How to tell if your lessons are having an impact

Your classroom may be a flurry of activity but is the learning making a difference? A simple acronym can help to answer this complicated question, explains Mark Enser
20th January 2025, 12:29pm
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How to tell if your lessons are having an impact

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/secondary/how-tell-if-your-lessons-teaching-are-having-impact

We all want to make a difference. This must be true in just about any job, I think. It is disheartening to do something and feel that you are getting nowhere.

But I suspect this desire to make a difference must be greater in education. Most teachers I’ve known have had the sneaking suspicion that they could find a better-paid job outside of the classroom and have been certain they could find a less stressful one. It is that hope of having an impact that gets them out of the car and through the door in the morning.


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The problem is, education is such a complex area, with so many moving parts, that it is very difficult to know what impact any one person is having. We might hope to see the impact of our hard work in pupil outcomes. But perhaps pupils did well, or badly, because of whole-school policies or the amount of parental help or just their own effort.

It can also be hard for an outside observer to see the impact that teaching has. It is tempting to look for proxies of impact on learning, like the quality or quantity of work in books or how busy or engaged pupils look in the classroom. The problem is, these show us activity, not learning. We don’t know whether this activity had an impact.

Therefore, if we want to know what impact the curriculum or teaching has had, we need to ask pupils what they know and see what they can do.

Even here, though, there is a pitfall. It is tempting to focus on surface knowledge: on little tidbits of information that we think that pupils should have. If we have taught them that William won the Battle of Hastings, we can ask “Who won the Battle of Hastings?” and see if they say “William”. If we have taught them how to play the opening bars of Frosty the Snowman on the glockenspiel, we can see if they can demonstrate it. However, I’d argue that we all want the curriculum to do more than that. This isn’t really checking the scope of the intent for our pupils.

The different types of teaching impact

I have found it helpful to think about different types of impact, and there are five types, which, handily, spell out the acronym FACED.

Fluency

Firstly, we can check whether pupils are becoming more fluent with using the procedural knowledge that they have been taught.

Do they know how to work out a six-figure grid reference quickly? Can they decode sounds and blend them into words without hesitation? Can they recite their seven times table?

We can design a curriculum to support fluency, with lots of opportunities to practise until skills become automated, so we can check for its impact.

Accuracy

Of course, there is no point in doing things quickly and without hesitation if they are wrong. We want to know that pupils can do things with accuracy.

Can they accurately find a line of best fit on a scatter graph? Can they accurately play those opening bars of Frosty the Snowman? Teachers spend a lot of time checking what pupils know and can do and giving feedback on the accuracy of their work. It is something that should be having an impact.

Connection

When you talk to pupils about what they know about a particular topic, you sometimes get little more than a list of disconnected facts. For example, if you ask what they know about deforestation of tropical rainforests, they can list a few reasons why trees are being cut down, and then list some impacts of this tree felling and then perhaps name a way that people are trying to prevent it. But each of these things stands in isolation. They can’t connect up the knowledge to say whether some impacts are linked to particular causes.

The problem gets worse when you ask pupils to connect knowledge between topics. For example, asking for the connection between a country’s drive for economic development and the way it manages natural resources. But, in many subjects, it is this connectedness that the curriculum is setting out to achieve. So we want to see if pupils can make links between their knowledge.

Enabling

We also want knowledge to allow pupils to do something. We have presumably taught them it for a reason. We need to ask ourselves, and them, what they can use that knowledge for. Can they apply it to different scenarios? Does it allow them to access other parts of the course or to live fulfilling lives?

Depth

Finally, and perhaps the most difficult, is looking at the impact on the depth of knowledge that pupils have. This helps to show the impact of the ambition of the curriculum. Can they explain why countries do not work together to solve the problems of climate change? Can they explain why it is difficult to give just one factor that led to the First World War?

What is “enough” is a matter that’s open to debate, but I think we can all agree that it should mean that pupils can give more than superficial answers to questions and that as they get older, their answers should grow more complex and nuanced.

Mark Enser is an author and freelance writer

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