The 4Ps of high-quality teaching: Purpose - SecEd (2024)

Last week in the first article of this five-part series, I introduced a framework – called the 4Ps – which I have formulated to help one of the schools I support in its mission to improve the quality of teaching.

We’ve agreed that the secret to their success will be consistency: making sure that every student receives the same high-quality education every day.

The idea of the framework is this: we want a simple way of capturing all the key actions on the school improvement plan, a means of teachers self-evaluating their current practice to identify their professional development needs, and a shared language with which to articulate their vision and values.

As I explained last week, the Ps in this framework are purpose, pitch, pace, and progress.

Explore this SecEd series: The 4Ps of high-quality teaching

• • Article 1: Introducing the framework (published April 24, 2024)
  • Article 2: The first P: Purpose (this article)
  • Article 3: The second P: Pitch (published May 7, 2024)
  • Article 4: The third P: Pace (published, May 15, 2024)
  • Article 5: The fourth P: Progress (published May 21, 2024)

Introducing purpose

There are five teacher self-evaluation criteria associated with purpose:

1. I teach an appropriate and ambitious curriculum to all my students and ensure it fills knowledge gaps.
2. I teach the knowledge, skills, and behaviours that my students need to progress to the next stage of their education, employment, and lives.
3. What I teach represents excellence in my subject field and prepares students for future success.
4. I sequence learning to ensure my students make progress and I use retrieval practice to activate and build upon prior learning.
5. I tell my students what they are expected to learn, why that matters, and how they will use it later.

Purpose in practice

The best curriculum plans are threefold:

1. They are ambitious for all students in that they embody high expectations and excellence.
2. They are progressive in that there is continuity so that what’s taught today builds upon and extends what was taught yesterday and builds towards what will be taught tomorrow.
3. They are preparatory in that they equip students with the knowledge, skills, and behaviours they need to succeed at the next stage of their lives.

Making the curriculum ambitious starts with equality…

Inclusion and diversity

If we dumb-down or reduce the curriculum for some students because of their starting points, backgrounds, or additional and different needs, then we would be guilty of deepening those existing differences and disadvantages, rather than using the curriculum as a tool for social justice.

Therefore, we should teach the same curriculum to all students. We should afford all students the opportunity to be exposed to excellence in our subject discipline, and to be given an equal chance of succeeding in the same tasks.

As well as representing excellence, the best curriculums represent our students. In other words, they talk to our students’ lived experiences so that they can see themselves and their lives reflected in the content we teach and in the examples and analogies we use to teach it.

This is important if students are to engage in school life and if they are to believe that they have a part to play in education. Representation is about inclusion.

Once we have made sure our curriculum is inclusive, we need it to celebrate diversity. In other words, we want it to take students beyond their lived experiences and teach them about people who are different to them including those from other cultures and backgrounds. Celebrating diversity helps foster empathy and understanding, it helps prepare students for future success.

Michael Young, in his book Knowledge and the Future School: Curriculum and social justice (2014) says that the purpose of education “is to enable all students to acquire knowledge that takes them beyond their experience”. He continues: “It is knowledge which many will not have access to at home, among their friends, or in the communities in which they live. As such, access to this knowledge is the right of all learners as future citizens.”

He is therefore arguing that one purpose of education is to achieve social justice and improve social mobility.

So, yes, it starts with equality – teaching the same ambitious, inclusive, and diverse curriculum to all – but equality is still not enough. Equality needs to give way to equity…

One size does not fit all

If we gave every student exactly the same uniform to wear, it might fit a small proportion of them, but it would be too big or small for the vast majority. We want all students to wear the same uniform (equality) –but we must ensure that students are given uniform that fits them (equity).

Equity is about teaching all students the same curriculum – and requiring them to complete the same tasks in lessons – but then making sure the curriculum fits them by tailoring it to meet their individual needs.

Most often, this adaptation takes the form of task scaffolding. Scaffolds are short-term tweaks we make to tasks to help all students access them. Scaffolds might take the form of more detailed or chunked instructions, partially completed tasks, or worked examples, the re-teaching of key concepts, a bank of key words and definitions, support from an additional adult, and so on. The key to making scaffolds successful is that they are reduced over time to avoid perpetuating learned helplessness.

Order and organisation

Next, to ensure our curriculum is progressive, we need to sequence learning over time. Sequencing is about activating and building on prior knowledge and building towards our ambitious end-points. The best curriculums bake-in increasing challenge and enable students to build ever-more complex mental maps of information. The best curriculums have a logic to their order and organisation, but are not linear; rather, they are cyclical because they return to prior learning to ensure it does not decay and to connect it to new learning.

Sequencing works well when we know what was taught previously. In other words, we need to find out what students should already know and be able to do, and what likely misconceptions they’ll bring with them to the classroom.

Then, we identify the checkpoints through which students must pass on their journey through our curriculum – what does good progress look like at each juncture? What should students know and do at each stage? Once we have this shape set out – perhaps in the form of a progression map – we need to decide how progress will be assessed and what we will do with the data to ensure all students are supported and that we maintain the integrity of our curriculum sequencing – in other words, we need to know how to support those who have fallen behind without allowing the gap between them and their higher-performing peers to widen.

Peer-teaching is a great way to do this. Rather than allow higher-performing students to rush too far ahead while others flounder, peer-teaching ensures that all students remain at the same stage of our sequence but that all students are meaningfully engaged.

Those who are peer-taught are helped to understand key concepts by having it retaught by someone else, perhaps using more accessible language or analogies. Those who are peer-teaching deepen their understanding of key concepts by engaging in retrieval practice and by having to explain those concepts to someone else.

A sign of successful schooling

Next, to ensure our curriculum is preparatory, we need to know where students are going and what they will need to know and do when they get there. We also need to consider outcomes in the widest sense of the word – what will a successful student look like at the end? What will they know and be able to do, what qualities and traits will they possess, how will they behave and what values will they hold dear?

Preparing students for future success is about looking beyond a subject specification rather than teaching to the test. It is about identifying the more ambitious end-points of a great education and it is about personal development. What, other than good qualifications (which remains important) will our students need in their toolkit in order to be well-equipped for the next stage of their education and lives?

Preparing students for the future is also about identifying the skills they need and then explicitly planning and teaching those skills. Skill development is, I think, two-fold.

First, there are the skills that students need now in order to access and achieve in school – these comprise study skills such as note-taking and research, as well as independent learning skills such as metacognition.

Second, there are the skills that students will need outside of school in order to play a full part in the world – these comprise character traits such as resilience, determination, compassion, communication including oracy, confidence and self-esteem, empathy, the ability to keep safe and healthy, forward-planning, organisation and time management, team-work and so on.

Often, we leave the development of skills to chance rather than identifying the skills that students need now and in the future, and explicitly planning and teaching them.

Sharing the big picture

Finally, once we have achieved all of the above, we need to share it with students. In other words, we need to articulate the bigger picture to explain to students:

1. What they are learning.
2. Why they are learning it.
3. What they will do with that learning later.

Sharing the bigger picture will help build students’ intrinsic motivation. It will also ensure that students have the requisite knowledge to be able to understand new concepts, processing new abstract information within the context of what is already familiar and concrete.

The big picture is a student-friendly version of our curriculum plan and sequence, it shows students how learning connects and builds over time, how their progress will be assessed, and what real-world applications their learning will have in the future.

Purpose and motivation are also borne of future-planning. We want students to have an idea of where they are headed and how they will get there. This involves careers education and the development of employability skills. It involves work experience, including work placements. And it involves making explicit connections between what we teach and the world of work.

A decade or so ago, while a headteacher, I interviewed all my highest-performing students – those who’d just got the top grades at GCSE and A level. I found a set of common traits. They all had good attendance and punctuality, they were all well-organised and completed work on time, they were all willing to ask for help when stuck, they all had something to aim for and were ambitious, and they had all mapped out a career path and were determined to succeed.

All these students believed that doing well in school would increase their chances of getting more interesting (and higher paid) jobs later in life. Many of them had a clear idea about the kind of job they wanted to do and knew what was needed to get it. They had researched the entry requirements and had then plotted the necessary sixth form, college, and/or university paths. They had connected what they were doing in school with achieving their future ambitions. In short, school work and good exam results had a purpose, they were a means to an important end.

Final thoughts

The moral is this: purpose breeds motivation. As such, the more we can articulate a clear goal to students – explaining what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will use that learning later – and the more we can plan an ambitious, progressive, and preparatory curriculum with excellence at its heart, the more purpose and motivation we will foster in our students, and the more successful they will be.

• Matt Bromley is aneducation journalist, author, and advisor with 25 years’ experiencein teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher. He remains a practising teacher. Matt is theauthor of numerous books on education and co-host of the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Find him on X @mj_bromley. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/matt-bromley

Further information & resources

• Young: Knowledge and the Future School, Bloomsbury, 2014.