"How inclusive was that?" - evaluating lessons 2

Teachers' Standard 8 requires you to take responsibility for improving teaching.  Wherever there are opportunities, I'd encourage you to take ownership: decide which aspects of your practice you'd like to discuss with colleagues.  You can do this by deciding in advance the focus for you response to "How did that go?"

You could consider how inclusive your lesson was.  The Venn diagram below is a useful way of thinking about this.  With each of the elements you could ask yourself to what extent... For example, To what extent did I set suitable learning challenges (for all children)? As with any evaluation you then need to be prepared to provide evidence of this.  How do you know that the learning challenges were suitable?  (This links back to how you have planned the lesson.)  

You could evaluate the inclusivity of your practice independently, without the support of or feedback from an observer.  The DfES produced a useful teaching observation checklist intended for school self-evaluation but you could apply it to your own evaluative thinking.  It's important to remember that inclusion is about all pupils, not just pupils with an identified educational need.

Focusing lesson evaluation on inclusivity addresses Teachers' Standards 8 and 5 - you're demonstrating that you have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils and can evaluate 

distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support them.