The Great Teaching Toolkit
A developmental approach to performance management

Evidence-based

Controllable metrics

Effort over outcomes

Supportive accountability
Less box ticking, more meaningful development

The Great Teaching Toolkit is helping schools to bridge the ‘stubborn gap’ between professional development and performance management.
- Set goals based on an evidence-based framework focused on pedagogy or school environment and leadership.
- Draw upon courses and resources to build the knowledge needed to achieve individual goals.
- Gather insight and evidence of improvement from video and learner survey tools.
- Organise and record development and review meetings in a shared space.
- Evidence the improvement journey using development cycle portfolios.
“Performance management methods can often fall short of their desired aims when they are overly-focused on compliance rather than genuine people development. Moreover, they tend to present ‘improvement’ as something that you do when you’re not good enough, rather than something that everyone does, irrespective of how good they currently are in their role. Improvement is for everybody.”
“Take the middle path with the Great Teaching Toolkit.”
Professor Rob Coe
Evidence Based Education
Evidence Based Education

Love the one you’re with
Here’s how schools are using the Great Teaching Toolkit:
- Goals: every teacher is accountable for setting a learner-focused, actionable goal from within the Model for Great Teaching. Their goal is recorded in the GTT.
- Understanding: with a valuable, learner-focused goal defined, teachers build the knowledge they need to understand how to achieve the goal through GTT resources.
- Skills: a goal and increased knowledge get you so far, but practical strategies and techniques need to be learned. These are practised and refined through feedback as part of the GTT development cycle.
- Habits: teachers who get better at the day job embed their new learning. They are fundamentally changed by setting a goal, building understanding, developing new skills, and embedding habits through deliberate practice with plentiful feedback.
- Evidence: evidence and feedback are at the heart of the process. Use GTT video and survey tools to gather evidence, and add your own.

“The Great Teaching Toolkit hands autonomy over to the teachers. I think this has been a really big thing in building trust across our staff. They have ownership and a real say in their development and direction, and it’s not led by accountability, but out of a real drive to support our students as best we can.” (Read full case study here.)
Jamie Kelleher
Assistant Headteacher
Assistant Headteacher

Upgrade your performance management approach
- Supportive accountability within a framework of managed autonomy and feedback.
- Professional development resources to addresses individual teacher needs and goals.
- Classroom feedback tools to inform and demonstrate effort and outcomes.
- Focus on goals, actions and effort based on what teachers can control.