Teaching Sprints
How Overloaded Educators Can Keep Getting Better
With all of the everyday demands of teaching, the job of improving classroom practice is a challenge for teachers and school leaders. Grounded by research and field-tested around the world, Teaching Sprints offers a professional improvement process that works in theory and practice.
Including insights from the field, and practical protocols, this book outlines a simple model for engaging in short bursts of evidence-informed improvement work. Using Teaching Sprints, teams of teachers can enhance their expertise together, in a way that is sustainable on the ground.
In Teaching Sprints, readers will find:
- three big ideas about practice improvement
- a detailed description of a simple improvement process
- advice on how to establish a routine for continual improvement
Whether you’re a classroom teacher thinking about your own practice, an instructional leader supporting colleagues to teach better tomorrow, or a school leader interested in enhancing your program for professional learning, Teaching Sprints is a must-read for you.
"Among the greatest unresolved issues within schools is developing great models of implementation: Sprints is certainly one of the breakthroughs. This book can make major improvements in schools and classrooms, ironically by focusing on tiny shifts."
John Hattie, Laureate Professor
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Melbourne, Australia
"Once in a while you come across a book that really cuts through the complexity of issues and provides a refreshing and practical approach to improving what happens in schools. This is such a book. Evidence-based, easy to read and full of down-to-earth ideas that busy teachers can implement. I love it."
Steve Munby, Visiting Professor
University College London
Former CEO, National College for School Leadership
London, UK
Brilliant! As school leaders we live, eat and breathe school improvement. In Teaching Sprints, Simon and Bron give us a practical and effective way to make it happen. I wish they had written this 20 years ago when I was a principal.
Our teachers are proof of the impact Teaching Sprints has on improving their practice and ensuring impact. Teachers meaningfully engage in Teaching Sprints because they know it works.
Teaching Sprints has enabled our teams of educators to refine and improve their teaching practice by engaging with research. The Sprints process fosters collaborative learning and has been a valuable form of professional development in creating lasting change. I like that teachers reflect on their current practice and then identify areas where they could improve their expertise. The change is evident in the conversations you hear in meetings where the first step is engaging with research to inform the decisions we make. It is not uncommon to hear teachers say, ‘Well, what is the best way of teaching...?’ Sprints has reaffirmed the need for teachers to be continual learners who constantly strive to get better, regardless of their experience.
As a school leader, I credit the role Teaching Sprints has had in shaping staff culture – it’s one of continual teacher improvement. Through Sprints, teachers at my school routinely improve their effectiveness while simultaneously building strong relational trust.
The Teaching Sprints process has become embedded in our school’s practice. Teachers collaborate, using the three phases of a Teaching Sprint to research around best practice, implement, review, refine, and assess. Improvement in student learning outcomes is evident as a result of the focus on improving and refining teacher pedagogy.
Teaching Sprints is a great process that allowed our team to have some engaging professional dialogue on our teaching practice. It gave us a safe space to reflect on research and share our learning.
Transformative. Timely. Teacher and research informed. Teaching Sprints provides us with the space for deliberate dialogue around two critical aspects of education; improving student outcomes and shifting pedagogical practice.
Teaching Sprints has enabled our portfolio of schools/pre-schools to be involved in a consistent organisational process for developing teacher practice and collaboration. As a local Education Team, the impact of this approach has been clearly identified through the collection of evidence which is enhancing our overall Site Improvement focus.
This book starts with a compelling proposition for anyone involved in teacher learning: “If it doesn’t work for teachers, it doesn’t work.” What Simon and Bronwyn outline is an evidence-based, field-tested, no-nonsense process to support teachers in continually improving their teaching practice. This is a timely and welcome addition to the teacher learning discourse.
Through Teaching Sprints, thousands of our teachers and leaders now have another, and arguably better, way of moving through a disciplined inquiry process - the intentional experimentation, the fast fails, the iterative improvement. It is these small shifts that have added up over hundreds of our schools to make improvement across a system. We now have more expert teachers who not only know the most impactful teaching strategies, but where and how to use them, for which students and at precisely the right time.