Jerusalem

Posted on October 27, 2019 by Jo Facer

I didn’t want to go to Israel. I know that’s a terribly spoiled child point of view, but that’s the truth. When I looked it up the first search hit was “terrorist threat” (which, if you’re interested, was not considered zero). In fact, it was a chance conversation with my friend Lia who told me she was considering going there at Christmas that made me think again.

My Israel trip coincided with discovering Ann Patchett. Readers will be familiar with the “reading rut”: you’ve exhausted all your go-to reads, and nothing on your shelves seems appealing. All of a sudden, a writer emerges – an odd article mentions them in passing, and you’re away. How had I never read Ann Patchett before? Wonderfully, you discover their large back-catalogue, and suddenly the reading vista seems plentiful again; the reading world infinite once more.

So much about This is the Story of a Happy Marriage spoke to me. In “Do not Disturb” Patchett writes:

“what we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached… later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans… Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home.”

As a full-time, main scale teacher, I went on holiday to do two things: 1. To read books; 2. To sit still. The daily life of a teacher is energetic to say the least, and so all I really wanted to do was sit down. (I always want to read, so that is always my number one aim of anything I’m doing or anywhere I’m going.) My partner, by contrast, has a job that involves a lot of desk-sitting, so his ideal holiday consists of moving and doing. We are not, sadly, ideal holiday companions. This time, we took the advice an Israeli colleague and headed for Tel Aviv, which seemed to have it all: beaches for me to sit on, and no end of things to see and do.

On the penultimate day, we took a small group tour to visit Jerusalem. I want to write about Jerusalem while it is fresh in my mind, and I want to write about it when it is not. I want to find out what stays with me and what melts away, though I suppose writing about anything will also change the experience.

In my ignorance, I’d not known that Jerusalem is a city of three religions: I knew, of course, that the city was disputed by Jews and Muslims; I had been less aware of the Christian elements of the city (and the Armenian presence was a mystery to me). Friends had warned me that I might find disapproving looks from the ultra-religious in the different “quarters”, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, the only location where anyone glanced at our group with anything approaching distaste was during prayers at King David’s tomb, when, perhaps understandably, a man trying to focus on his prayer in the space (which is also a synagogue) was unhappy at our looming, encroaching presence.

At site after site, our tour guide spoke honestly of the reality of what we were seeing: “this is where they say Jesus died… but we don’t really know. This is meant to be King David’s tomb, but it probably isn’t. This is where some Christians believe the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven… But some Christians think it’s somewhere else.” For my scientific other half, this served to strengthen his view that religion is “made up”. But what came through for me was the power of tradition to help us connect to something bigger than ourselves. I don’t think I have ever felt the power of belonging quite so strongly as standing side by side with the women on the ladies’ side of the Western wall, or watching a boy read his Bar Mitzvah Torah as his joyous relatives celebrated his coming of age in the streets, or seeing large groups of Muslim worshippers outside the Dome of the Rock eating a shared picnic and holding out bread for us to join them. Religion connects us, and that’s not nothing.

And though the city has had a fractured past (to say the least), and though I can’t speak for those who live there, there was something astonishing about people of such extremely diverse backgrounds living so closely and so, apparently, peacefully (I asked my tour guide if the city was “safe” and she unhesitatingly said “of course!” before adding: “but I am from South America, so,” and shrugging). I’d been warned before visiting Israel to be ready to see the military walking the streets armed with terrifyingly visible weapons, but found that to be vanishingly rare. In fact, I saw this only twice, by those guarding the most sacred places in Jerusalem.

Who are the Jews who live in Jerusalem, who pray three times a day, who dress in the ultra-orthodox manner? Our guide explained that many devote their lives to studying the Torah – they don’t have what we’d consider traditional employment. The depth of the knowledge they must have of this sacred script seemed awesome to me, and reminded me that we need all focuses to make up the intellectual world: the polymath is just as crucial as the post-doc. Why is Judaism the oldest surviving world religion, asked our guide? Because of these people, who devote their lives to fully living this tradition. Without them, she posited, the religion and culture could have died out long ago. So from the Jewish quarter, I felt the value of tradition and the value of deep knowledge.

We learn more from travelling than we would have learned from a textbook not because of our own physical presence somewhere foreign, but because of the people we encounter. Our tour was made up of kind and fascinating people: a couple from Turkey and their colleague, who sold smart fridges and were passionate about their technology. An Italian couple, living in London; one of whom taught Maths, one of whom worked at the Wellcome Collection. A couple and their daughter from Hong Kong, who talked about the protests they were currently living through with great fortitude and occasional humour. And a final couple, who I didn’t manage to talk to until lunch. We had two options, lamb and falafel. I ordered the latter. “My daughter’s a vegetarian as well,” said the gentleman. I was pained to admit that I was not a vegetarian, I just loved falafel.

As we walked together after lunch, I found out he was from Athens and had studied Computer Science in Scotland in the 80s, where he was “part of this incredible revolution.” As we moved on to our next stop, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he said to me: “this is the dream of my life. It is the dream of my life to see where Jesus was buried and resurrected, and now I get to be here.”

“The dream of my life.”

His words haunt me. I feel honoured to have been there at the moment where this man accomplished his life’s dream, but I also feel deeply troubled by his words. To me, there is something infinitely admirable about having such a dream. What, I immediately worried, is the dream of my life? To run a school? To own a dog? To have a child? To read some books? To write some books?

These are ambitions; they are actions I can do, and when they happen, what will be the outcome? Will I say “well, that’s the dream of my life. Onto a new dream.” Beside this man’s enduring faith, all my dreams seemed suddenly stripped of meaning. This man’s faith taught me that we need to seek something more in life than milestones and accomplishments.

I don’t like to think of myself as a superstitious person, but I probably am. When I lose an eyelash, I blow on it and make a wish. For years, I wished for the next rung on the promotion ladder. (I don’t wish for that anymore.) I used to wish I would have children, but for reasons too complex for this essay I don’t wish for that anymore either. On the times that I would pray, I would wish for these two things. I would also pray for friends who were in physical or mental or spiritual pain, or I would ask for those closest to me to be protected, or, embarrassingly occasionally, I would express my gratitude for what I have.

A couple of weeks ago, my step-father’s cancer was given the “terminal” diagnosis. It was very unexpected, and deeply troubling with how rapidly “some tests, nothing to worry about” had become “weeks, maybe months.” When I got to the world’s most holy place, it struck me that the thing I would most wish for, the object I would most want to pray for, is for him. But for what? A miraculous recovery? It seemed so unlikely, so small a wish to put up against the forces of nature that are ravaging his body.

And it came to me as I stood by the Western wall, surrounded by those for whom faith forms a central part of their lives, that prayers are not wishes. That I had misunderstood. Instead, I turned my thoughts to the inner life. I prayed that my stepfather would have the mental strength to die with dignity and to overcome the suffering that was now inevitable, and that I and my family would find the strength to let him go thirty years before anyone expected that to happen. And instead of praying to become a Headteacher (thank you, God), I prayed that I would have the strength to do the job well, and the moral compass to add to the world’s good in my small sphere.

Reading Patchett’s thoughts on dogs, death, divorce and marriage, I reflected that I have written too little about too little. I have stayed in a small sphere, not seeking to contribute elsewhere. I resolved to give more time to more areas of my life, and to reflect that time in the things and in the way I wrote. Because how can I answer the question: what is the dream of my life? It will take much more time, knowledge and experience.

MVIMG_20191024_112829

How do Success Academies achieve such exceptional results?

Posted on October 13, 2019 by Jo Facer

In Robert Pondiscio’s brilliant book, How the Other Half Learns, readers gain a real insight into the workings of the Success Academies through an in-depth look at one school year in Bronx 1, one of their primary schools. In this post, I’m going to explore Pondiscio’s writing in an attempt to draw out what makes Success Academies so, well, successful. And before we think about the “they choose their children” argument so often levelled at successful schools, I will quote the author: “While critics frequently attribute Success Academy’s results to systematically weeding out low-performing students, it would be hard to get anywhere near these targets, even if you hand-selected each child. Success Academy outperforms New York City’s gifted and talented schools, which actually do handpick their students.” Success’s results are astronomical: on state standardised tests, the network averages 95% proficiency in Maths and 84% in English, far above even the state’s most selective schools. For me the key learning points that shine through Pondiscio’s book are:

Curriculum
Teaching, and the leadership of teaching
Parents

Curriculum

The narrowing impact on the curriculum of national tests is something we in the UK can readily engage with. Pondiscio describes low-income children’s “starvation rations in history, geography, science, art and music” as their teachers prioritise a narrow range of skills to pass state tests (the irony being that a more narrow curriculum drilled tightly to the test tends to have the opposite impact on scores). The impact of the Common Core, introduced in 2013, saw depressed results across the board as children’s lack of a broad curriculum experience emerged – in all except Success Academies. This attests to Success’s rich, rigorous and broad academic curriculum. Success employs a common, shared curriculum across its schools, meaning that their teachers focus instead on “intellectual prep”: i.e., how they will deliver the lesson to their specific children. One of my favourite sentences in the book is this: “once children can decode a piece of text fluently, a reading test is hardly a reading test at all; it is functionally a test of background knowledge.” The Success curriculum is a knowledge rich curriculum.

Teaching: behaviour management and teacher instruction

Behaviour is always a priority at Success, and this is quantified for rigorous follow-up. The SLT talk about “deliverables”: children are expected to be on-task 95% of the time; teachers are expected to notice and correct off-task behaviour 100% of the time; teachers should be able to de-escalate challenging behaviour 85% of the time. Why is behaviour so key? Pondiscio writes: “Children who are ready for new intellectual challenges pay a price when they sit in classrooms focused on their… less engaged peers”.

The culture of learning at Success emphasises what Doug Lemov calls “ratio” – putting the learning onto the children. Teachers at Success are repeatedly described as creating situations for children to grapple with difficult concepts, even from a very young age. One teacher in Pondiscio’s book advises that: “one of the most dangerous mindsets to my mind is ‘it’s too much, you are all doing too much, it’s too hard on them’… Kids are so resilient.” Later, another teacher concerned about her class’s poor performance brings in all the parents for a meeting, telling them: “we will never lower that bar because it’s too hard. We will figure out other paths to get to the destination.”

2a. Leadership of teaching

Coupled with these foci is the amount of time invested by leaders in observing and improving teaching. SLT conduct daily “walk-throughs”, giving feedback by email or in the moment (I wrote about this live coaching in my previous Success post, Mission Possible). The principal ensures their SLT are united in their approach, conducting joint walk-throughs initially and asking for their thoughts to check that everyone is looking for the same things ( “what did you see?” – “I want to see that you’re noticing the same things I’m noticing”; “what [feedback] would you prioritise?”) This culture is led from the very top – Eva Moskowitz herself visits Success Academies frequently, and her feedback as described is rooted deeply in her values and ethics: “you’ve got to ask yourself, Would you have your child in that classroom?” The job of the principal at Success is to focus “entirely on instruction, student data, and outcomes” – all operational issues are delegated to a specific, high ranking individual.

Parents

By far the greatest learning for me in this book, as with Mission Possible, was around parents. Pondiscio puts it superbly: “Among education reform advocates, there is a regrettable tendency to view urban communities through a lens of dysfunction… ‘Schools should not expect much from parents at all,’ the founder of one national charter school network told me… Success Academy’s relationship with its parents suggests precisely the opposite view. The network makes significant demands of parents, assumes significant leverage, and makes no discernable negative assumptions about parents’ ability to contribute materially to their children’s education. Very little in the network’s expectations, for good or for ill, suggests a view of low-income parents as any less capable and competent than affluent ones.”

Throughout his book, we learn of the almost constant contact with parents and the logistics of how this works. Teachers call, text and email frequently, and daily during important testing preparation periods, about children’s progress, behaviour, or test scores. We are treated to a blow-by-blow account of a parent meeting, where the teacher explains the minutiae of the school day to ensure parents understand why she is asking for what she is asking for, along with offering to support them in any way they need (“You need more stickers? Just ask! You need more cubes, tiles, index cards? Just ask, ask, ask. We’re happy to give you anything you need to support your child at home”). Just as teachers have “deliverables,” so do parents: “97% of students present, 96% on time, 97% in uniform, 97% of homework completed.” Pondiscio even describes a “parent report card”, which was received without argument.

The unavoidable trade-offs

Pondiscio does not shy away from the inevitable trade-offs required. Ultimately, we can’t do everything. He writes that we can either “attempt to serve all disadvantaged children equally and labour to close the achievement gap” or we can “do all in our power to ensure that receptive and motivated students can reap the full benefit of their talents and ambitions because that is what’s just”. He notes that the latter is what well-off families secure for their own children. Exposing a second moral quandary, he asks: “when a school or teacher fails to engage or manage disruptive behaviour, children are cheated. But who, exactly? The disruptive child who is suspended and excluded from class? Or the diligent student whose education bleeds away hour after hour while her teacher responds to antisocial outbursts or focuses on her classmate to prevent them? The weight of education policy and practice, as enshrined in impulse, empathy, and the law, comes down on the side of the disruptive child. But not at Success Academy.” Pondiscio does not cover all the trade-offs, however, and I would have liked the author to look more into the high staff turnover at Success.

Ultimately, Success exemplifies the Charter movement: exceptional achievement, at a cost not everyone is willing to pay: “her methods may not work in all schools, and not all parents would want to send their child to a Success Academy even if they could.” Me? I’m totally sold. I would send my children to Success in a heartbeat, as the CEO Eva Moskowitz herself does. Now, to find out how to visit…

Responsive Teaching

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Jo Facer

It’s probably not going too far to say that an observation from Harry Fletcher-Wood altered my teaching in the most dramatic way possible. In 2012, he visited my classroom and offered feedback in the gentlest manner possible – with a series of questions: ‘do you think they were focused on the work? Do you think they can handle doing everything in groups? How did you make sure everyone was working? Was anyone opting out from learning? Do you think your weakest readers were also reading in their groups?’ It was through his eyes I saw that teaching everything through group work (as I had been trained and advised to) was not working, and was not going to work.

So it is no surprise to me that Harry can see what is happening in a classroom, see how to make it better, and then kindly suggest how teachers might make that leap. I can imagine no human better placed than he to be an Associate Dean at the Ambition Institute, a body that is working to improve classrooms across the country. I am ever in awe of his humility and constant drive to learn, despite his eminent authority in education, and his most recent book, Responsive Teaching, offers much to the development of our profession.

The book opens with a typically humble introduction that identifies three main problems in the author’s past teaching practice: ‘assessment seemed to hinder learning, skills seemed more important than knowledge and Assessment for Learning seemed to be just a collection of techniques.’ He moves through addressing these problems, to considering how we can genuinely work out what children have learned and what they are struggling with, and how we can rebalance to ensure children learn both skill and knowledge in their subjects.

Each chapter follows a clear pattern: it outlines the problem, the evidence, the key principle, the practical tools to improve classroom practice, and then the words of individual teachers reflecting on their own practice in each area.

One of the key take-aways from me were the warnings against ‘extraneous cognitive load.’ I definitely need to think harder about paring my lessons down to ensure children are focusing on the crucial aspect, rather than being overloaded by material that is not yet essential for them. I also need to script model examples more frequently – students always need to see lots more of these than I ever think they do. As Fletcher-Wood writes: ‘Overcoming ambiguity by showing what success looks like seems to particularly benefit lower-attaining students.’

One further aspect of practice outlined in Responsive Teaching that I’d like to think more carefully about is student misconceptions. At Ark Elvin Academy where I’m doing my NPQH placement, a subject expert has listed key misconceptions for every lesson the teacher delivers. It’s an incredible resource for novice teachers, or those teaching out of specialism. I think this is a hugely worthwhile task. Perhaps a group of subject experts could club together to write ‘the book of English misconceptions’, for example?

As always, I could go on, and add more detail on what I learned from this book, but to avoid plagiarism I will simply recommend this book whole-heartedly.

Mission Possible

Posted on June 22, 2019 by Jo Facer

I started teaching in 2010, the same year the documentary Waiting for Superman came out. If you haven’t seen it, you should: it’s a polemic on the American school system, starring the Charter school superstars. You hear from Geoffrey Canada, of the Harlem Children’s Zone, along with Michelle Rhee (ex Chancellor of Washington DC’s schools; proponent of performance pay) and the founders of the influential KIPP Charter Schools. The message of the documentary is that the school system is broken, but there are ways we can fix it.

When I first watched this documentary, I remember feeling that our school system was ‘at least not as bad as America’s.’ But I’ve come to see that working in London schools for eight years blinded me to the challenges of rural communities who cannot choose their school; schools who are dependent on one bus a day to transport children to it (making any kind of detention system extremely challenging to implement); the impact of grammar schools on student self-belief; and the funding of small-town secondaries.

But mostly, I’ve come to think that we probably are failing children, on a system-wide level, in a similar way. We don’t have the annual benchmarks of success, but in the schools where we have run the NGRT (a nationally standardised reading age test), the results have been damning. The amount of children not achieving a basic pass in English and Maths GCSEs at 16 is damning. And the number of children leaving school at 16 is damning. I remember being horrified about the ‘drop-out rate’ of American schools, thinking ‘at least we get everyone to the end.’ But 16 is not the end, so we don’t. In fact, allowing children to leave the school system at 16 (and I know colleges and apprenticeships exist and I know these have their benefits) is deeply troubling to me.

In this post, I’m not going to tackle these monumental system problems. I used to worry a lot about the education system, and what we could do to improve it. Now, I look at what we can do in schools to improve the lot of the children we work with, in spite of those poor systems (something The Teacher Gap has really convinced me of). And what Mission Possible does is to examine what goes on in a successful school, in this case the Success Academies in Harlem, New York.

The defining principle of the authors, shared by many in the charter movement, is that the quality of the school and the quality of the teachers are what make the difference to children’s results. The book opens with the impetus to make schools a ‘magical place’ to be, which I found an interesting word to use. While I wouldn’t prioritise some of what the authors consider important (notably, expensive trips and impressive classroom displays), I would totally agree with their other aim of encoding success for students so they want to come to school every day and succeed (and what is continual success in academics if not ‘magical’?).

The writers make much of the rigour of the curriculum, and the urgency required to ensure children catch up with their wealthier peers. Furthermore, the pages on letting children ‘do the thinking’ I ultimately agree with – not in terms of guessing answers or discovery learning, but certainly ensuring they do the bulk of the work in the lesson. In general we are moving, in so many schools, towards teacher-led lessons (something I wholeheartedly endorse); yet it is crucial this does not result in children sitting passively. It is too easy for children to tune their teachers out. Rather, our teaching must be continually asking students questions to ensure they work hard.

This book has helped to shift my thinking on parents. Of the two extremes on this view – shut parents out at the gates versus give parents autonomy to influence the day-to-day of school – I leaned in the past towards wanting parents to let teachers teach, smiling on from a distance. Yet this book is persuasive in the possibility of parents really transforming their child’s academic success. I’m always amazed by how much parents are willing to do to support their child’s learning if you only ask them.

The book also ranges over rigour, reading and pace, but the chief takeaway for me was on the professional development of teachers. Again, the authors implore us to focus on the adults, and begin by asking school leaders: how often do we fix the children when we should fix the adults? I’m certainly guilty of this: walking into a lesson and using non-verbals to remind the students of their teacher’s expectations, or even just standing there (when you’re senior enough), waiting for the class to behave perfectly and then leaving… Only for the class to immediately start to murmur again.

Instead, at Harlem Success, leaders practise live coaching. Instead of ‘fixing’ the children, the observers whisper to the teacher, or hand them a note (‘Ali is doodling; Tommy is looking out the window’) and then watch how the teacher ‘fixes’ their own classroom. They don’t intervene at all – or, with training teachers, they model the first two ‘fixes’ and then watch how the teacher does it. After the lesson, they feed back on how effective the teacher’s actions were and where they might improve. Doing this would require huge teacher buy-in, but I do think it would be far better for the overall quality of teaching.

The book goes into significantly more detail on teacher development, and I’d recommend reading it for those chapters alone. Although not everything in Mission Possible chimes with my beliefs, there is much to admire here.

The Teacher Gap

Posted on June 8, 2019 by Jo Facer

I think The Teacher Gap is the most important contribution to education this year. The book offers an incisive critique of what is wrong with the state of education, and then offers governments and school leadership teams concrete ways to fix it.

In the opening sentence of this book, the authors, Becky Allen and Sam Sims, note that ‘education is unique among the public services in its ability to propel people forward.’ At the heart of this is the notion that education is a public good, and the potential of a good education to transform lives. Yet, surveying education policy over the past several years, they note that many of these initiatives – Building Schools for the Future, school choice, class size – have little to no impact on student attainment. What does have an impact? Teacher quality. This is especially the case for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, for whom a good teacher can make the ultimate difference in their educational attainment.

Despite this, improving the quality of teachers has ‘rarely, if ever, been a genuine priority for government.’ We can’t even hire enough teachers, let alone teachers with top credentials; let alone begin improving the ones we have. The answer to all of these conundrums, for Allen and Sims, is that ‘we need to give teachers a career worth having.’ This is two-fold: firstly, to professionally develop teachers so they get better at what they do each year, and secondly to manage workload so they remain in the workforce, improving each year.

Part of the joy of this book is that is balances out research (lots of it) with engaging personal narratives, so the numbers are given faces and feel familiar to readers. At the end of each chapter, instead of saying: ‘isn’t the status quo rubbish?’ the authors provide a series of ‘what we can do’ for schools, even without waiting for government policy to alter. This solutions-focused method makes the book, which could feel massively depressing, wonderfully uplifting.

There are too many learning points for me to list here without running to plagiarism, but the ones which seemed most vital to me in the contexts in which I have worked are:

Use anonymous surveys to know what teachers genuinely think.
Give new teachers ‘easier’ timetables, ensuring they teach (where possible) the same lesson to more than one year group (i.e. give them two year 7 classes) and have them only teach one subject; write their timetables and roomings first.
Develop CPD for experienced teachers with experienced teachers and use the peer effect to ensure this is appropriate, enjoyable, and low-stakes.
Implement teacher coaching.
The 8am to 4:30pm experiment: two weeks where no-one works beyond these hours. At the end, assess what the impact was of losing that extra work time, with a view to cutting more of what proved unnecessary to move working hours closer to this ultimate aim.

In a nutshell: teachers are really important to student success, and this is even more the case for disadvantaged students. We need to train them better, and we need to treat them better.

Making Kids Cleverer

Posted on May 18, 2019 by Jo Facer

David Didau’s most recent offering is his most compelling manifesto for closing the advantage gap yet. Making Kids Cleverer eloquently and persuasively asserts the worth of an academic education, and adds much to the current discourse. Brilliantly, Didau has not lost his connection with the classroom: so frequently in books written by non (-practising) teachers I find myself dubiously asking – ‘yes, but what about year 9 period 6 on a windy Friday?’ Not so with Didau.

The book’s power comes from the meticulous logic of its argument, developing from the initial question: ‘given the choice, who wouldn’t want to be cleverer?’ It is the coherence of this argument that propels this to being my favourite education read so far this year.

Although the central thesis of the book might be ‘more knowledge equals more intelligence,’ Didau adds crucial caveats: not all knowledge is equal; not all practice is equally effective.

One of the highlights of the book is the chapter on the purpose of education: schools, of course, can’t do everything. I found the idea that academic education is character education a revelation: we can (can we?) teach generic skills of hard work, perseverance and resilience… Or we can double up and make children learn really hard stuff, and lots of it, from which they will (hopefully) develop those character attributes along the way.

Although I loved the unpicking of what intelligence is along with the relationship between genetic inheritance and our environment, for me the most directly useful chapters were those on school culture. In particular, this book gave me a lot to think about in terms of motivation. Didau writes: ‘if students simply struggle they will learn to hate school.’ While struggle might be the optimal way for children to learn most, the reality of human psychology is that they simply will not choose to learn anything if they feel constantly defeated. Didau’s caution to ‘encode success’ prior to introducing those ‘desirable difficulties’ is something I’m taking into my practice explicitly from now on.

There is so much that is great in this book – from an exploration of the theories of ability grouping (Didau leans toward mixed ability and I find his argument challenges much of what I believe, in a good way) to how to move children beyond ‘just knowing stuff’. I would absolutely recommend this as a must-read for teachers.

A New Way of Reading

Posted on November 24, 2018 by Jo Facer

I knew I had to read this book when I heard Doug Lemov endorsing it. Reader, Come Home sells itself as a portrayal of the reading state of the nation. It is really about the state of humanity.

The author points out that the Ancient Greeks were concerned that rising literacy would fundamentally change people’s ability to remember, and that they weren’t wrong: the rise of reading did change the way our brains worked, making memory weaker, and remarkably rapidly. So today, with the rise in digital devices, both the way we read and the way our minds work has shifted. But are we worried about the right things this time? Our fears seem centred around the fact that more children (and adults, truth be told) are not reading… But they are.

In fact, we are reading more than ever before: the author quotes studies that reveal we are reading around 100,000 words a day now. That’s a short novel, every single day. But what should be cause for celebration is in fact cause for concern, because the way we are reading is so dramatically different.

Wolf quotes a memorable speech by Barack Obama where he said that information has become ‘entertainment rather than empowerment.’ Moreover, our reading is ‘chopblock,’ not continuous, and situated within a technological world where ‘cognitive overload’ is ubiquitous. To take in all this information, ‘skimming’ has become ‘the new normal.’ We focus on the surface rather than digging deeper. And this has a profound impact on the way we process information.

I have often felt I read too much fiction; indeed, my aim this year was explicitly to read more non-fiction. That was before Wolf articulated to me (and I do feel this is personal, as she writes the book explicitly as letters to the reader) the benefits of fiction. For Wolf, we understand others and can show compassion and empathy through reading. Reading connects divergent cultures, so we have a more in-depth understanding of those different to us.

But this only happens when we read with ‘close attention.’ This kind of deep reading requires ‘analogical reasoning’ and ‘inference’ to uncover its many layers. In praise of beautiful prose, Wolf reminds us that beauty in words holds our attention so we focus on what lies deeper.

Yet in the modern world, the prevalence of digital devices results in ‘continuous partial attention’: we live in a ‘world of distraction’. This is not conducive to deep thinking. As well as cycling through the argument, familiar to readers of Lemov and Murphy and Willingham, that knowledge is crucial for deep reading, and that critical thought ‘never just happens,’ the author goes on to explore the impact on children of this way of processing words.

Boredom in children is normal. But ‘post-digital’ boredom is a different kind altogether. Wolf says that this kind of boredom, rather than provoking creativity as the former can, ‘de-animates’ children. The constant stimulation of the screen prevents them from experiencing true, tranquil tedium.

We know from our own adult lived experience how addictive devices are; studies abound to support this, but are barely needed. Of course children are much more vulnerable to this. And when they are developing their cognitive abilities, this has a devastating impact. The multiple stimulants on devices split children’s attention, and studies show that texts read on devices compared with traditional paper lead to weaker comprehension even if no other applications are running. The mere expectation that the device will have multiple purposes diverts their attention, ability to focus, and thus weakens their ability to understand what they are reading.

Moreover, the information overload of our reading society makes it much harder for children to build background knowledge. With so much information and so little time to process it, this threatens the development of children’s attentions and working memories.

There is so much more in this book, and I would urge everyone human to read it. It urged me to reflect on how I feel when I read a novel compared with how I feel when I read Buzzfeed. The guilt I used to feel for losing myself in a novel will be banished from my life. Instead, it will be my phone that I must lock away; my laptop I must periodically lose. Fiction is vital.

Wolf asks: ‘What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different?… It is a formula for unwitting ignorance, fear and misunderstanding, that can lead to the belligerent forms of intolerance that are the opposite of America’s original goals for its citizens of many cultures.’ Far from an optional extra, deep reading is the stuff of life itself.

Non-Violent Communication

Posted on July 7, 2018 by Jo Facer

When a close friend of mine who works in the prison service told me to read this book, she caveated it with saying: ‘I know what you’re thinking. But it’s actually really good.’

The name alone sent shivers down my spine, let alone the tag-line: ‘if “violent” means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate could indeed be called “violent” communication.’

My friend told me that some prison officers use this technique with their most challenging inmates with amazing success, though, so I thought – why not have a read? If nothing else, I always try to engage with what I disagree with to ensure I keep an open mind. Plus, at my current school, we have a short-term programme of alternative provision (run on-site) for children at risk of permanent exclusion. I thought this could be a good route in to re-engaging those children with school.

Whilst I couldn’t claim to agree with everything in the book, there was a surprising amount I found incredibly helpful, and perhaps applicable even beyond our alternative provision. The foundational idea behind the book – which is, in my view, impossible to argue with – is this: treat everyone with respect. To do this, we must resist the urge to respond to others in anger or upset. When we hear something that upsets us, instead of reacting we have to ask: what is this person needing that they are lacking now?

In order to practice non-violent communication, there are four basic steps:

Observe what is happening in the situation;
Explain how this makes us feel;
Ask what needs of ours are connected to the feelings identified;
Make a specific request of the other person.

For a full explanation of the method, you really need to read the whole book. The part that seems least obvious to me, however, was step three: needs. According to Rosenberg, the root of our feelings is in our unmet needs. We need to ask: ‘what does this person need? What would they like to request in relation to those needs?’ We have to accept full responsibility for our own intentions and actions, but not for the feelings of others. We are completely responsible for our feelings and reactions, as illustrated by this eminently relatable anecdote: ‘if someone arrives late for an appointment and we need reassurance that she cares about us, we may feel hurt. If, instead, our need is to spend time purposefully and constructively, we may feel frustrated. But if our need is for thirty minutes of quiet solitude, we may be grateful for her tardiness and feel pleased. Thus, it is not the behaviour of the other person but our own need that causes our feeling.’

Another central theme of this book is empathy: ‘empathy… requires us to focus full attention on the other person’s message.’ Rosenberg gives example phrases for tricky situations, like: ‘I’m frustrated because I’d like to be clearer about what you are referring to. Would you be willing to tell me what I’ve done that leads you to see me in this way?’ For the author, ‘Self-expression becomes easier after we empathise with others, because we will then have touched their humanness and realised the common qualities we share. The more we connect with the feelings and needs behind their words, the less frightening it is to open up to other people.’

I still believe that for a large institution like a school to work, we need sanctions that are enforced fairly and predictably. Children must know that their actions have consequences.

For all children, sanctions can be given with love. We must reiterate to children that we are showing them their actions have consequences because we love them enough to care about their future, and to want them to change their behaviour to have a great future. I have never worked at a school where sanctions have been implemented without this philosophy, but I think in every school every teacher has, at least on some occasion, failed to be explicit enough about the love behind the sanction. We could all get better at this.

But what I am increasingly coming to see is that for the very most challenging students, sanctions with love are not enough. Our children at risk of permanent exclusion are impervious to sanctions. They simply do not seem to care what happens as a result of their behaviour. Yes, these children need to be apart from the mainstream, at least for a short period of time, because they need something more and something different to reorientate their mindset. And I do think that this method, which undoubtedly will take much more time and effort with each individual case, sounds extremely promising in helping these children feel understood, cared for and listened to. At this point, our only hope is that they choose to change their behaviour. Sanctions haven’t worked – what comes next?

Glass Ceilings

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Jo Facer

I’ve mentioned before: Glass Ceilings is my favourite education read so far this year. And that’s not because I agree with every page, because I don’t. The book is inspiring and thought-provoking in equal measure.

When I started teaching, a film came out called Waiting for Superman. Again, I don’t agree with everything in it – but I still think it is a superb documentary. Both that film and this book showcase American charter schools, fighting against unthinkable odds to send children from the poorest backgrounds to the best universities. In 2013, I got to visit Chicago and see some of these charter schools in action, and it profoundly changed what I believed was possible in education. I had always said: ‘all children can go to university,’ but I would never have had the gumption to say, as a classroom teacher, leader, or (I hope eventually) headteacher, ‘all these children in front of me now will go to university.’

The charter schools forge the path for us: they are beacons of hope, and reminders that we could and should do better. I’m not aware of a UK school serving a deprived community that has yet managed to admit 100% of its pupils to a university, and yet schools like this do exist stateside. Statistically speaking, they are vanishingly rare, and yet their very existence should shock us into believing that we can do better.

What Hall’s book does so beautifully is to look at what those schools are doing, and what we can learn from them. An interesting early thread for Hall is how traditional the teaching was when he visited the charter schools: he reports being shocked by the ‘didactic’ focus, along with the ‘amazing gains in outcomes.’ Interesting, when I visited charter schools – though I was fully mired in progressive practices myself – the classrooms simply seemed normal to me. I think the length of my teaching experience (then just 2 years) was outweighed by my own fortunate experience as a student in a traditional private school.

Hall’s take-aways from these visits, and his application of these to his own British context, makes for helpful reading: he saw relationships forming the cornerstone of strong behaviour systems, a whole-school insistence on ‘whole sentence answers’ supporting literacy, and, after meeting Rafe Esquith, a belief that what all children need is a ‘content-rich knowledge based curriculum.’ Hall’s personal story is told in a compelling narrative, oozing humility as it inspires.

But what this book really made me think of was that education is, in the end, about our values. After I finished this book, I revisited and edited some of the things I had written when I first became a senior leader in a school. They were my core mantras for children, and core mantras for staff. These are my values, and the values I would love the people I work with and work for to share.

For children:

Education changes your destiny.
Discipline now means freedom later in life.
The more effort you put in, the more you will get.
Politeness gets you where you want to go.

And for teachers:

Children rise (or fall) to our expectations.
Powerful knowledge changes lives.
All children are essentially good – it’s their behaviour that sometimes is not.
Tough standards for kids are loving.
Success motivates.
All kids can do all things.

And number six is really the core of it all. I couldn’t count the number of times Hall referred to the belief in all children to do all things. And that really made me think: do I still believe this? And does every teacher in my school believe this?

Because over time, this driving belief that all children can achieve academically is being gradually eroded. The more time I spend with the ‘edge-case’ children, the more children I see being excluded from schools, or simply refusing to attend school at all, the more children aged fifteen and sixteen I see who can barely write even one coherent sentence, the more I start to think: is it possible?

And yet we have to believe. Perhaps the key is wilful belief, against the evidence. Meeting up with a colleague recently, we argued about the extent to which a child’s genes determined their ability. When it came down to it, I said, it didn’t matter what evidence my colleague had – I just could not believe it and still do a good job. Perhaps we have to believe against all evidence to the contrary that it is possible.

Then what do we do? Working it out – that’s the hard part. But it has to start with belief.

Reading all the Books

Category Archives: Book review