Swedish school culture is changing. More and more school leaders want to focus on the quality of teaching by observing it to see what it leads to and developing it together with the teachers.
Sweden’s new observation form Teaching skills in practice is now also receiving international recognition. The mastermind behind London’s schools’ turnaround from being the worst to the  the best performing schools in England, Professor Sir George Berwick, describes it as innovation for Swedish schools.

Read Professor Sir George Berwicks blog

Read more about the observation form – Undervisningsskicklighet i praktiken

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After part 1 of 8 in our series of 30 minutes lunch webinars
Theme: Equivalent leadership in all classrooms

Watch the video below. As a participant at our webinars, you can listen and also ask questions. After each webinar, you will also receive an email with a video with input to use internally at your school.

Co-organizers: Lärarnas Riksförbund teacher union and the National Federation of Free Schools

Sign up here for all the lunch webinars
Price: SEK 800 excluding VAT.
All revenues in full go to BRIS (Childens’ rights in society).

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Next lunch webinar is with John Steinberg on October 28 – mark that in your calendar
John Steinberg’s theme: The teacher’s body language – the path to trust
See you at 12.00-12.30 on the 28th. Welcome!

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Link to the video with Johan Alm from the lunch webinar

With kind regards!
Mats Rosenkvist, BRAVOLesson

PRESS RELEASE – OCTOBER 1, 2021

Now a 2-year project focusing on the quality of teaching starts at all schools in Åmål. Kent Jönsson, who is Head of school in Åmål, has together with the principals developed a plan that will focus on three concrete dimensions of good teaching. With the help of the web tool BRAVOLesson, teachers and principals will together develop teaching through systematic and collaborative visits in ebery classroom.

More than 144,000 lessons are conducted every academic year at the schools in Åmål. The overall goal of the plan is to improve the students’ results – their learning. The plan describes the research that shows that it is crucial not to focus on the students but to focus on the quality of teaching for the students. The three areas that are included in Åmål’s plan are: environment for learning, individualisation of the teaching to the students in the group and a structured and thought through start and end of the lesson.

– With reflection after each lesson observation and open conversations, between the principal and the teacher and between teachers, we hope support all teachers’ to take their teaching to the next level to support students’ learning, says Kent Jönsson, Head of school in Åmål.

Åmål is the latest of several schools and municipalities that initially has participated in our webinars and then chose BRAVOLesson to improve their focus on the quality of teaching in a different way than what Swedish school culture normally leads to. Teaching, should of course, be the core of the school improvement and we are happy that more and more schools on all levels of education, just like us, believe that teaching can be systematically improved in every classroom, says Mats Rosenkvist, BRAVOLesson.

For more information contact
Kent Jönsson, Head of school in Åmål municipality
Phone: 0532-17278 and email: kent.jonsson@amal.se
or
Mats Rosenkvist, founder of BRAVOLesson
Phone: 0709-574780 and email: mats@bravolesson.se

Now a new academic year has started and at the same time 1000s of lessons at each school. Before that school is out in June next year, a total of more than 100 million lessons will have been completed at Sweden’s primary and secondary schools. This means a fantastic amount of opportunities because everyone agrees that it is the teaching that has the greatest impact on students’ learning.
In previous years, in August, we pointed out the most important question for the academic year and each lesson: Is learning taking place here right now? Now we have honed that wording together with our customers and partners. Interested? You can find it below…

If you as a principal want to organize a systematic focus on developing the quality of teaching together with the teachers at your school, it is important to:

use observational material for lesson visits so that the reflections during the subsequent didactic conversations will, among other things, be about evidence-based important dimensions of good teaching. In short, for the conversations to be systematically about what is important.
use questions in the material (s) that during the conversations really systematically lead to reflections that move the teaching forward.
One of the few such questions is of course related to the question mentioned above – “Is learning taking place…?”. It now reads as follows for discussion and reflection with and between teachers after each classroom visit:

What learning did the lesson lead to for the students – based on your planning?

Feel free to read our next blog. Then we will raise the issue that is as important or perhaps even more important – as a prerequisite for a learning environment  – every school year and every lesson.

Feel free to book a 30-minute web demo and we will show how BRAVOLesson and systematics can lead to better and better teaching in every classroom.

Good luck with the new academic year!
from Team BRAVOLesson

PRESS RELEASE – AUGUST 13, 2021

More and more schools and municipalities are systematically focusing on the quality of teaching. Something that has probably never been more important than after three semesters with a pandemic and a learning debt.
When the new academic year starts, several new customers on all levels of education systematize their focus and internal work together with all teachers in the BRAVOLesson tool. Work based on evidence to reflect on questions like: how is the teaching carried out, what does it lead to, how can it be improved and does our focus lead to improved teaching and learning?

Municipalities and schools such as Norrköping, Oxelösund and Åmål as well as Thorén Business School in Malmö, Grimslövs Folk High School and the Olympica playschools have recently decided on BRAVOLesson at different levels. In addition, Ludvika municipality has now completed a procurement and renewed their license from 2018 until 2023. They will continue to develop their work with a focus on teaching and for that accounts in BRAVOLesson for all principals and teachers.

– Various surveys over the past ten years have shown that the Swedish school culture generally does not include looking at and evaluating the quality of teaching. We notice a change. This is completely logical because everyone in the global education community along with research agrees that it is the teaching that has the greatest impact on students’ learning. Since the start with BRAVOLesson 2017, interest and the number of customers have been growing for each academic year. During the spring, almost 20 schools in Iceland also chose our tool, says Mats Rosenkvist, founder of BRAVOLesson.

During spring we have, despite the covid-19 crisis, been fortunate to welcome new customers as well as new schools with municipalities that have used BRAVOLesson for some time.
This week we have delivered BRAVOLesson to our first play schools – Trolle Ljungby and Nymö förskola in Sweden.
This means that during the next academic year BRAVOLesson will be used on all levels of education in three countries.

Hi!

Due to covid-19 schools and higher education have quickly and in an impressive way changed ways of working and turned to online teaching. We are all very grateful for this! Schools have shown their commitment and their important role in our society.

The current situation with covid-19 means that online teaching will remain for different levels of education in many countries for at least this academic year. This means millions of students being taught millions of online lessons. In a small country like Sweden more than 6 million lessons in upper secondary schools will be conducted online **.

BRAVOLesson has therefore designed an observation form *** for online teaching available in our free library. Many schools and teachers have already expressed their gratitude to BRAVOLesson in assisting teachers in developing the quality of their online teaching and using the form for:

• Self evaluation
• Peer evaluation
• Collaborative reflection and learning
• Online lesson observations

Kind regards,
from The BRAVOLesson Team

DOWNLOAD THE OBSERVATION FORM FOR ONLINE TEACHING

**
40 school days x 4 lessons per day x 38,800 teachers

***
BRAVOLesson has not found any existing observation form specifically designed for online teaching in the Nordic countries. Our new observation form is based on the Swedish National Agency for Education’s research overview of important dimensions of online teaching as well as The Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s existing research-based observation form for general didactics. We have also gathered impressions from examples from other parts of the world where there is a greater and more systematic focus on the quality of teaching that has led to that they also have existing observation forms for online teaching.

New at BRAVOLesson’s stand at BETT.

This year we are using The Lesson Calculator to discuss and reflect together with visitors just how many lessons per school and year that can be improved. This is a dimension that many teachers and school leaders have not thought about. At a small school with only ten teachers it is more than 7.000 lesson per academic year.

We are also launching a module for how to carry out both self- and external school quality assessment according to the Icelandic school inspection authority’s (Mentamálastofnun) structure (Viðmiðum um gæðastarf í grunnskólum).

January 23rd at 16.00 hours Professor Sir George Berwick’s will hold a short speech at our stand at about the key details of the approach that has made it possible to raise the standards in London’s schools from the worst to the best performing.

Welcome!