Chasing perfection in education

As we strive to improve our teaching practice, ‘Do we need to be a bit less Steven Bartlett?’, asks Nathan Burns

A few months ago, the internet was alight with responses to the Steven Barlett interview, where he discussed how his life had been turned upside down and back again because he’d had a glass of wine. I’d love to say I was exaggerating, but I’m not. It turned out that the glass of wine that Steven had meant that he didn’t sleep quite as well, and then he didn’t do quite as well at the gym, and hence his podcasting wasn’t as good as normal. That glass of wine has a serious number of things to answer for…

“Ultimate efficiency”

Now, for us in education, not having a good night’s sleep, and a lesson not quite going perfectly, sounds like an everyday occurrence. Things happen – we’re working with young people who all have their own minds, wishes and whims, all of which we certainly can’t control.

Yet, the idea of perfection, of ‘ultimate efficiency’ that Barlett talked about, seems to be creeping more and more into education – forgetting the fact that every single lesson is a live performance with an audience who just loves to interact. There are some benefits to this. For example, if research tells us that a new approach is really powerful, then it makes sense that we take time to learn more about that approach and consider how we can embed it within our lessons.

Improving our teaching quality by just 1% is a worthwhile aim. However, expecting that new idea to go absolutely perfectly every single lesson is unwise and unfair to teachers up and down the land.

Leadership approach counts

Let’s take the following context. A teacher (let’s call them Ava) was present in an internal PD session, where the T&L lead discussed ‘explicit justifications’ – a research-backed approach to improving modelling in the classroom, and something that works across all phases and subject areas. The session is delivered well, with a range of examples, and the opportunity for planning and discussion. Ava is feeling confident about how to implement this approach and knows that she has several lessons to implement this before leadership are coming to observe her.

So far, so normal. But at the point of observation, if things don’t go too well in the given lesson, there are two outcomes that we may face…

The first is a supportive leader, who discusses with Ava what did go well, where to improve, and how things have been going in other lessons. The leader would listen, see how they could support, and see if Ava wants them to pop in again soon to provide some further feedback, ideas or just to observe great practice.

The second is a leader who is not supportive; instead, they are one who believes that things need to be perfect all of the time, in much the same ilk as Steven Bartlett. They aren’t supportive of Ava – listing all of the things which went wrong and providing her with clear actions that she must do to improve. They don’t take time to ask what support she would like, to see how it was going in previous lessons or for Ava to feed into the process at all. They also don’t consider the fact that students (the audience) are all their own people, and their actions can, of course, impact how smoothly a lesson progresses.

Staying realistic while aiming high

Chasing perfection in education therefore needs to be carefully designed. It’s crucial that we constantly engage with research and consider how we can improve our practice. A 1% improvement in a range of areas can lead to significant overall improvement. This is often how I explore metacognition – a little improvement in our modelling, our questioning, the resources we use, how our feedback is engaged with (and so forth) – will make massively positive impacts on our own teaching, and therefore the outcomes of our learners. Improving our knowledge of what makes for effective teaching is imperative – and we should never stop looking to do this.

However, striving for an impeccable performance with each and every routine in every single lesson is not an achievable aim. We don’t need to berate ourselves should things not go absolutely perfectly, much like Barlett did when he had a glass of wine. We should absolutely have high expectations of ourselves and one another. Research should challenge us – and feedback should help us improve. Professional learning should continually refine our craft. None of that is incompatible with accepting that individual lessons will sometimes go wrong.

A continuous journey

High standards mean attempting to improve; perfectionism means believing anything less than flawless is failure. This is something that leaders need to be aware of when working with their teams. We need to chase overall perfection in how we develop our T&L, curriculum and policies, but expecting each and every lesson to be perfect is not the situation we want to put ourselves in as a sector.

Perhaps that’s the lesson education can teach the rest of the world, that excellence isn’t built by never making mistakes but from continually learning from them. Teachers don’t need to be flawless. They need to keep getting better. There’s a profound difference between those two ambitions.