Stop. Collaborate and Listen. PD lessons from Vanilla Ice

Introduction

Teacher quality is consistently the strongest in-school predictor of the quality of student learning relative to other levers such as class sizes and technology use. This is an assertion supported by a wide body of research including, EEF, (2025) and Hanushek, et al, (1998). With this in mind, it makes sense that we should invest heavily in understanding what effective teaching is and happily, the research base around effective teaching has become increasingly accessible in the last ten years. In some cases, this access has been used to find ‘what works’ and justify mandated implementation of it across schools in a way that is overly prescriptive. While this is often well intentioned, it may also be symptomatic of a deficit model where research is used to minimise poor judgement (Lather, 2004). This is particularly problematic given that teacher agency is so important for job satisfaction, (Herzberg, 1984) and associated factors like meaning and purpose that not only keep teachers in the profession but also fuel their continual commitment to improvement, (TDT, 2025). Our efforts to improve teacher quality must focus on cultivating a strong sense of agency within a shared framework of learning and teaching. While this seems relatively obvious, the high stakes school system we currently have and the fine line that exists between agency and complete freedom makes this endeavour one worthy of proper exploration. Furthermore, is it imperative to our trust to construct our theory of teacher development inductively, using the expertise of our best teachers who are able to strike this balance.

What is the reality of the environment in which our great teachers work?

Teaching is often referred to as a complex activity. Mintz and Yun, eds (1999) included a section in their book titled ‘The outer worlds’. In the section, they commented on how political, social and cultural forces exert an influence on what goes on in classrooms. This is a form of complexity that is echoed by Corcoran and Dilkes, (2024). They showed how external forces such as policy and school culture add layers of complexity to the work of teachers in the classroom as they try to satisfy external pressures at the same time as make decisions based on the context of the moment. Penney and Fox, (1997) also showed how external reforms added to the complexity of teacher’s working conditions, requiring them to balance new policy with existing procedures and the need to be responsive in their work.

Other authors have chosen to focus on the nature of complexity in the classroom itself, in the act of teaching. In the context of professional development, this is useful because it is classroom interactions that make the biggest single difference to student learning. Cilliers, (2005) identified twelve characteristics of complex environments and systems. These include three that are of particular relevance to teaching due to the high importance of human interaction. Firstly, complex systems consist of many components. Secondly, these components interact with many other components. They do not interact in neat pairs but often in unpredictable groups. Thirdly, the behaviours that result from these interactions are often not predictable by considering the nature of the components involved in the interaction. Cilliers refers to this third characteristic as ‘emergence’ (p. 257). Spurrett, (2015) echoed a belief in these three core characteristics of complex systems, referring to the interactions between elements as ‘non-linear’ (p. 1). While Spurrett does not agree with Cilliers’s position in its entirety, (particularly around the distinction Cilliers draws between complicated and complex systems), he does concur with Cilliers’s definition of complexity. 

The concept of ‘emergence’ (Cilliers, 1998; Gershenson and Fernandez, 2012; Rosas, et al, 2018) has a key implication for the development of teacher quality. There is significant agreement within the literature that emergence within complex systems makes it difficult to accurately predict the outcome of actions taken in that complex environment. This difficulty in making predictions means that plans should be held provisionally (Kruger and Verhoef, 2019). Some researchers, including Van De Merwe (2021) argue that the concept of emergence and therefore provisionality of plans in complex systems is in conflict with some evidence from neuro-science which argues that plans are made and followed through as means of creating necessary constraints within complex environments. Klein, (2011) goes some way to addressing this apparent conflict by suggesting that all systems have complex and routine elements to them and therefore, elements that are more predictable than others. 

In complex environments, experts do not analyse every element of a situation in order to make sense of it. Rather, they use experience to notice only the most important details, (Wolff, et al, 2016). The details they notice are cued by experience and how closely the details observed match to important details from previous situations of a similar nature, (Klein, et al, 1988). This process of interpretation is specific to complex environments, which, unlike routine environments, do not afford people the time and space to weigh up the significance of every aspect in the environment. Classroom teaching requires teachers to interpret the situational environment based on only the most important details because of the significant number of elements and interactions between those elements that exist in the classroom. This also has implications on how teachers make decisions in the moment of teaching.

What have we done to connect theory to reality?

Our approach to the creation of a framework for great teaching began with a consultative group of 18 teachers. We met with this group in October and spent the day prompting thinking and listening to conversations about what these teachers believed great teaching is. Using written notes and question responses from each participant, we were able to draw out 15 key themes of great teaching and from this, we co-constructed a visual representation of our shared understanding. The representation is reproduced below:

While this framework is intellectually useful to think and talk about great teaching, we understand that for it be scalable, it needs to be operationalised. This lead us to focus on the decision making process because this underpins everything else within the framework, as reflected by the consistent provisionality within it. Decision making also leads to the teachers actions and it is this which has a direct impact on student learning. As part of this process, it is important for us to think about the nature of teacher decision making.

Decision making - cued response or weighing alternatives?

Some decision-making research has focused on the importance of proceduralising situations (Peters, 2017) so that as many of the necessary decisions as possible are absorbed within the procedure. Van der Steen, et al (2022), used a combination of individual and group discussion to gather their data around what good formative assessment practice should include. They proposed that teachers’ decisions in response to formative assessment could be improved by following a set of design principles for the tasks and actions they took in response to formative assessment. De Van Phung and Michell, (2022) concur with this view in their study which presented the decisions teachers make as a procedure and suggested that decision making could be improved through structured reflection of the decision pathways that had been followed. In the study, 12 experienced EAL teachers watched video clips of students taking oral exams. They reviewed them live and thought aloud their decision-making processes in response to the students’ answers. Other researchers have found positive results from studies that have sought to proceduralise teacher decision making (Earle, 2021; Gross and Prediger, 2025). However, these studies focused on whether or not teachers made decisions with fidelity to the framework of decision making they had been trained to use. Indeed, Earle, (2021) conceded that a limitation of the study is that the impact on student learning of the decisions taken was not directly measured. 

Evidence can be found of the positive impact on outcomes of proceduralising decisions. Pronovost, (2006) introduced a five-step procedure for limiting bloodstream infections in intensive care units. The procedure led to dramatic reductions in the number of infections within 18 months. Key, et al (2022) found that failure to follow procedures in the aviation industry dramatically increased the chances of fatalities occurring. However, this research in both the medical and aviation fields focused on routine environments rather than complex ones. Washing hands thoroughly to decrease infections in an intensive care unit is a routine that can be followed in the same way every time it is performed and we can be sure that it will have the same outcome on each occasion. In the same way, aircraft safety checks can be carried out in the same way every time because there are a finite number of safety issues that could be identified as part of these checks. In the case of aircraft safety checks, there is also no time pressure involved. If the safety checks have not been completed by the scheduled take-off time, the plane stays grounded. By contrast, in a classroom, the outcomes of following the same routine on multiple separate occasions is likely to be very different each time, (Cilliers, 1998) and if a teacher is not ready to make a decision, it is rare that a class will wait for them to be ready. There is a time pressure for teachers that adds an additional layer of complexity that is not captured in the routine focused decision-making research. Smith, (1992) identified two types of decisions that teachers need to make. Firstly, there are the decisions that they anticipate they will make and secondly, decisions that they make in response to unexpected events in the environment. It is these second group of decisions that teachers find most challenging because of the prevalence of these kinds of decisions in complex environments. 

While ‘the process of transforming skills into procedures is irresistible’ Klein, (2011, p. 15), classroom environments are ill-structured (Spiro, 1991). Therefore, the same procedure followed on two different days will often lead to different outcomes (Cilliers, 1998) and these outcomes are likely to be unpredictable and non-linear, (Cilliers, 2005). Klein, et al, (1986) conducted research into how people make decisions in real world situations that are highly constrained by time limits and uncertainty. They called this kind of decision-making Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM). Klein proposed that in complex environments, people make decisions based on intuition, pattern recognition and experience. Klein, (1998) created a framework called Recognition Primed Decision making. He proposed that people recognise the nature of a situation based on previous experience, mentally simulate one or more potential courses of action before making very fast decisions about the action to take. This view aligns with Simon, (1956) who proposed that people who succeed in complex environments do not search for the optimal solution to a problem but for the first solution that satisfies their minimum standards of acceptance. Simon called this ‘satisficing’. 

Other researchers have echoed the importance of decision-making processes that are driven by intuition rather than procedure in complex environments. These commentators have added to this field of naturalistic decision making. Todd and Gigerenzer, (2021, p. 381) align with the idea that complex environments require individuals to make a decision on the action they will take ‘once a sufficiently good option has been encountered’. They also concur with the idea that complex environments require the use of heuristics to combat the time pressured nature of the environment. Elstein, (2001) wrote about pattern matching when making decisions in complex situations, drawing on Klein’s earlier work on Recognition Primed Decision making. This focus on the impact of the decision also resonates with Bordley, (2001) who wrote that ‘the quality of a decision-making process is determined, not by its logical consistency but by the quality of decisions that emerge from that process’ (p. 355). Another feature of decision making in complex environments is the incomplete nature of the information available to the decision maker (Lipshitz and Strauss, 1997). In teaching, teachers are frequently faced with situations where they have incomplete information, time pressure and unpredictable outcomes to the decisions they make. Because of these conditions, they often make decisions by matching their decision to a previous situation that bears similarity to the present situation. As such, naturalistic decision making is a theory that seems to sit well with the reality of how teachers make decisions. Therefore, the next phase of our work is to operationalise our framework around the catalysts of teacher decision making.

Purpose, purpose, purpose

This commitment to decision making does not diminish the importance of teaching techniques. Fundamentally, teachers need a repertoire of techniques that they execute versions of dependent on the demands of the situation – that is the decision-making process they follow. However, too often, when organisations are creating their approaches to teaching, they focus on the development of the techniques – the actions - rather than on the decision making that makes the chosen technique right for the demands of the moment.

The teachers participating in the project were asked to explain how they decide what to do in any given teaching situation. Of the 18 respondents, 16 said something linked to a clear awareness of their purpose. Whether this was described as a goal, an aim or by using the word ‘purpose’ itself, it is clear that great teachers know what they are trying to achieve and that this helps them take laser-sharp actions in service of that.

We took our initial themes and framework to our teaching and learning leads and asked them to use it to construct a set of teaching purposes that would be applicable to all teachers, regardless of phase or subject. This has given us a provisional set of purposes.

Our next steps - the mechanics of scaling up and our 7 deliberate levers

Scaling up efforts to allow all teachers to learn from the mental models of expert teachers is our greatest challenge. Indeed, scaling across organisations and the sector more widely is the perennial challenge that faces us all in our work. Scalability in improvement work is often the critical point of failure. As such, we have thought carefully about how to scale patiently in a way that will ensure long-term sustainability through utilising deliberate levers of change.

Many organisations begin with a theory of ‘what works’, often drawn from case studies from other organisations or a robust research base. They then take this theory, seek to inject it into the actions they take as an organisation. We see this approach as largely deductive - beginning with principles that have been brought in from an external source and applying them to the specific case of the school or trust in question. We prefer an inductive approach. We started this piece of work by simply listening to our best teachers. We asked them broad questions about teaching, we gave them the space to think and collaborate and the time to tell us everything they wanted to tell us. We took the themes from what they said and allowed these to be the catalyst for our purposes. By building our theory from the observations within our own organisation, we increase our chances of creating something that is aligned to what already happens in our most successful classrooms. This is the first deliberate lever.

In many cases, roll out of new initiatives is done ‘to’ schools and teachers rather than ‘with’ them. This creates a deficit in terms of agency and a sense of staff feeling genuinely invested in. As our own Flora Burt noted from the TDT conference:

‘some of the panelists discussed how we had moved from a period of autonomy into quite a prescribed approach to teacher development (brought about by the introduction of the ECT framework and NPQs) which inadvertently removed a lot of autonomy for teachers. However, there seems to now be an appetite for that to shift again and to empower teachers in their own decision making’. 

Of course, allowing autonomy without the necessary toolkit of techniques, routines and systems to enable laser-sharp decision making is not autonomy at all but rather, as unkind as putting a learner driver on the motorway in their first lesson. By working with leaders to help them diagnose individual teachers’ level of development need against each of the purposes, we can help to ensure that teachers get the support they need, specific to them. Expert teachers will not be constrained by replicated lesson structures while less experienced colleagues will not be left to flounder without enough guidance around what to do to enact each teaching purpose. Teachers will get what they need and will, we trust, see a PD approach that values their start point, helping them to invest and commit to the process. A personalised aspect to our roll out approach is our second deliberate lever.

School capacity issues mean that initiatives that begin with enthusiastic commitment quickly fizzle out. We recognise that different schools have different levels of capacity and so we offer centralised delivery of the PD programme and in-school delivery supported by centralised resources. This means that schools can access the level of trust support that is appropriate for them. This flexible approach to centralised support is our third deliberate lever.

School leaders often talk about the challenge of keeping change in place once the focus shifts on to something new. We know that the most successful schools leverage their drop ins, monitoring work, evaluation foci and whole staff communications to keep bringing previous foci back into the front and centre of teacher thinking. However, we know that this is not easy with so many competing priorities. To support schools with this, we are providing training in monitoring and evaluation strategies and the school improvement team support school leaders with the design and schedule of these activities. Furthermore, our central team quality assurance process acts not just as a window into the quality of work going on in school for the central team, but also as a space for school leaders to refocus their attention on how well things are developing in their schools. To further keep the previous PD foci in the consciousness of our teachers, we intend to produce podcasts and substacks for them to engage in as a means of keeping previous learning front and centre. This support around monitoring and evaluation and reinforcing previous learning is our fourth deliberate lever.

As an organisation, we believe we have a responsibility to continuously improve capacity for the leadership of teaching and learning. Our model for 2026-27 school improvement is about creating and embedding a shared language of practice across our more than 20 schools. From the 2027-28 academic year, we plan to provide the conditions for schools to deepen their work around their own priorities that emerge from the 2026-27 academic year. For this to happen, we need to invest in our leaders of professional development. Therefore, during the next academic year, our teaching and learning leads will engage in a sustained programme of training in Instructional coaching and PD leadership. This investment in the development of our PD leaders is our fifth deliberate lever.

We also recognise that while not the only form of PD that leads to positive impact, Instructional coaching is a form of PD that has the potential to help our teachers improve their practice most significantly. Therefore, investing in the quality of instructional coaching on offer in our schools will ensure that there is long-term individual development capacity. This investment in our sixth deliberate lever.

All of our schools have invested significant time in developing teaching models and frameworks and structures up to this point. Helping each school team understand the importance of aligning with one central approach is perhaps our biggest challenge. To overcome this, we will stress the importance of the framework being driven by purposes rather than techniques. This will allow school leaders who want to use a set of prescribed core techniques to continue to do so but in a way that shows clearly how these techniques are aligned with purpose. Schools with existing prescribed lesson structures will be supported to re-frame this tool, not as a prescribed approach but as a scaffold for less experienced teachers. Our fundamental belief is that in the long-term, every lesson following the same structure is limiting for the quality of teaching and learning. This commitment to work with leaders to deliberately align, integrate and where needed, reframe current models is our seventh deliberate lever.

Our levers are embedded within a detailed strategic plan which we summarise below:

Time scale	Actions	Purpose
Spring term 1 2026	Observe and interview all 18 of the teachers involved in the project	The teachers have so far given us rich data around what they believe about great teaching. We want to see: -        If their beliefs play out in their decision making in practice -        The extent to which they are aware of the synergy between their beliefs and their practice when we interview them
Spring term 2 2026	Propose a final framework of core teaching purposes to our school leadership teams	Having observed and interviewed every teacher within our initial group, we will be in a position to finalise our framework. It will, at this stage, reflect what our best teachers believe about teaching but also how these beliefs inform their decision making and subsequent actions. At this point, we will work with school leaders to understand how best to strategically integrate the framework in the context of the frameworks schools already have in place.
Summer term 1 2026	Train school leaders to understand Train school leaders to implement Train school leaders to monitor and evaluate Train central teams to quality assure Work with teaching school team to integrate the framework into their programmes	We will train school leaders to thoroughly understand the framework, the research base that underpins it and what it means in practice. We will also train school leaders in how to implement the framework through structured, well-sequenced professional development. We will train school leaders in monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to ensure that as a trust we are monitoring and evaluating against a shared understanding of what we value. Finally, the school improvement and teaching school teams will engage in moderation training to ensure that we have a genuinely shared approach to quality assuring the in-school monitoring and evaluation. Our organisation includes one of the most successful teaching schools in the country. The vast majority of recruitment into our schools comes from those trained in our teaching school. Therefore, we will work with the teaching school team to ensure that the framework is embedded into the training that ITT students receive from the 2026-27 academic year.
Summer term 2 2026	Diagnosing PD need Launch the framework to our entire staff body	We plan to roll out a bespoke and targeted PD programme in the 2026-27 academic year (see below). To prepare for this, we will work with school leadership teams to identify two groups of teachers in each school: -        teachers who are more expert and therefore would benefit from greater control over their personal implementation of ideas from the PD we deliver next academic year. -        Teachers with less experience who will benefit from a more heavily scafolded and in places, directive, approach to their PD. Crucially, this is not to be framed as a competence divide and movement between the two groups for any individual teacher remains fluid based on the half termly focus. At the Chiltern Summit in June 2026, we will launch the new framework to the entire organisation and share the plan for implementation.
Autumn term 1 2026	Professional learning sequence launch for framework purpose 1 Monitoring and evaluation Awareness and culture Preparing for long-term sustainability - Instructional coaching and PD leadership training	Over the course of each half term, every teacher will engage in three sequenced PD sessions focused on one of the teaching purposes within our framework. This programme will be delivered: -        In school using centralised resources -        In school using QAd internally produced resources -        Centrally by a member of the school improvement or teaching school team School leaders will have the opportunity in the Summer term, as part of the diagnosis process, to decide which of the three methods of delivery they want to use for each of the two groups of teachers identified in Summer term 2. Over the course of each half term, leaders in school will monitor and evaluate the impact of the professional development using the collectively agreed metrics and methods for this (see Summer term 1). This will be quality assured by the school improvement team. Each week, a podcast episode and substack post will be produced featuring a teacher from across the trust who has will share how they implement the focus purpose of that half term. The podcast will be a digestible 25 minute replicated format covering: -        What is the purpose? -        What is one way that you enact it? -        How and when do you adapt it? -        Under what conditions do you not use it at all? The substack will follow a similar structure and will also feature a video of the teacher enacting their purpose. The value of these mechanisms is to reinforce the importance we place on decision making within the trust. There are times when techniques are used in their most familiar format, times when they are adapted and times when they are not used at all. Decision making is what guides this. Over the course of the year, one coach in each school will be centrally trained. Thai will involve them coaching one teacher over the course of the year and building towards improving their leadership of PD more generally and their leadership of Instructional coaching more specifically in their school. This will increase capacity for more school-based PD leadership in each school for the 2027-28 academic year.
Autumn term 2 2026 onwards	Continuing all of the above.

By building professional development around teaching purposes, we hope to develop teachers across our organisation who take actions with a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve in that teaching exchange. If we are successful in this, we hope to develop not only more situationally adept teachers but also teachers with a stronger sense of agency and therefore the meaning and purpose that will sustain them through long careers.