Inspired by Tom Barrett’s post commenting on Steve Phillip‘s wordle showing the content of the proposed text in the forthcoming EYFS document, I was intrigued to see what the outcome would be if I turned the Teaching Standards into wordles for each level. I’ve been working with the standards a lot recently, reporting on the progress of NQTs this year as well as preparing my own documentation for Threshold, so wanted to see if they suffered the same fate as the EYFS framework. Or were more inline with my view of the job and the capabilities needed to perform it well at the differing levels.
All the standards can be found on the TDA Website and it is worth remembering that they are hierarchical so to become an Advanced Skills Teacher you have to meet the standards at that level but also all the levels that come before it.
I hear that next year they will be changing (at least for QTS) so it may well be interesting to perform this task again when they are published and see where the new focus will lie. [UPDATE: the new standards have been published for QTS and Core, I’ve turned these into a Wordle and written about them in a new post: New Teaching Standards as a Word Cloud.]
The Wordle for the Standards to be awarded QTS:
It makes for interesting reading, but I am happy that words I would consider vital to describing my job come out as the largest.
The Wordle for the Core Teacher Standards (NQTs):
Similar to the standards needed for the award of QTS, pleasing to see the focus in on learners and learning along with progress.
The Wordle for Post Threshold Teacher Standards:
Again it’s pleasing to see that learning, learners, and understanding come up trumps alongside words that you would hope to find for an experienced teacher such as effective and knowledge.
The Wordle for Excellent Teacher Standards:
We start to see Practice become more important now along with out-of-classroom skills too. Teaching and Learning though are still up there.
The Wordle for Advanced Skills Teacher Standards:
Now there is hardly any mention of learning, children or teaching with the focus clearly on Leadership and Developing the whole school.
All in all I’m happier about these outcomes than the one shown for the EYFS document, these above at least hold teaching, learning and children as important (or at least talk with reference to them frequently) and as you “progress” then children are phased out in favour of colleagues and development of their practice and the school.
