Our schools are full of great teachers, but often the specifics of what they do to make great learning happen remain hidden.
In his Visible Learning series of books, Professor John Hattie has argued that we need tools and research to make visible how the best teachers teach in order to support all teachers have the most positive impact possible on children’s learning.
In 2014 Nesta worked with the University of Melbourne and technology provider Ai Media UK to explore the potential of real time captioning and transcripts of lessons to support teachers’ professional development.
Teachers and their students were provided with a real time text display of the spoken elements of a lesson, which they could review during and after the lesson.
Once the lesson was over, teachers were able to quickly and efficiently review how their teaching went using the transcripts and a dashboard feeding back on the key features of their lessons such as balance of teacher and student talk, ‘thinking time’ given to learners, the types of questioning used and the clarity of their explanations.
We worked with schools in Dudley, Birmingham and London to develop the use of this programme, which was independently evaluated by NatCen social research in a project funded by the Education Endowment Foundation.