At DMAT, we moved away years ago from a ‘tick-box’ approach to teaching and have embraced a ‘tight but loose’ approach. We want teaching to be tight, in terms of focusing on sound , evidence-informed pedagogical principles resulting in strong outcomes for our pupils, but loose in terms of how this is interpreted in classrooms. We do not talk about ‘outstanding’ teaching and we do not grade lessons; instead we talk about great teaching and how all teachers can get that little bit better. Outstanding teaching is formulaic; great teaching accepts that successful teaching looks different in different contexts – great teachers are great at teaching their subject.

We have distilled our approach to great teaching down to six pedagogical principles:

• Challenge
• Explanation
• Modelling
• Practice
• Questioning
• Feedback

We believe that when teachers implement these principles effectively, students learn well, have high aspirations of what they can achieve and so develop into confident and resilient learners.

We allow Teachers to Focus on Their Core Purpose
We understand the importance of constantly reviewing our practices so that teachers are allowed to focus their energies on the main thing – planning and delivering great lessons. We do this by focusing on a number of key areas:

• The culture of our schools is critical to ensuring we have an enjoyable, rewarding working environment in which all colleagues believe the demands of them in their role are reasonable and manageable.
• We use INSET days and meeting times to support the idea of collaborative planning.
• There is no trust wide approach to marking and feedback. There is also no centrally prescribed frequency of written feedback. Schools think carefully about evidence informed ‘feedback principles’ and contextualise these to their setting.
• We use the research evidence to identify practices that are most likely to improve student outcomes – so teachers and leaders don’t waste their time on ineffective approaches.
• All data analysis is carried out centrally for teachers and we continue to look at how we can make all processes and sharing of data as streamlined and relevant as possible.
• There is no expectation that staff respond to emails in the evening or at weekends. We want all staff to be able to achieve a healthy work-life balance and we trust the professional judgement of our staff to make decisions about when they work outside school hours
• We have worked hard to keep the contact time for teachers below local and national averages. Our class sizes are below national averages.
• Our schools have well established systems and sanctions to support disruption free learning in lessons.
• Any approach we take within our schools is fully reviewed. If it’s not working, we won’t continue with it for the sake of it. We will either ditch it or adapt it – or try something new.