Monthly Archives: November 2014

Educational underachievement and possible racism

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Very recently, I was reading this book:

Evans

 On showing a friend, she commented to me: “isn’t that a bit…” Then followed the confused and screwed up face, because no-one wants to imply to your face that you are reading potentially politically unacceptable, racist literature.

And that reminded me of this excellent post from Bansi Kara on white working class underachievement. The sticking point in this scenario was one of names: “What do you call a group targeting white working class students?  How do you explain that this achievement group is for white students only?  If you have African or Turkish groups, it is called celebration, but if you add a white group, does it become segregation?”

Ofsted’s 2012-13 annual report includes a specific section on white children from poor families, who are falling behind: “Compared with other ethnic groups of pupils from low income families, White children have the lowest attainment.” This is of key interest to me, as my borough frequently laments a gap between achievement along these lines, and boosting the achievement of White British students has been a major priority for my school.

Here’s what Ofsted says: “It is poverty of expectation in these communities and in many of their schools, not poverty itself, that limits the achievement of these children. In the best schools, successful leaders and teachers challenge all children to achieve well. A relentless focus by school leaders on the quality of teaching creates a climate in which no child is left behind.”

I’m not sure how I feel about that. I mean, I agree with the second part: yes, focus on teaching and learning, every time. But the idea of a “poverty of expectation” just doesn’t ring true for me – unless these families and children are just really good at seeming to want to achieve.

Let me explain. I teach a large number of White British students, all of whom I would consider at risk of underachieving, but really only because I consider nearly all my students at risk of this. Humans are strange and unpredictable beings; teachers will tell you that their star pupil of one week can morph into their massive concern the next. Furthermore, you just don’t know who will fall to pieces before an exam (the panic attacks from my most unlikely Year 11 last year in the minutes before their English exams assured me of that). I’m worried, in short, about all my students.

But to peel off a group, because Ofsted says they are at risk, my school says they are a risk, and even the data suggests they are at risk, I’ll look at these individuals in isolation. These students all want to do well; they are in some ways C/D borderline students, but they want to achieve A grades in English, and they all actually could achieve this. What is holding them back?

Behaviour is an issue – and I mean the full range here; from pretty serious storming out of the classroom in anger to sitting idly and disengaging with the lesson. I speak with the parents of all my Year 11 (race non-specific) a lot. And you know, the White British parents are nothing but entirely supportive of everything I do. They become angry if their child has disappointed me; they talk to their children, they support their children, they come into school to talk with me. I saw all of that in evidence at last year’s year 11 parents’ evening, when 100% of the White British parents attended and spoke with me, and I know when I say I will ring a parent they will become either elated (if it’s good news) or desolate if it’s not. The relationship is working; parents are supporting their children and the school.

So what’s going on?

I turned to Gillian Evans’ Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain in the hopes of gleaning an insight. Yes, the book is from 2006; however she speaks of children in primary school who I am teaching now in secondary school (hypothetically, I mean).

Evans’ book is made up of extensive field research: she lived on a council estate in Bermondsey anyway and integrated herself into the community, conducting interviews and observations over the course of a number of years. The difficulty with this is that the research is all qualitative – I’m not sure how relevant one particular woman’s outlook on life is to all of my students several years on.

Nonetheless, the first aspect which jumped out to me was rules. Early on in this study, Evans notes that while middle class children turn up to school very ready to learn, working class children do not: “the form of participation that is required of them at school doesn’t closely match the one that is required of them at home.” While middle class parents create and enforce strict boundaries, leading their children to recognize these in the school setting, apparently working class parents tend not to. So, in some ways, despite wishing and wanting the best for their children, and despite supporting the school, their offspring will always struggle with tough behaviour boundaries.

This is expanded upon in one case study in which a parent “believes that her daughters’ happiness depends on her giving them the freedom to ‘do as they please.’” This parent’s comment of: “if they want to learn they will, if they don’t they won’t and that’s that” did ring surprisingly familiar to me: I have actually heard almost these exact words from more than one parent.

Evans does not provide solutions in her book, only an overview of some working class values and lifestyle factors which can be inferred to lead of educational “failure”, or at the very least, underachievement.

And this is where I feel frustrated. To return to Kara’s initial comments, we know there is a problem, we almost know what the problem is, but we are powerless to do anything about it. I remember a colleague bringing up a meeting with just White British parents and dismissing it almost as soon as it was brought up – what would that look like?

I will go back to the drawing board on this one, but if anyone can provide any marvelous strategies that aren’t perceived as a little bit racist, I would so love to hear them.

Postscript: I wrote this post back in May, and have been squeamish about putting it onto the internet. Then, I didn’t know what would happen to my C/D borderline White British students, but now I do: they achieved B grades in English. Each and every one of them.

Update: A wise friend has just commented to me: “The fact that your white British parents attend parents evening is the main reason their kids got B’s”. I can’t agree more, and will be posting about the issue of non-attendance at parents’ evenings soon, as it has been especially on my mind this week.

Reading exercise books

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Marking as an English teacher means you spend most of your week reading. If I am honest, most of what I read is what I mark. A set of exercise books can become a novel; more than a novel depending on the class size. A novel, of course, full of repetition and analysis. Perhaps, then, more a book of critical essays.

A recent conversation prompted me to realise that while anyone I have worked with knows that marking is 1. My absolute favourite part of teaching and 2. The way I spend almost every evening, weekend and holiday, I have somehow neglected to say very much on the subject here. Below is my attempt to shoe-horn my ideas about marking into a blog about reading.

Teaching lessons: in my first year in the classroom, I found I wasn’t terribly good at it. I read Phil Beadle’s How to Teach, wherein he writes: “make no mistake: this is the most important thing you do as a teacher… mark their books with dedication and rigour and your class will fly.” Essentially, Beadle contends, you can be the greatest educator ever, but if you don’t mark, your students won’t progress; conversely, you can be a bit of a rubbish teacher, but if you mark well, great things could happen. In my first-year-teacher despair, I clung to marking.

While my mentor and line manager watched me hunched over yet another pile of books (“you’re marking again Jo?”) and begged me to instead spend more time planning semi-decent lessons, I ploughed on regardless, writing buckets of WWWs and EBIs on every page a child’s pen had reached. I handed books back, and rushed to deliver my next rubbish lesson.

Happily, what I learned from this was to balance my time more effectively. I went on to spend less time marking, to mark less frequently and say less, and taught better lessons where children went on to make some progress, as well as making my life less of a nightmare.

Indeed, as the years have gone on, it seems that the thinking around marking, at least in my sphere of existence, has become ever-more progressive and manageable. If the mantra of my mentors early on was “mark less!”, it is now “write less!”

I’ve read so many excellent blogs on time-saving marking, notably from Joe Kirby; and Alex Quigley has signalled my earth-changing, life-altering view of marking, and made me realize that “marking” as a term is horribly outdated. What we need to talk about, instead, is feedback. (Indeed, Quigley’s department has a feedback policy as opposed to a marking policy, a semantic shift I adore.)

When we mark a student’s book, they need to spend about as much time doing something with that marking as I spent giving feedback. This means that rather than writing “nice notes” as I had been advised early on (“put something on every page, so Ofsted don’t think you’ve ticked and flicked”), I do tick and flick their notes (if they are there and in good order; if they are not I tend to write “WHERE ARE YOUR NOTES?!”). I mark their extended writing closely, but not too closely if it’s riddled with errors – most of their ideas are good, and the human brain can process only so much red/pink/green ink.

At the end, I write an encouraging comment (unless they have been truly lazy) and a target. I used to check students had met their target the next time I marked their books, but I now recognize this is not the most effective way of target setting. I now phrase their target in such a way as to encourage editing there and then. And, crucially, I give students time to go back and improve their writing.

The first ten to twenty minutes of the following lesson can then be spent improving a decent paragraph and making it marvelous. The efficacy of this exercise very much depends on what you have written as a teacher; your comments need to be specific, detailed and open-ended, allowing students to add to their responses without needing you to stand beside and cajole each letter from their biro.

Interestingly, in our department’s mock-Ofsted last year, the English specialist pulled out a couple of books that he believed showed outstanding marking. These books had a relatively small amount of ink spilled, but it was done in a miraculously effective way. Teachers had written short, pointed questions at key moments, and students had responded and improved their work. Easy as that: marking not to build confidence, not to check every error, not to show Ofsted we have marked – marking, instead, that allowed students to progress, and allowed teachers to mark without wanting to kill themselves. What a relief!

I haven’t written about the state students keep their exercise books in, because it’s not something I’m especially concerned about. Perhaps another year I will endeavour to inspire students to keep their books pristine, but I’m not a very visual person, and I can’t help but overlook dog-eared covers for the glorious writing inside.

All of this sounds so painfully straightforward, I wonder if anyone is still reading. There will always be new ideas, and new approaches. Yet the core of marking is beguilingly simple: mark often, mark strategically, mark specifically, and make the students do some work too.

Being the teacher Year 10 deserve

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I have what has been termed as an “intervention” group in year 10. Last year, when making the set lists, I decided to make a top set and then mix the rest of the year; it was then decided that certain students would take one less GCSE and have three extra lessons a week: one in English, two in Maths. So the two intervention groups came about, and I took one.

Why do these students need extra English? It’s not because they’re stupid – but then, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a stupid child. It’s not because they’re illiterate, although I do wish they would read more. They seem to be behind their peers, in terms of their raw data, and for that I can think of many reasons, which I would imagine are the same reasons any “intervention” child is behind. What it boils down to is time and effort. At some point, for some reason, these students have lost time in English. They have missed lessons, or they have been in lessons in body only. Many of them aren’t the well behaved angel children I am accustomed to dealing with (joking – though my year 11 class does seem fairly rammed with angels).

The bottom line is that these children deserve the best teacher. They have to cover more ground in less time; they have less than two full years, and time is ticking.

But I’m filled with doubt. Am I the teacher they deserve? Can I dedicate enough time, energy and effort myself? With all my other classes exam classes, with running a department, and with the additional responsibilities of being a member of the SLT, can I be that teacher?

These children need to be inspired. They need to feel awe and wonder in their English lessons. They need to be thirsty for knowledge, keen to read and learn and close the gap. Can I muster the energy to inspire them six times a week?

These children need to be nurtured. They need to be comforted when things go wrong, they need to feel safe in my classroom, they need to know that they have the space to get things wrong because that is what learning is. They need to be cared for, and their parents need to be told when they are wonderful, every time they are wonderful. Can I care for each and every child individually?

These children need to be in the room. They might behave in ways which eventually lead to being sent out, but when they do that in every lesson every week, it is clear that they are desperate to avoid the learning. They need to be sanctioned in multiple ways, outside classroom time, and those sanctions need to be both horrible and long. Can I improve my planning and pedagogy to the extent that I can ensure no-one needs to be sent out of my classroom? Can I follow up every sanction relentlessly?

These children need to receive excellent feedback. They need to fill their books with work they are proud of, with paragraphs that improve every week, where they understand the next steps towards achieving in English. Can I mark every book every week, let alone every lesson, with comprehensible guidance to lead them in the right direction?

I don’t think there is a teacher in the world who hasn’t had a class like my year 10. In fact, there probably isn’t a teacher anywhere in the world who doesn’t have this class right now: the class where every moment is vital, every interaction make or break, every comment taken to heart. This week, I have invited teachers into my lessons and taken their feedback, tracked down students in between lessons to smooth over issues, phoned parents and re-read parts of my go-to teacher manual Teach Like a Champion before and after every class. Next week there will be more visitors to the class, and more phone calls, more emails, more marking, more reading, more encouraging, more consoling, more understanding.

Things are improving, but I’m not the teacher they deserve.

Yet.