The 4Ps: Pace

The 4Ps offer a shared language for consistent high quality teaching. In this five-part series, Matt Bromley breaks down each one and offers practical strategies for teachers. In part three, he breaks down the third P – pace…

This article first appeared in SecEd Magazine on 14 May 2024.

My 4Ps framework has been formulated to help one of the schools I support in its mission to improve the quality of teaching.

The idea of the framework is that 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 question are purpose, pitch, pace, and progress.

Introducing pace

As I explained in the first part of this series, there are five teacher self-evaluation criteria associated with pace:

1. My classroom is a disciplined environment in which there are clear expectations for behaviour, guided by the whole-school culture, and in which students are motivated and develop positive attitudes to learning.
2. I enthuse my students with clear and insightful explanations then model excellence and, while doing so, think aloud.
3. I ensure lesson activities are planned to gradually hand ownership to my students so that they can contribute equitably, and through this become increasingly independent.
4. I use questioning effectively to engage students, and challenge and deepen their thinking, as well as to check understanding and provide on-going formative feedback.
5. I give students feedback only when I allow time for them to process it and act upon it. I then celebrate the progress they make. I use the outcomes of assessments to inform the pace and pitch of my teaching and am unafraid to stray from the plan and be flexible in my delivery.

Pace in practice

Once we have instilled in students a sense of purpose so that they know what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how that learning will be used in the future, and once we have set the bar high and instilled high expectations of what students can achieve – creating a classroom culture of high challenge and low threat where we teach to the top – then we want to make sure that lessons are instilled with a sense of urgency.

We want there to be an appropriate pace to learning so that students cannot become passive. We want students to feel a sense of progress, to know that they are moving relentlessly forwards and doing something worthwhile.

Pace starts with culture. We want to create a learning environment that is disciplined and orderly. We want to create a learning environment in which students know what is expected of them and feel safe.

And we want to create a learning environment in which students are familiar with the habits and routines in place so that they do not have to dedicate much working memory capacity to it but can instead focus on the learning at hand.

Effective learning environments

Here are six key features of an effective learning environment.

• First, students feel welcomed. The best and simplest way of achieving this is to physically welcome students into our classroom with a smile and by name. For some, this might be the first time someone – an adult, at least – has acknowledged their existence. If we can’t show our students that we are pleased to see them and are eager to teach them, then can we really expect them to be pleased to be in our lesson?
• Second, students feel valued. We achieve this by creating a culture whereby everybody’s contributions are welcomed and given the time and attention they deserve. Valuing each student’s contribution is not the same as agreeing with everything they say. Indeed, if a student gives a wrong answer, then they need to know it’s wrong and why. Our classroom should be a place of intellectual rigour. But a student’s response doesn’t have to be right in order for it to be useful.
• Third, students are enthusiastic about learning. This is, in part, achieved by developing students’ sense of intrinsic motivation but this isn’t always possible and is rarely easy. One tangible, teacher-led strategy for enthusing students is to model that enthusiasm by constantly articulating – through our words and actions – our joy at teaching our students and at teaching our subject.
• Fourth, students are engaged in their learning – not solely in the sense enjoying what they are doing, but rather that they are actively paying attention to the right things and are thinking hard. It is about being meaningfully occupied by the curriculum.
• Fifth, students are eager to experiment. Taking risks and making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process. Being eager to experiment should therefore be about instilling in students the importance of practice, of redrafting and redrafting work until it is the best it can be. In short, in our classrooms if it isn’t excellent, it isn’t finished.
• Sixth, students feel rewarded for their hard work. Rewarding hard work and effort not only creates a level playing field on which every student has an equal chance, it also makes explicit the progress each student is making from their individual starting points. Not every student can achieve a top grade, but every student can improve and beat their previous score.

In order to achieve these six features, we need to attend to three aspects of the learning environment…

1, The physical environment 

Here I refer to those concrete aspects of our surroundings that affect our senses – the attractiveness and usefulness of classroom walls, the quality of light and the temperature, and to how the physical space is utilised in terms of layout and facilities.

Students’ emotional and physiological stability can have a direct impact on their understanding of the curriculum and, therefore, the pace of their progress. Thus, creating a physical environment that allows students to feel comfortable, content, and focused can help them to become more attentive and more attuned to the content of the curriculum.

An intelligently designed physical environment with, for example, distinct and clear lines of communication can help to promote dialogue between students and teachers. This, in turn, can help students to feel better integrated in the learning process which then helps to promote wellbeing within the classroom.

2, The emotional environment 

Here I refer to the ethos of the classroom and to how students are helped to feel safe and secure, and taught how to manage their emotions and engage in learning with confidence, determination, and resilience.

As well as explicitly welcoming mistakes and promoting risk-taking, we want to actively teach metacognition and self-regulation – including by modelling it ourselves.

Metacognition describes the processes involved when students plan, monitor, evaluate and make changes to their own learning behaviours. Metacognition is often considered to have two dimensions: metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation.

Metacognitive knowledge refers to what students know about learning. This includes: the student’s knowledge of their own cognitive abilities; knowledge of particular tasks; and knowledge of the different strategies that are available to them and when they are appropriate to the task.

Self-regulation, meanwhile, refers to what students do about learning. It describes how they monitor and control their cognitive processes. For example, a student might realise that a particular strategy is not working so they decide to try a different strategy. Put another way, self-regulated students are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and can motivate themselves to engage in, and improve, their learning.

Talking of motivation – intrinsic motivation is key to helping students manage their emotions. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to gain new knowledge. Often, intrinsic motivation is driven by an inherent interest or enjoyment in the task itself and exists within an individual rather than relying on external pressures or necessity.

Put simply, it is the desire to do something even though there is no reward except a sense of accomplishment at achieving that thing. Intrinsic motivation is a natural motivational tendency and is a critical element in cognitive, social, and physical development.

3, The social environment 

Here I refer to an environment which is conducive to good behaviour and attitudes to learning, tackles poor behaviour including low-level disruption, and protects staff and students from harassment and harm.

One way to build an effective social environment is to define a set of social norms for what constitutes good conduct, and this is much more than the reduction or elimination of non-compliance.

A whole-school approach to behaviour is much more than a set of policies or documents, it is about what everyone in the school does, how they behave, and what expectations are set and taught. It is also about the values and ethos of the school.

Strong values underpin good behaviour. In the best schools, the values underpinning the behaviour policy are clear and explicit. Staff and students know what the values are. In these schools, students know that good behaviour and attendance prepares them well for their future lives.

Thinking hard but efficiently 

Now that we’ve created a disciplined learning environment and motivated students, we need to make sure they think hard but efficiently about the curriculum content we need them to learn.

First, we need to give students work to do that is challenging but achievable, because if the work is too easy, students will complete it through habit and if the work is too hard, students will be unable to complete it. In both cases, learning will fail.

Working on problems that are pitched in our struggle zone is rewarding. We are motivated by thinking hard and overcoming difficulty; we are motivated by overcoming challenges.

To achieve this, sometimes we need to place artificial barriers in the way of students’ initial encoding of information so that the information is stored more effectively and can more easily be retrieved later. These artificial barriers, or roadblocks in our thinking, are what Robert Bjork (2011) calls “desirable difficulties” which “slow down the apparent learning, but under most circumstances help long-term retention and help transfer of knowledge from what you learnt to new situations”.

One problem with giving students hard work is that a lack of space in working memory is a functional bottleneck of human cognition. We therefore need to help students to cheat their working memories.

One way to cheat the limited size of working memory is through factual knowledge – the more information you have stored in long-term memory and the more mental maps or schema you have connecting this information together, the easier it is to process new information. Another way to cheat working memory is through the use of mnemonics and other memory aids, as well as by using dual-coding.

Explanations and modelling 

Another aspect of pace is the effective use of teacher explanations and modelling.

The best explanations present new material in small chunks and provide scaffolds and support. Here, we model a new procedure by, among other strategies, thinking aloud, guiding learners’ initial practice, and providing learners with cues.

Then we provide supportive feedback and systematic corrections, giving students “fix-up” strategies and expert models of the completed task. Finally, we provide opportunities for extensive independent practice, affording students plenty of chances to practise new knowledge and skills. The best explanations tend to include:

1. Metaphors and analogies which contextualise information so that abstract ideas or hitherto alien concepts, are made concrete, tangible, and real, and so that they are related to students’ own lives and experiences.
2. Dual-coding combines verbal instructions, as well as any text-based explanations displayed on the board or in hand-outs, with visuals such as diagrams, charts, graphics and moving images.
3. Reciprocity which involves students explaining concepts back to the teacher as well as to each other. This works on the basis that only once you teach something have you truly learned it.
4. Models which provide exemplars of both good and bad work, as well as exemplars from a range of different contexts, in order to show students what a final product should look like and what makes such products work.

Variety is the spice of learning 

Once we’ve explained and modelled new information, we need students to engage with that information to deepen their understanding of it and improve their chances of transferring the information between contexts.

As such, we need to provide plentiful opportunities for learners to engage in speaking and listening activities and one of the best ways to do this is to ask questions.

In many ways, the art of asking good questions is what teaching’s all about. Indeed, Socrates argued that “questioning is the only defensible form of teaching”. I discussed effective questioning in a recent episode of the SecEd Podcast and a recent five-article series.

Dialogic teaching strategies make use of the power of talk to stimulate and extend students’ thinking, as well as to advance their learning and understanding. Dialogic teaching enables the teacher to diagnose and assess learners’ understandings and misunderstandings through speaking and listening, and questioning.

Follow Matt on X @mj_bromley for more teaching tips like these.