Hello, Teacher editor Jo Earp here and I’m going to be your host for today, but before we get into this episode a reminder that if you’re looking for more free content from Teacher head over to the teachermagazine.com website. There are thousands of articles, infographics, videos and podcasts in our archive, including transcripts of all the episodes from all our series – they’re all online, they’re all open access, and we publish fresh content throughout the week!
Thanks for downloading this podcast from Teacher, I’m Jo Earp. In this episode we’ll be finding out more about the OECD’s Unlocking High-Quality Teaching report. Published last month, it explores 20 practices that teachers draw on to achieve 5 key teaching goals, what we already know about each of them and what remains to be understood. It shares strategies being used in classrooms around the world (insights were gathered from 150 schools from 50 countries).
It looks at the day-to-day complexities and wider school environment, it looks at the important role of professional judgement, and how school leaders can create the enabling conditions that help teachers excel. The report draws on research from an expert group led by Jenni Ingram, Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Oxford, and she’s my guest for Episode 99 of The Research Files. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Jo Earp: Hi Jenni, thanks very much for joining Teacher. You're joining us actually all the way from the UK, which is morning your time, evening for me. As I mentioned in the intro then, the report has just been published by the OECD. It draws on research from an expert group that was led by yourself at the University of Oxford. Let's start off then, what was the aim of this research?
Jenni Ingram: Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to talk about the work. The research part is just a small part of a much bigger program of work. So, I will mostly talk about the research part because that was the bit I was mostly involved in.
But the main goal was to develop some sort of taxonomy, or structure, to describe teaching that cut across different pedagogies. So, there wasn't a promotion of a particular way of teaching it was more about what practices that appear in all these different pedagogies that actually we have evidence for that make a difference to different outcomes. And we needed to create a shared language so that we could talk across countries, not just within countries, about teaching and learning. And it was important to identify actually the best research evidence that we have for these practices, because it's been a growing area. There's considerable research going on. Some of it is very close to teaching and teachers will recognise it, it will sound like their classroom. Some of it has been conducted in laboratories and actually it's not that close to the classroom. So, it's about looking at all the evidence and how that might tell a story about some practices being more beneficial to learners than others.
JE: Yeah, it's interesting you were saying about the language there and having a shared language; that's something we might come on to in terms of how you collected that, but that's an interesting point. And the extensive research done by your team then, that involved something like, was it 150 schools from 50 countries, was it?
JI: Yes. The whole thing was led by Anna [Pons] and Lawrence [Houldsworth] at the OECD, and they made everything happen. My team was the group of experts that came up and was involved in the conceptualisation of the taxonomy. We were identifying evidence, we had 2 people do a scoping review for us, and then Lawrence and Anna would send all that information to teachers and to school leaders in lots of different countries, but also to organisations and knowledge brokerage organisations, as well as academic researchers.
And then all that feedback would come back to us, and then we'd revise what we'd written, we’d revise the framework in light of that feedback, and then it would go back out to schools. And then one of the main ways that we drew on schools was, inside each chapter with each practice we've got comments from teachers and school leaders about what that might look like in different classrooms and how you might do that in a classroom, just to make it very, very close to practice.
And I think that’s … if you look at the expert group, the majority of the members of the expert group, we are teacher educators and researchers. So, the vast majority of us spend most of our time in schools rather than most of our time sat behind a computer or in a library and so forth, which does make it quite distinctive. So, the experts are people that are very familiar with educational research, conduct educational research but also we train teachers or we work with teachers in lots of different ways.
JE: Yeah, got it. How were the school participants chosen? Was the aim there a bit of a representative sample, you know, sort of K-12, different age range, maybe public, private. How did that happen?
JI: So, we weren't aiming for representative, we were aiming for as much variety as possible because we wanted a taxonomy that could work in a variety of contexts. So, it was organisations and schools that volunteered; so, there was there was a call out to all of the countries that the OECD is in regular contact with – some of those are OECD countries, but some of those are participating organisations in PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment), for example – and they were invited to take part. And some people took part in one stage, like at the beginning when we were thinking about the conceptualisation and what this taxonomy might look like; others were very involved in the ‘well, what does this look like in a classroom?’ and the practice side of things. So, there's a huge range of schools involved; there are public schools, there are private schools. There are organisations with particular pedagogies that they’re promoting; there are organisations whose whole job is to curate evidence. And it was, yeah, it was about getting as many voices involved as possible.
JE: I'm going to read a bit from the foreword of the of the report. It says ‘…this report offers a rare glimpse into the real-time decisions of teachers and the observations they make in the classroom to gauge their effectiveness’. That sounds like a very big, and I'm thinking tricky, undertaking. How was that work carried out? Again, was that something you were involved in?
JI: Yeah, it is a big undertaking and it's why the report is actually just a small part of the work that's going on. So, there were lots of people involved in lots of different ways. It kind of began with meetings of the expert group where we looked at background documents and we conceptualised the meaning of pedagogy, the meaning of practices and we came up with this taxonomy. And then there were lots of expert academics and researchers and organisations involved in rating the quality of evidence against the practices that we identified.
And then there were face-to-face meetings and online meetings with schools and school leaders and government representatives responsible for education policy in different countries to kind of look at the qualitative side of things – so, to look at how we were describing those practices, to ensure that the way that we were describing them could work in their context and made sense to teachers.
And then there was an exercise where the practices went out to schools and to teachers and they were asked to just say whether, actually: How easy is it to do this in your classroom? How easy is it to implement this practice? Are you going to see this practice in an expert teacher’s classroom anyway? How different is it or how much does your classroom context influence this? So, are you able to do it easily with some classes but with other classes it's more difficult because of who you're teaching, or where you're teaching, or the resourcing that you have and so forth?
But the key thing is we’re not addressing pedagogies, it was all about the practices – so that's a much smaller grain size than is often talked about.
JE: Sure. So, unlocking high-quality teaching then; at a really basic level for anybody listening to this podcast, you know, convince us why is this so important for us to understand.
JI: The main thing is that over recent years there's been so much research, both in cognitive science, but in education, but also in different curriculum areas about what has an impact on learning, but also what has an impact on children at different stages. So, looking at this huge amount of research in the early years, there's quite a lot of research looking at adolescence, and we're at a point where there's so much evidence it's quite tempting to cherry pick and to find evidence that agrees with what you might do already. And what we wanted to do was actually say ‘well, what is the high quality evidence that we actually know has an impact on student outcomes’, but not just focusing on the outcomes in terms of their ability to read or their ability to do maths, but also to look at their socio emotional wellbeing. To also look at their creativity or their ability to collaborate – all the things that are really useful to students in their adult life. So, we also wanted to kind of look across those different outcomes.
We still have a lot to learn and part of this program is about finding out those things that we don't know. So, there's a lot of evidence for individual practises, but how do they work together? How might they influence each other when you're putting one or more together? Or how do they work in different classrooms? So, might it work in one way, in one setting, but be different in another? And, we might have a lot of evidence of a particular practice on how it improves maths outcomes, but actually how does it make kids enjoy maths, or choose to continue with maths? These are the other important outcomes, but we may not have studied those outcomes. We might know, yes, they're good at passing an exam in maths if you do this but do they like maths if you do this. Those sorts of things.
We were very focused on things that teachers will recognise. There shouldn't be anything in this report where a teacher doesn't say ‘Oh yes, I do that’ and it's more about unpacking that and looking [at] what the evidence says about how and why it works, as well as what it is.
JE: Yeah.
JI: And we also wanted to include innovative things. So, there are things where actually they're fairly new; teachers have tried something, and they've come up with this new way of doing something and it's too early to have evidence but, actually, what we have is promising. So, it's about putting those ideas out to schools so they can try them so that we can build that evidence.
JE: Got it, and seeing which context that's happening in as well.
JI: Yes.
JE: So, the report presents 5 teaching goals to high quality teaching and 20 practices that teachers draw on to achieve them. There's so much information in there – it's something like 244 pages and, as usual for listeners I'll put a link to the full report in the transcript of this podcast, just go over to teachmagazinemagazine.com. We're going to try and distil some of that down over the next sort of 15 minutes or so and look at some of those big takeaways. Let's start with the 5 overarching teaching goals, then.
JI: OK. So, the 5 overarching teaching goals are: Ensuring cognitive engagement – that's, are the students thinking about what you're teaching them?; Crafting quality subject content – so the ‘what are they learning?’; Providing social emotional support – so, are they taking risks? Are they being supported to do that?; Fostering classroom interaction – do they have opportunities to talk and discuss, or work collaboratively?; and Using formative assessment and feedback – so how are teachers responding to students?
And these 5 practices, they came out of a previous research project that the OECD also coordinated. There was a team based in the US-led by Courtney Bell, who designed an observation framework, and this framework involved 9 countries looking at, well, what evidence do we have of what you might observe in lessons, by watching lessons, that correlates or is a causal explanation for particular student outcomes. So, this framework was designed by that team.
We took 5 aspects of that framework. There were 6 – the 6th was classroom and behaviour management. But the research study that developed that framework showed, actually, there was little variation with behaviour management within a local context. So, for each of the countries that took part, classrooms were fairly similar in terms of how behaviour management played out. Whereas with each of the other practices there was quite a lot of variation and there were some teachers that really showed very different practices to others, which meant that there's a potential to change and there's potential to do things differently because some teachers are.
JE: Yeah, that's interesting. I was going to ask you actually as a follow up, whether there were any that nearly made it and not quite. So that's interesting to hear. I'm here with Professor Jenni Ingram, and we'll be talking more about those 5 teaching goals that we've just gone through there and the 20 teaching practices and what this means for your context after the break.
You’re listening to podcast from Teacher. If you’ve just discovered our podcasts and Teacher magazine, I want to let you know about the additional free content on the teachermagazine.com website. You’ll find more than 3,000 articles, infographics, videos and podcasts (including all the transcripts of these episodes) in the archive – they’re all online and open access. And it’s where you can sign up to our regular bulletin to get the latest content and trending topics, delivered straight to your inbox. We publish fresh content throughout the week; access everything and sign up to the bulletin at teachermagazine.com.
JE: Welcome back, before the break you spoke about those 5 teaching goals, Jenni, to high quality teaching; there are 20 practices, then, that teachers draw on to achieve them. We're going to dig in a little bit deeper into that now – rather than going through them all, are there some that you want to sort of highlight as some of the takeaways?
JI: Yeah. So, I think I'll zoom in on just a few. I'm going to take a personal interest here, so I'm going to talk about the ones that connect most to my own research.
First of all, fostering classroom interaction – which is where most of my own research lies. And if we look at the strength of evidence, we've got quite a lot of evidence. It's one of the strongest areas for the quality of evidence for the benefits of students collaborating and finding collaborative ways of working, but also for having whole class discussions and dialogue and conversations within a lesson. So, that's one of the areas and the practices that we have the most evidence for and the strongest quality evidence for and for a range of outcomes. So, it's not just beneficial for their maths learning, or for their science learning, or their English learning, it's also beneficial for their ability to collaborate and their ability to communicate more generally, and so forth.
And the other one is kind of the nature of the subject. So, the ‘what’ are we teaching. What does it mean to learn history? What does it mean to learn maths? I myself am a maths educator, so mathematics is my area of interest. But there is something, there's an art and a craft to creating an explanation that students can follow that makes sense to students, but is also reasonably mathematical – it's actually a maths explanation, or it’s a scientific explanation. And so, there's a lot of work to be done there about bringing those 2 together and it's quite an art to do that well, but also to make some very difficult ideas clear. So, you're explaining something that's really, really quite complicated to a 13-year-old or to an 8-year-old. And actually, that's where the skill of a teacher is – taking those really complicated, really connected ideas and making them clear to the children that are in front of them.
So, we don't have as much evidence for those practises, the ones that relate to the subject content. But that's largely because they're everywhere, so you can't isolate them to research the effect of doing that. So, there is evidence that making connections within your subject and across your subject in between different ways of representing your subject or different perspectives does make a difference. There is evidence to show that considering what it what being a historian means, or what being a mathematician means, or being a scientist means does make a difference. But it's not as strong as the evidence that we have on classroom discourse and interaction.
The other thing that we looked at was not just the strength of evidence, but also how difficult these things are to actually do in the classroom – how easy it is it for teachers to change their practice. So, we asked teachers, what's the level of difficulty for somebody who's an expert teacher to do this practice, regardless of what class they're teaching or what school they're teaching in. And how much does the context of the classroom impact on this practice.
And none of the things that I've talked about – so, the collaboration, the discussion, the making connections, or the nature of the subject, or the other practices (all 20), none of them were seen as difficult by the schools that we talked to. But some of them were slightly more difficult than others, if that makes sense. They were all rated as relatively easy, but some were more difficult than others.
And what we've done in the report is we've illustrated each of these practices with insight, what we call insights from schools; so, this is where schools have made suggestions. So, I'll give you a couple that relate to the classroom interaction strand. Explain to students why you will use questions that probe and push their thinking. So, talking to them about your questioning and why you're asking them to think. Developing clear prompts and patterns and routines so that students get used to having to share their own thinking. ‘Can you go in deeper into why you've said that’ or ‘Could you tell me more about your answer?’ Those sorts of follow-up questions. Or being careful with those follow-up questions so they're not too broad, they're not too open and too broad. So, saying things like ‘turn and talk to your partner about this’. Well, do their students know what they're talking about? So, it's about thinking about, well when you want them to turn and talk to a partner, what actually do you want them talking about? And being very clear and precise about what you want them talking about.
JE: Oh, that's the absolute skill of it, isn't it? You've just … yeah, as you were discussing earlier, that skill of, you know, being able to pitch things to different abilities, where they are at in the learning, what they need next, just giving enough away, but not too much. I mean, it's just the skill of teaching. It's interesting there, you mentioned about context – there's a lot of things going on as well, other than just the teacher and what's happening for the teacher and the students – so, presumably is all that taken into account as well? Sort, of that supportive leadership, all those kind of aspects?
JI: Yeah. So, I mean when we talked to schools, we didn't just talk to the teachers we also talked to school leaders. And we also talked to not just school leaders, but the people who in a particular local context were responsible for developing teachers’ practice, which is often school leaders but not exclusively school leaders. And we also asked them about – actually, how difficult is it for teachers to adopt these practices?
JE: I've got quite a big question next! So, thinking about what all this means for listeners out there. And, again, we're going back to that word ‘context’, which is something we go back to a lot with Teacher – what your own context is, what your own student needs are, what perhaps your own level of staffing expertise is, and so on. So, for any kind of implementation then there are lots of factors to consider, as I said. And this is something that's flagged early on in the report – and actually, incidentally that links with a recent article from Teacher columnist Professor Martin Westwell called The power of professional judgement (so I'll pop a link into that too). So, the OECD report says, and I'll quote: ‘High-quality teaching requires flexible, context-sensitive decision-making that combines evidence with professional judgement. There is a need to consider more deeply how these elements intersect, considering the 'science' [behind] effective methods, the 'art' of their implementation, and how teaching 'craft' adapts to varied classroom environments.’ OK, discuss!
JI: Yes, so there are lots of different ways of using these practices and that entirely depends on teachers’ professional judgement. Teachers are the ones that know their context, they know their students. And one of the things about research evidence is in order to research something, we have to isolate it, and we have to give it a boundary so that we can measure it. And we can also only research what we can measure.
We're getting better at doing that, but it's teachers that use their professional judgement about when and how to use things, but also how to combine practices, how to sequence practices, which particular practices might suit a particular task that they're going to work on. So, there's a lot that teachers need to do to make sense of the evidence and part of this report was about helping teachers to do that. So, the report is written for teachers. It's not written for the evidence brokers or for the politician – it is written for teachers.
And so, there's a lot that we can learn from teachers. Teachers are already managing many of these practices in most of their lessons, sometimes simultaneously. They will have much more insight than researchers do about why some things work or don't work in particular contexts. They are much more aware of how you might combine these practices in different ways. But there's also a lot to do at the school leadership level.
So, if you're thinking about this strategically in terms of working with your school – because, we do know that teachers work best in collaboration with each other when they're trying to develop their practice or to take risks and try something new – you need a school culture where you are allowed to work on your practice and you're encouraged to work on your practice. So, there's also an aspect of reaching out to school leaders and encouraging them to work with teachers to draw on their professional judgement in order to improve practice and think about how the practices might work in that school context. But also, there are school policies and school practices that can drive what teachers can do.
So, yeah, teachers are professionals and the whole thing about being a profession is that you continually grow. So, you never stop learning, you never stop having new ideas, you never stopped taking on new evidence. That's part of what being a professional is. So, you reflect on your experiences, you try things out, you collaborate with colleagues, you develop particular practices that work really well for you.
But also, one thing that we're advocating for is that you might do that a bit more systematically. So, you really say, ‘actually I'm going to work on this practice with these colleagues. We're going to meet, we're going to discuss it, we're going to try it out in different ways…’ because [we know, often] when you try something out for the first time, it doesn't go to plan. I certainly say that I can't teach something well until I've taught it at least 5 times, because I make mistakes each time, and I learn why things work and how they work in different ways. So, it's doing that systematically and paying attention to what did go well and what didn't go well and doing that in collaboration with others – and that's all part of the professional growth of teachers.
That’s all for this episode – my thanks to Professor Jenni Ingram for sharing her expertise today and my thanks to you for joining me. That was Episode 99 of The Research Files, which means that, yes, the big 100 is on its way! But if you want to keep listening now there are more than 360 episodes from the last 11 years of Teacher podcasts to choose from, including our series on Behaviour Management, School Improvement and of course The Research Files. Find those wherever you get your podcasts from. Hit the follow button to make sure you don’t miss out on new episodes, including that 100. And please leave a rating and a review while you’re there. Bye!
The Teacher bulletin is your free, weekly wrap of our latest content – not just the podcasts, but also the articles, the infographics and videos – straight to your inbox. Click on the sign-up button at our website, teachermagazine.com.
References
OECD (2025), Unlocking High-Quality Teaching. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/f5b82176-en
