topTEACHER

topTEACHER is an ideal App for clarifying your strengths as a teacher and the areas that you need to develop. The App is for anyone who works as an educator or trainer in the public or private sectors, formally or informally. Parents can use it to help understand the work of their child’s school. Learners can use it to reflect on the quality of teaching they are receiving. It uses readily recognisable aspects of teaching such as building learners’ responsibility for their own learning, engaging learners, providing interesting and challenging experiences, challenging oneself as a learner as well as a teacher, and focussing on learners’ progress as well as curriculum coverage. topTEACHER identifies priorities for development. It is designed for iPad tablets.

The topTEACHER experience
• Reduces bureaucracy
• No distractions or intrusive graphics or sounds
• Intuitive card game
• Goes at your pace
• Easy card movement using touch and drag
• Clarifies your thoughts about your teaching
• Advises you on what and how to improve
• Engaging because it is about you and your teaching
• Records screenshots if you wish
• Offers Help when you need it
• Allows you to go back and change your mind at any time

Go further with topTEACHER by
• Sharing the results with someone who coaches you
• Using the App when coaching others
• Collecting data from a number of teachers to find strengths and common areas for improvement across a teaching group, team, school or other establishment
• Reducing bureaucracy by using this App rather than complex paper or online forms
• Undertaking further reading on teaching skills
• Linking the results from this App to your own school/area/national professional standards
• Asking someone else to evaluate your teaching skills

The cards cover the following:
Showing learners that it is their curriculum
This set of cards is about building learners’ responsibility for their own learning. That involves setting and using goals and understanding learning outcomes, ensuring that learning has a sense of audience and purpose, being flexible with lessons and programmes of work, providing lots of points of choice for learners, involving learners in planning their learning and bringing to bear your own subject knowledge and expertise and that of your colleagues.

Emphasising that learning takes place inside learners’ heads
This set of cards explores the skills involved in putting learner engagement at the heart of all that you do. Good teachers are able to be flexible and deploy approaches appropriately depending on the circumstances.

Ensuring that everything I do helps learning
This group of cards covers the ideas around providing interesting and challenging learning activities. The cards here explore the nature of the learning contexts that you offer your learners, the routines you have in place in the learning environment, the appropriate use of technology, encouraging learners to articulate their learning in a range of ways and cutting back on the time that you take in class simply talking.

Reflecting on and improving my teaching
This set of cards focuses on challenging yourself as both a teacher and as a learner. The skills described on the cards range across eliciting feedback from students about your teaching, sharing your own passion for teaching and learning, basing all that you do on a clear set of values, keeping up-to-date with educational research, and collecting and using data to improve your teaching.

Relating learning to the quality of thinking
This set of cards describes the skills involved in the continuous challenging of learners by talking about their thinking. It covers how learning can be reviewed in an ongoing way, how you can model good practice by demonstrating your own thinking, building on things that motivate learners, asking great questions and tuning-in to the link between emotions and learning.