Outstanding Lessons Made Simple

Dr Richard Beard started off as a Science Teacher at Codsall Community High School, Staffordshire, UK and progressed to being an Advanced Skills Teacher (AST), Gifted & Talented and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Co-ordinator. This supportive role continued for four years and across all subjects within a mixture of age ranges as part of the Codsall High School Federation of Schools. Throughout this period, Richard worked within an outstanding and innovative leadership team to help raise the quality of teaching rapidly from Satisfactory (2007) to Outstanding (2010). In three short years, the team had worked to complete a meteoric rise in the quality of Teaching & Learning. Richards work during this time and in the present day is heavily influenced by Assessment for learning (AfL). He realised that training related to planning and the use of AfL lacked the simple approach. Confusion often reigned over what is good practice especially in teachers just joining the profession. From this, Outstanding-lessons-made-simple.co.uk was created in the aim of promoting the simple approach: The Outstanding Lesson Framework. The framework was designed to help teachers discover a simple and effective way to teach. The aim being that all teachers can deliver good and outstanding lessons all the time not just in observations with the simple backbone to good teaching: AfL. At the present time, the framework provides the basis for the improvement of the quality of Teaching & Learning across all of the schools Richard has worked at. He continues to use it as an Assistant Headteacher in charge of Teaching & Learning at The Marches School in Oswestry, Shropshire (Outstanding, Ofsted, 2010) whilst he regularly delivers training on the framework and its use to improve the quality of Teaching & Learning across different schools.