Ofsted and Outstanding Classroom Practice

Today at our Isle of Portland Aldridge Community Academy training day we had the pleasure of hearing from Deborah Zachary. Deborah from the 'The Zachary Network' is a lead Ofsted Inspector and came today to share her view on Outstanding Classroom Practice.

Deborah encouraged us to think about some outstanding teaching we have either seen or delivered. My thoughts took me back to earlier this year at the Prince of Wales First School to a lesson where the pupils used Lego WeDO robotics to independently solve a problem-based challenge. See below:

Deborah then shared an example observation from an Outstanding lesson she observed in the Spring Term, this was from a Year 5 mixed ability Maths lesson. The thoughts below relate to this lesson's starter: 

- Excellent start, self-start with strong differentiation.

- Teacher tight on timing but lively.

- Teacher encourages challenge.

- Building on work from yesterday.

- ThinkPINK time - AfL Strategy - involving everyone.

The key is that outstanding teaching leads to outstanding learning.

We then explored the Ofsted Grade Descriptors - Quality of teaching in the school:

I have taken the Outstanding criteria from above and created the below word cloud:

Deborah shared the importance of fostering an environment where IT IS OK TO FAIL, after all isn't this how we all learn? This reminded me of the great Michael Jordan advert for Nike:

What would you see?

How do you know the strategy is working?