroom climate or how students view the teachers’ diagnosis of student learning as a positively good thing for their progress and not an evaluation. For instance, a classroom climate may promote mistakes as learning opportunities, but this could also be a wider, whole-school approach about experimentation and the value of failures which reinforces this messaging to students.

Some practices can be highly dependent on routines around transitions or positive behaviours, such as student collaboration or first-hand experiences. Whilst these are shaped by the individual classroom and the teacher’s individual classroom management, the wider school’s policies and approaches to classroom management, or the so-called behavioural policy, are also significant. For instance, an inconsistent approach among teachers to disrespectful behaviour between students when collaborating may send students signals that sometimes or in some settings such behaviour is acceptable.

A further manifestation of consistency and routinisations may be in relation to how certain practices are embedded to reduce their cognitive burden and workload, on both students and teachers. School leaders and teachers may oversee the establishment and refinement of approaches towards certain practices that can work consistently effectively across classrooms. For instance, consistent language in practices such as questioning or whole-class discussion may mean certain behaviours become embedded at a school level. Students may, for example, become habituated to justifying their answers with evidence. Also, practices such as metacognition and feedback may be approached through the same cross-classroom approaches, such as routines for how self-reflection unfolds or how students respond to feedback.

Enabling a formative environment orientated around data can be a powerful support from school leaders for their teachers (Day, Gu and Sammons, 2016[37]). In particular, a core feature of this is monitoring student progress and using this to constructively inform the teaching and learning programme in the school (Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2008[30]).

There may be the availability of in-class monitoring and assessment tools that facilitate the monitoring of student progress and how it is used formatively to drive learning. For instance, certain digital tools, including those based on artificial intelligence, may play a role in shaping how teachers diagnose student learning and provide feedback. They may also be tools for students; for example, facilitating the revision of certain content and ‘weak points’ to ensure clarity, accuracy and coherence in student knowledge, or how students digitally map their learning and make connections. Notably, these tools may stretch beyond purely cognitive outcomes and knowledge acquisition; it may be that tools also facilitate student self-assessment and their ability to log their own progress, including their social-emotional skills acquisition, to enable metacognition to be practised over time. It is worth noting that such tools may have financial considerations for schools too.

At the school-level, the provision of student information systems, as well as developing teachers’ fluency in using them, can help the overall staff body to have access to key information about students to impactfully inform their decision-making in the classroom. For instance, it may inform a more intensive period of attention to strengthen the teacher-student relationship or to the levels of adapting to student learning, with a teacher perhaps prioritising more supports and scaffolds to a student, or more extensions too.

The external evaluations context runs throughout classrooms and schools in a system shaping the day-to-day teaching that unfolds. Assessment is a critical component of the teaching-learning process which informs the effectiveness of instruction. The alignment between external evaluations to the way that students are assessed in schools, including in terms of what is assessed and the level of attention it is given, can help inform teaching and learning in classrooms, and in the contrary distract from it. For instance, practices such as explicitly teaching and actively practising social-emotional skills may see less attention in an assessment system that gives little consideration to the wider holistic development of students.

Finally, schools may also seek to foster strong self-evaluation processes across the school that are orientated around learning and refining through data. This may seek to foster synergies between formal summative assessments, in-class formative assessment, and teachers’ own professional learning and evaluation. An open culture that allows for the honest identification and examination of the areas of practice for further refinement – be that as an individual teacher or as a collective of teachers in a school, or with the support of external system leaders too – coupled with mechanisms of support for realising this refinement, may impact how practices unfold. This type of orientation towards growth might facilitate more risk-taking with practices that invite greater teacher exposure, say student collaboration, which can see more student agency at the expense of teacher control.

Identifying and facilitating opportunities for external collaboration and building strong relationships outside the school community may also be mechanisms that school leaders draw upon as part of their instructional leadership in the school to support the impact of teaching and learning (Day, Gu and Sammons, 2016[37]; Day et al., 2010[31]).

The local community may serve as an enabler for certain practices. Classroom and schools may have connections to the local, or wider, community that may furnish them with resources or opportunities to support the implementation of certain practices. For instance, this may be particularly significant in terms of how first-hand experiences unfold. Partnerships with community actors may facilitate authentic inquiry projects that are relevant to students. Indeed, the community can have a particularly large influence on how meaningful context and real-world connections are implemented in classrooms.

Connections can also broaden horizons and enable a deeper understanding of the possibilities that exist. Digital communities and networks can also play a notable role in potentially shaping the above practices, just like the local community. Through the connections they facilitate, they may also be significant for shaping how teachers create opportunities to explicitly teach and actively practise social-emotional skills with students, for example skills such as open-mindedness. More broadly, these communities and networks may serve as reflective learning opportunities for practices where professional knowledge is exchanged and augmented.

Efforts to improve teaching quality often focus on more visible, surface-level factors within schools that are relatively easy to change. It is altogether simpler, if expensive, to reduce class size or raise the numbers of computers in schools than it is, for instance, to sustainably improve teachers’ capacities to respond to individual student differences.

It is far harder to reshape the core activities and dynamics of learning in the classroom, especially as doing so requires a deep understanding of what quality teaching entails in daily practice (Bereiter, 2002[38]; Fullan, 2006[39]). This report has sought to advance that understanding with the consideration of 20 practices. It has both looked inwards at the granular intricacies of implementation for each practice, as well as outwards from these practices to the wider school environment that can influence implementation.

Successful changes thus need a deeper consideration of how to support teachers improve their skill and create a supportive environment. For example, the recent emphasis on practices that demand greater individualisation such as explicitly teaching and actively practising social-emotional skills is likely to be particularly challenging for teachers given that this is a new demand for which they haven’t been prepared, and may be disproportionately challenging if their class is very culturally diverse. Similarly, new opportunities to build greater student agency, such as through collaboration or first-hand experiences, are only likely to be effective to the extent that sufficient school resources and ongoing support for teachers’ skill development are in place (See Box 8.5). What expectations of success should be placed on schools and their professionals if the complexity of change is not considered?

This report highlights that high-quality teaching does not occur in a vacuum. It is not solely the result of excellent teachers but also requires excellent schools. Improving the quality of teaching goes beyond only helping teachers refine their practice, but also involves creating a supportive environment where teachers can thrive. This is not surprising; yet we still know little about each of the two, and their interplay. What happens in classrooms and in schools is often hard to see, with the final student outcomes being what garners most attention. However, only through a deeper understanding of the processes and mechanisms behind teaching and learning can improvements be made.

A better understanding of the complexity of teaching demands engaging with the professionals in our schools. Naturally, teachers play a key role in leading on their learning as reflective professionals, but so too school leaders in creating an environment where teachers can grow their practice. This goes to the heart of our education systems and the need to better recognise and leverage the expertise of our schools. In a time of rapid change, building a stronger profession is critical, as the central role of teaching in shaping young people and their future lives is likely to only remain constant.

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