Category Archives: Education

Memory in English

Posted on by
9

On Saturday 7th November, I was delighted to present at Research Ed Literacy in Swindon. I was speaking about memory, and began by saying this is something I have only recently been concerned with. When Michael Gove some years ago suggested teaching children poetry by heart, I thought this was a terrible idea – what a waste of precious curriculum time! They have so much to learn, why waste time with this? I have, however, completely changed my mind on memory, and not just because of external imperatives – though, of course, closed text exams at GCSE has been the trigger for many of us in starting to prioritise memory.

Memory is important because if nothing has been remembered, nothing has been learned. I have an A grade at Physics GCSE, but if I sat the exam now I would fail completely. Can I really say I know Physics? I don’t think so. I’ve crammed Physics, enough to pass an exam, but I haven’t learned it. 

Cramming is not the name of the game; we are not computers storing endless facts. Instead, our brains collect these seemingly isolated facts and embed them into networks of perceptions, allowing us to have a deeper understanding of the world around us. And these facts, this knowledge, is vital to all we do; in reading comprehension, a knowledge of the subject matter predicts your capacity to comprehend a piece, as Eric Kalenze brilliantly pointed out in his session, with an incomprehensible piece on American football plays.

As Daisy Chrisodoulou points out, though, we often underestimate our knowledge and overestimate students’. She makes the argument that general knowledge is like oxygen: vitally important, but we only notice it when it isn’t there. Furthermore, the more knowledge we have, the more we can get: knowledge loves knowledge; or, knowledge is like Velcro: it sticks to other things.

English has, in the past, been seen as a ‘skills based’ subject; but the idea we can transfer skills across texts with no regard for background knowledge of those texts is only slightly less ridiculous than the idea that if we can analyse a maths problem, we can analyse a cave painting. For a full and enjoyable debunking of the skills argument, I refer you to James Theobald.

Willingham tells us that ‘memory is the residue of thought’: we remember what we think about. Our job as teachers, then, is to ensure students think hard about our subjects. This links to Bjork’s idea of ‘desirable difficulties’: we need to make students think hard, not allow them to sit back and passively let the ideas wash over them, leaving no trace of their existence. But we must be careful with this idea: school is already very hard; students are shunted from subject to subject, having to come to terms with up to six a day; there is no need to surprise students every time they enter our classroom (‘today – nouns! Tomorrow, ‘Oliver Twist’! Thursday, poetry!’) – this is just too difficult. We only need to put something in place that makes students think a little more. Don’t just read a passage, ask a few questions about it that students all have to think about to answer. That’s a desirable difficulty.

How do we build memory? In my initial scripting of the presentation I had written: ‘it’s not just rote learning of dry, meaningless facts.’ But actually, I disagree with my summer self – it sometimes is. In learning a language, I had to learn how to decline nouns, or conjugate verbs, and rote learning of those dry, meaningless facts suddenly became very exciting and meaningful in the schema of learning a language. Once those isolated facts were committed to memory, they could then link up with hundreds of other ideas. We’re keen to skip this stuff as teachers, because we know it isn’t fun; but school isn’t about fun, it’s about learning. And this is how we learn.

Making children remember what you say can take many forms: Willingham says we are attuned to narrative, so we could make our lessons into stories – not too difficult in English, as we deal in stories, but not always easy to make each individual lesson story-like. He also says we remember what prompts emotion, but it’s really difficult to be sure all your children have felt the emotion you intended. Also, what if someone comes in a bit tired, a bit grumpy, or already very emotional? I don’t think emotion or stories are reliable enough to ensure we build students’ memory in the classroom on a day to day basis. What is reliable is quizzing: any teacher can quiz students about key ideas. When I visited Michaela Community School, in every lesson I saw at least 20 minutes of recap: unabashed testing of prior knowledge, from previous days, but also from previous units.

I shared some strategies borrowed from Joe Kirby and Daisy Christodoulou: first knowledge maps, and then multiple choice questions, and explained how these were quick and easy to get recap into lessons on a daily basis.

In building students’ memories in English over the course of their study, I suggested two guiding principles: first, what are the hidden bodies of knowledge in the subject? The things we just know, that we now need to systematically teach to our students? I’d suggest these are grammar, and the literary canon (in a cruel twist of fate, I was scheduled at the same time as Katie Ashford, who has to be the most forward-thinking expert on grammar working in schools right now). We then need to sequence these ideas in the optimal way to help students see the links between them, and build up their knowledge incrementally, building in time for revisiting and interleaving the core concepts we want students to remember in the long term.

If it’s not yet clear, I need to explicitly say that there is not one original idea in what I have said. I’ve read a great many books, contained in the presentation, and a great many blogs, and had a great many conversations; I’ve stuck them together and worked at these in my own context. I’m not the ideas person. Despite this, I am so grateful that so many people came along, and were so engaging and so warm in their interactions.

research-ed

Memory in English

How to Read: TLT15

Posted on by
10

On 17th October, I travelled to Southampton for my second year presenting at TLT. I was talking about reading (not much new there), and, specifically, how to read. Reading, of course, is at the core of what we do as teachers; and not just as teachers of English. More and more in my new role, I’m coming to see that reading may be the only silver bullet in education: beautiful in its simplicity, obvious in its impact.

The reality is that our strongest readers read the most, and our weakest readers the least: the exact opposite what we need to see to close the gap between our best and worst performing students. This is not only true in their home lives, but also in our classrooms. Anyone who has ever asked for volunteers to read (including: me; guilty as charged) is advantaging those strong readers, and further denying reading from the weakest.

The gap in reading is not just a practice gap: it is also a knowledge gap. When we take our weak readers out of subjects to teach them reading skills, we are denying them that subject-specific knowledge that will enable them to make sense of a wider variety of texts. With the new strengthened GCSEs, students being able to read rigorous subject matter independently is essential.

Of the three stages of reading, decoding, comprehension and fluency, I said the least about decoding, instead pointing people to the awesome Katie Ashford’s blog, where she gives plenty of great advice on how to deal with students who cannot decode. It is clear that too many students slip through the decoding net at primary school, and we at secondary school lack the expertise to bridge that gap. This is evident in my experience in even years 10 and 11; last year I taught a student who would auto-correct unfamiliar words, as she didn’t know how to decode and hadn’t been properly taught phonics. She would autocorrect so many words, she couldn’t then understand the sentence, so for example: ‘Alison leapt up bracingly from her meal’ she might read aloud: ‘Alison led up braking from her meal’, which makes absolutely no sense.

Comprehension entails understanding what is written. Using Willingham’s examples from his excellent book Raising Kids who Read, often reading contains an inference gap: ‘Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped from his chair to fetch a cloth.’ Expert readers automatically see how the first sentence impacts the second; novice readers might see these as two separate and unconnected events.

Interestingly, though, the gap between those from low and high income backgrounds manifests itself after the decoding has been taught, because comprehension, the second stage, is largely predicated on background knowledge, which our economically advantaged students have in abundance (usually from wide background reading). Using Hirsch’s classic ‘Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run,’ I explained that readers with high levels of knowledge on a given topic do better on tests which supposedly only test their reading ‘skill.’

And yet we are still persisting in believing our weak readers simply need more training in generic reading strategies, often withdrawing students from subject lessons to teach reading in isolation, and then wondering why their reading is not improving. In fact, the optimal way to close the reading gap is for students to gain a broad knowledge of subjects across the curriculum.

So clearly, we need to put reading at the heart of our lessons. Yet this is not an easy sell. Citing my own trials of getting students to read aloud (ranging from outright refusals to early tears), I later that evening found there were many out there who considered reading aloud in class to be cruel: (https://twitter.com/JulesDaulby/status/655448338905628672 https://twitter.com/JulesDaulby/status/655437621372547073

https://twitter.com/mustntgrumble/status/655433156099710976

I welcome those challenges to this idea. It is all too easy to do whole class reading badly.

Indeed, it is absolutely vital to consider the emotional impact of such a policy, and the way to make it work in your individual classroom for your children. Running a class where every child reads aloud is difficult, make no mistake about it. It depends on excellent pedagogy and the creation of a warm, safe environment. It requires constant vigilance and tight management. But, crucially, it is possible.

Why read aloud with students, if it is so difficult? First, so we know they can read. I’ve heard of too many teachers at KS4 finding out their students can’t read to not put this top of my list of reasons. Next, so we know they are listening during the lesson – the knowledge you could be asked to read at any time undeniably focuses the mind. Also, reading aloud helps us as teachers to check for understanding, something impossible when students are reading silently at their own pace. But finally, because reading aloud is probably the most enjoyable thing you can do with a class.

One recent example: when year 7 went on their ‘outward bound’ trip, I was the lucky teacher of history with three periods to fill for those ‘left behind.’ A mixed group of around 18 students of vastly differing ability, I didn’t want to press on with the planned lessons, but also didn’t have a bank of ‘rainy day’ history lessons as a first year teacher of this subject. In my desperation, I photocopied about 30 pages of Gombrich’s History of the World (recommended to me in the summer by both Daisy Christodoulou and Jonathan Porter) and threw together some comprehension questions. The first lesson was fine, but I was really concerned about the double: two hours of pure reading and writing. And guess what? It’s probably the best lesson I’ve ever taught. No joke – I wish someone had come to see it. These children were utterly, utterly engaged in a way I’ve seen only rarely, in the most remarkable teachers’ classrooms. They adored the stories, and their curiosity led to a wonderful class discussion and some impressive paragraphs.

It was not always thus. Previously, I would use ‘guided reading,’ where my students read at different paces in groups, thus ensuring no misconceptions could be ironed out, and again advantaging those strong readers. Moreover, I previously did not read aloud well to students, as I have written about here.

So, I was held back by my own low expectations, and it was the children themselves who set me on the right track: they wanted to read, and they seized that moment to show me they could do it.

But how can we do it every lesson? Here, Doug Lemov has the best answer I’ve found with ‘Control the Game.’ I went through each of the components of this: be vague about how much children will be reading, keep the reading duration unpredictable but short at the outset, move swiftly to the next reader with limited words (‘Stacey, pick up’, or, in my class, ‘Stacey’) and take over and model reading of tricky passages. At the start of my time in a new school, I tweaked this: we did snake around the class, for two weeks in fact. What was lost in terms of students checking out and not following in this two weeks was made up for, I think, in that it set the expectation that every child would read in every one of my lessons. For unconfident readers, they got used to this expectation with the predictability. It also gave me two weeks to suss who was going to push back on reading, and deal with them individually. (Interestingly, my year 10 middle ability class proved harder to get reading than my year 11 set 7 class, who frequently bound into my room shouting ‘are we reading today miss?’) Only once the whole class was secure in reading (and only a sentence each time) did I move to selecting students, but even now they are only reading a sentence, though I am moving away from that.

The implications of this kind of teaching are that teachers need to spend their planning thinking more about the questions they will need to ask students to ensure they have understood, along with which vocabulary students will struggle with and how they will gloss those words and check students have learned them.

From the mechanics of reading I moved to the motivation: reading is highly emotional, and I shared methods I’ve written about extensively on this blog in the past to build a reading culture in a school, such as sharing one book, sharing reading lists and delivering reading assemblies.

Once again, I would like to thank my warm and encouraging audience, who indulged me in my anecdotes and engaged with the ideas with gusto. Much love also goes to those who listen and challenge in the room and after: it is only through such thrashing out of the ideas that we come closer to being the best teachers and professionals we can be.

TLT

How to read

E. D. Hirsch at Policy Exchange

Posted on by
4

I’ve written previously about the impact Hirsch’s ideas in Cultural Literacy had on me, and so, with all the zeal of a convert, I clamoured to hear him speak at Policy Exchange last week.

Nick Gibb introduced Hirsch, outlining the influence he had on his thinking and the direction of travel in the Department for Education. He noted the strong social purpose behind Hirsch: the desire to equalise the distribution of intellectual capital in society, and compared this to the 2007 National Curriculum’s hostility to teaching prescribed knowledge.

Hirsch followed, quipping amiably: ‘it’s so rare for people in the USA in high political office to read books,’ before launching into a forty minute survey of his major educational theories. He explored the idea of developmentalism – to allow a child to develop on their own – and noted the ensuing confusion from such a disparate method of education, and gave some of the theoretical history which underpinned such notions.

Behind every utterance, the drive to use curriculum to equalise society was discerned. Explaining the wrong-headed focus on teaching reading skills, Hirsch cited Willingham’s research which suggests that ‘about a week’ is enough time to teach children ‘reading skills;’ ‘any more than that is a waste of time.’ High reading ability can only be achieved by a broad, wide-ranging and well-rounded education. He cited studies of poor readers who could outperform good readers when they knew more about the given topic, and, perhaps more fascinating, that students with low IQ and high IQ who both knew lots about the topic did equally well in reading about it. Knowledge, for Hirsch and most of his audience, overcomes ‘brute handicaps.’

Furthermore, just as the novice finds it debilitatingly hard to look up new vocabulary in a dictionary (in particular, discerning the ambiguities of words), so the internet age rewards those who already have wide knowledge: ‘Google is not an equal opportunities fact finder.’ I know from sending students off to ‘research’ a topic that this is true – too often they stumble across extremely dubious sites, and come away with ever more misconceptions than they began with.

The overriding purpose of education, for Hirsch, is an acculturation of children into society; we need to teach them the language and ideas of that society before they can enter into its dialogue. For those who worry that teaching knowledge is indoctrination, this is a vital point: it is impossible to (successfully) argue from ignorance. The old paradigms of transferable skills and discovery learning ‘have not been successful in bringing about equality’: core knowledge, conversely, has shown a remarkable gap-closing propensity in Massachusetts, Japan and Shanghai among others.

Throughout, Hirsch was self-effacing, describing himself as a classic ‘hedgehog’, knowing ‘one big thing’ (‘I just go around, repeating my one big thing’). We are so grateful to the Inspiration Trust for bringing Hirsch to London and to Jonathan Simons and Policy Exchange for organising this lecture so we can hear this legend repeat this one, big, hugely important thing.

IMG_5282

Research Ed 2015

Posted on by
1

There is surely no better way to begin the school year than immersing yourself in the genius of other educators. Compared with the last two conferences, though, this is the first I have attended every session, and not felt overly exhausted by the close – a testament, I think, to beginning the school year in a dynamic school with an exciting role, surrounded by supportive staff, but also to Tom Bennett’s astonishing capacity to gather together the best and the brightest to deliver and to dazzle.

Daisy Christodoulou: Life after levels

A long-time admirer of Christodoulou since reading her fabulous book, this session brought the theory and practice of life after levels to light. Noting that prose descriptors provide only the illusion of a shared language (after all, ‘Can compare two fractions and identify which is larger’ could apply as well to 3/7 or 5/7, 3/4 or 4/5 or 5/7 or 5/9), and ultimately ‘adverb soup’ she went on to share much wiser systems.

First, using the questions themselves, thus showing exactly what students can and cannot do, to provide clarity on exactly what they still need to master. Even better, use multiple choice questions, to probe student understanding more deeply by building in key misconceptions to the possible answers. Second, because of course we cannot get rid of essays, by ranking them instead of using spurious descriptors (as Christodoulou notes, we often get through half a class of marking and realise we want to change the first few – we are always, if only unconsciously, comparing essays for quality as we mark). This sounds tricky in practice, but I’m excited to explore ‘No more marking’, which presents essays to you to rank two at a time, before applying an algorithm to rank the lot.

Listening to Daisy Christodoulou is like listening to the future. I have often felt worryingly far behind where she is, but I am desperate to catch up.

Nick Gibb: The importance of teaching

Gibb, unsurprisingly, used his speech to provide examples of schools doing well as a result of government reforms. Along the way, he cited the BBC’s ‘Chinese School’ as a start to move towards a profession where we are focused not on our preferred teaching methods, but on those which deliver outcomes for children. He noted that ‘for some, a romantic aversion to formal teaching will forever trump the evidence,’ and I hope this is not the case. Gibb went on to also say that ‘pupil performance is not the sole aim of a school,’ explaining that although uniform might have no impact on pupil attainment, we wish to retain it for another reason.

Tim Oates: Other nations’ systems

This session focused on debunking many of the myths of other nations’ school systems. He opened with the assertion that we need to be exploring why some students are so much further ahead than our students, and closed by noting that we can’t adopt another system wholesale. Oates was scathing on a number of individual arguments, demolishing them with a mountain of evidence. On Singapore, for example, their case is often dismissed as their society is overly homogenous and their educational outcomes the result of high levels of private tutoring; yet Oates disputes both counts. He noted there was high social inequality in Singapore and large income variation, and yet their educational outcomes were outstanding (the subject of a worrying conversation later with Dani Quinn, who pointed out ‘if their educational outcomes are brilliant but there is still vast social inequality… Is our mission doomed?’). He noted that private tutoring usually exacerbates a gap between rich and poor, as the rich can afford the best tutors, and yet no such gap exists in Singapore.

Jon Brunskill: Moral psychology

Brunskill began by asking: what can moral psychology teach us about behaviour management? This fascinating session asked more questions than it answered, as we explored various moral dilemmas. He noted that children are often in the ‘pre-conventional’ stage of behaviour, where they believe the bigger the sanction the worse their act, and therefore behave well mainly to avoid such sanctions. He asked the troubling question of strict and successful behaviour systems like those at Mossborne kept students in this paradigm of behaviour, not allowing them to progress to the higher levels of behaving well because it is morally the right thing to do. He also questioned the idea that moral reasoning influenced moral action, sharing the Milgram experiment which involved participants delivering life-threatening shocks to others (luckily, actors) on the orders of men in white coats (also actors).

Towards the end, Brunskill began to unpick why some people act heroically, and explore some ways we as teachers can influence our students – I look forward to hearing more on this in the future.

Amanda Spielman: marking and remarking in exams

I’m not sure I have enough knowledge of statistics to have kept up with Spielman on marking, so I won’t try to poorly paraphrase the bulk of this fascinating talk. When looking at exam marking, Spielman praised the move to electronic marking, much despised by many examiners, for allowing unusual behaviour (overly quick marking; late night marking) to be picked up and addressed more rapidly. She also explored the issue of re-marking, noting that while 99% of grades do not change, often more marks are picked up by students, perhaps as a result of the markers’ sympathy in knowing these students are desperate to move up a grade.

Katie Ashford: The building blocks of literacy

I was so excited to hear Ashford speak, as I’m a massive fan of what she is doing at Michaela Community School with her phenomenal reading programme leading to astonishing student progress. She began by speaking about some of the low expectations we have of students noting ‘I want you to feel bad’ about saying things like ‘it’s not realistic for him’ to achieve a decent GCSE grade. After engaging the emotions, Ashford moved quickly on to the practicalities of teaching children to read, advocating robust assessments (‘a “4b” isn’t going to tell you anything about what a child does and doesn’t know’), a strong phonics programme like Ruth Miskin’s, and fluency and comprehension interventions. Finally, she went into detail about her reading plans at Michaela to have students reading 100 classic texts over their time there (or, ‘100 books kids probably wouldn’t read if they were left on their own’). She also noted the importance of reading across the curriculum, which is something I’m going to think hard about in my current role – what are children reading in every subject, in every lesson?

Sam Freedman: The five big challenges for the next government

Freedman began by asking how far we had come towards a school led system, and ended by asserting that such a system is still preferably to top-down initiatives led by government, which can provide a short-term push but in the long term do not make for sustainable system improvement. While government can devise what students learn, it is probably best for schools to have control over how students learn. The five challenges boil down to one: capacity. He then outlined challenges in resources, infrastructure, teacher supply, leadership and expertise, going over much-talked-of challenges in teacher recruitment and shrinking school budgets, and offering some suggestions for resolving these (make schools direct an easier thing to apply for; scrap fees for PGCE courses). The most important quote for me was that ‘schools are panicking and burning out teachers way too early in their careers.’ This is not a system issue, but a school issue; it is the job of leaders to shield teachers on the front-line from the stresses and strains of accountability, or we will be left with no more teachers.

I’m still digesting the genius of the day, and have added about ten books to my Amazon wishlist. The message of the day seems to me that we need to be critical and think harder, but not necessarily work harder.

researched_logo_small

New year’s resolutions: 2015-2016

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve mentioned previously that I like to start the new school year with my resolutions. This year is not only a new year for me, but a new school and a new role as well. I’m extremely excited to be moving back to Southwark, the borough where I first trained, and to an academy and mixed school for the first time. I remember all too keenly the trials of starting afresh: the students don’t know you, so you must build up trust and predictability of follow-through; teachers don’t know you and don’t know how committed you will turn out to be; not to mentioned the umpteen-thousand-million names to learn.

So, this year, I need to simplify my aims and keep it simple. My two resolutions for this year focus on behaviour and curriculum.

Behaviour

Good behaviour underpins a school’s every success. Without excellent behaviour, even the very best teaching is significantly diminished in its impact. Beginning a new school as a more seasoned teacher and with responsibility, I will still prioritise ensuring the behaviour in my own classroom is exemplary. I’ll be re-visiting Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion chapter on the least invasive intervention, and constantly explaining why I’m enforcing the rules, bringing everything back to the students’ learning.

I’ve made several visits to my new school, and have been very impressed with behaviour on the corridors. But I know this is the result of tireless efforts from the teachers to constantly enforce their expectations, always with a smile, ensuring a calm environment. I need to be vigilant to ensure I am a part of that team of continual reinforcement. There can be no priority more fundamental than 100% of students complying with 100% of the instructions of 100% of staff 100% of the time.

And of course, that goes for the classrooms of others. As a senior leader, I pledge to be visible and supportive in ensuring behaviour is excellent. I won’t be taking children back to teachers who have sent them out. I won’t be walking past a chaotic classroom with a struggling supply teacher because a meeting or pile of work awaits me. And, most vitally, I won’t be blaming the supply teacher, NQT or any teacher for the behaviour of their students.

Curriculum

My role at will be to oversee Curriculum Design, so I’ll be drawing on my ideas from E.D. Hirsch, as well as other school examples, for guidance on what makes an excellent curriculum.

My aim for the curriculum is two-fold. Firstly, I would like to see a coherent curriculum, where students’ learning is systematically sequenced, and then revisited. I’d like to see a curriculum where all students are studying high-quality subjects in a clear and coherent way, and intervention for the lowest attainers on entry still ensures students are receiving a coherent curriculum that will enable them to have choices in later life.

Secondly, I would like to see a rigorous curriculum, where every subject is teaching high-quality content in an academic manner. This will also encompass rigorous testing of the curriculum, to ensure students are remembering what they have learned.

It may sound like an immense challenge, but I’ve been privileged to meet heads of faculty and senior leaders at the school who have already worked hard to put many of the structures in place that will ensure the above is a reasonable expectation. The principal has assembled a team of highly committed, impressive individuals and I will have to work hard to prove my worth and live up to their proven excellence.

Finally, I’d like to maintain a healthy work-life balance. I absolutely love what I do, and the temptation is always to plough into work and forget everything else. I’d like to work sensible hours, see friends and family, and read plenty of books.

Emotions in education

Posted on by
1

I’d always simply assumed that emotions were a good thing in the school setting. After all, I’ve built my “teaching persona” around my genuine emotions: I love the students, and teaching makes me happy; I am always my best teacher when I project this happiness and love into my classroom.

But there are obvious downsides to such an approach. When you love your students, does this make it harder when they let you down? When you love your students, and they do something terrible, unspeakable, outside school, does it become less easy to be their advocate in the classroom? When you love your students and they shout and swear at you, do we leave ourselves open to feeling a deeper swathe of negative emotion? And what is the impact of this emotion on the rest of the classes we teach that day?

And then there is anger. It has been a long time since I have heard real bellowing at a class or child, but I can’t help but shrink from the idea of it. The school where I trained was explicitly “no shouting” – that was rule number one. But it didn’t mean it didn’t happen. And I’ve heard it said that shouting and anger are fine, except when the emotion behind this is real, because then you’ve “lost it”, and that’s never ok.

I’m not so sure I agree. See, I don’t find anger a helpful emotion in a school setting. I’ve definitely had to suppress my anger, sometimes weekly, but I can’t see a time when to express this emotion would be helpful for the settings I’m working in. If a class won’t listen, why raise the volume? If you are angry, why not stay calm, and discuss the issues?

Then there’s anger directed at teachers from other teachers. Surely there is never a place for this. We’ve probably all been at the receiving end of some anger. When it occurs, it does make me consider: has this emotional response helped me be better at my job? Has this anger made me more likely to want to help you, or to change my behaviour or choices in the way you would like? We are professionals in a work environment; surely a better response would be supportive, considerate; searching not blaming, asking not demanding. I don’t believe it is possible to motivate teachers with anger.

Now, I’ve caught myself telling students I’m “disappointed” in them. Doug Lemov points out how unhelpful this is: when we make our responses more about us than our students, they are unlikely to change behaviour; the typical student will simply shrug it off (“oh, how unfortunate for you Miss that you are disappointed. I still don’t care”). Far better to remind students of the purpose of their learning, and the path they need to be on, and push it back to them.

A colleague once told me a story about leaving her first teaching job many years ago. On going to the Principal to hand in her notice, she was told that she was a “disappointment”; that she was “letting the school and the children down”. Similarly, what does this emotion achieve? Does this make it more likely for someone to change their mind?

When I went to my first Headteacher to say I was thinking about leaving, she listened to my concerns, and calmly asked me what she could do to make me happier in my work at that school. She then told me a story about how she became a teacher (something I will write about in the future with her blessing), and played into my strong sense of mission. I left that office feeling ten feet tall; a soldier in the war against educational disadvantage, following in the footsteps of a colossal educator. I did not seek another opportunity that year.

So is it best to leave emotion at the school gates? Are we stronger and more purposeful educators without it?

And then I come back to love. Because on those hardest of hard days, when all the class is against you, and colleagues are filled with frustration, and you wonder if you might just retire to a cubicle in an accountancy firm where no humans will ever disturb your placidity again, it comes right back to love. This is the driving emotion that brings us back to the classroom, back to focusing on the learning, back to putting in the extra emotional effort that strong behaviour management can often require.

On those days of rawest emotion, the remedy for me is to remember my students, close my door, and teach them – with love.

These kids

Posted on by
1

There are some students who storm into your teaching life, and you know immediately: they’re going to be fine. They will have issues and problems and troubles, of course; they will have tantrums and bad days and choice words used at the wrong time, of course; they will miss detentions and not read enough and worry about you calling home, of course. But they will be fine.

By “fine”, of course, I mean, they won’t have any problems reaching the C-grade we teach them to dream of. They’ll almost certainly achieve B grades. You’ll spend your teaching time trying to stretch them towards the A grades; reminding them that you can’t give them the answers, trying to make them become independent thinkers. I’m not saying those students are easy. But they will be fine, in the sense that there is no scenario in which they won’t be picking up a string of B to A grades at GCSE with the odd C (bad day?), and dancing on to sixth form, followed by university.

And then there are these kids. I’m not sure why they’re so behind, because we’ve had them in our year 7, 8 and 9 classes and done a bit of huffing and sighing because they don’t seem to be anywhere near a level 5 for three years of trying; in fact, for three years of trying they seem to be stuck on the same level they came to us on. And while we know that’s not good enough, what did we do? With the best of intentions, we “tried our best”, which means we did more when we could, and when we couldn’t, we felt guilty, because we teach six classes English four times a week, and there are only so many hours in the day, and we’re teachers so we work all of them. No-one was filing their nails when they could have been helping these kids.

So, we’re not sure what happened, but here they are: in some crucial year group, languishing at the very bottom of the scale. Except they’re often not here; so often are they excluded or kept out of lessons or bunking in the toilets or bunking at home or genuinely sick but sick so much of the time you’re not sure they even have an immune system.

What can we do?

I once sat at a parents evening waiting for these kids. It seemed as if every “fine” child in the year group had turned up, while “these kids” hadn’t. Where were they? Would I ever know? And I would call the next day, and not get any answer, or leave a message that wouldn’t be returned, or hear an incorrect number tone.

And you know, there aren’t many of these kids. In fact, they’re an incredibly tiny number, and an infinitesimally small proportion of what will be our A-C achievement that will judge us as a school.

So what can we do? And if we do nothing, will anyone notice?

After that parents evening, I came home devastated. I couldn’t get through to “these kids”, I couldn’t get through to their parents, I couldn’t get anyone else to care as caring too much with “these kids” will only end in hopelessness. These kids are doomed. They turn up in year 7 with nothing; they leave in year 11 with nothing.

The next day, I went to visit the new teacher. It was Friday, period 6, and I’d just spent the previous lesson with some of these kids. Not too many; two were sick, one was AWOL, one excluded, and another suspiciously in school for all the other lessons that day. During the lesson, we’d practised listening to others without speaking, we’d learned that board markers shouldn’t be used on school property, and we’d been reminded that we definitely don’t throw our property across the room, and definitely definitely not at another student.

And then, in the new teacher’s classroom, there was calm, focused endeavour. Those children were all on the right path, hurtling ahead, doing the right thing without question. Because the new teacher had set up her classroom to ensure that all would achieve, and she was reinforcing those expectations, and she was firmly challenging them to do better, and they were internalizing her messages, her belief, her expertise.

So I have to do better by these kids. I have to transform my classroom. They have to want to be there, and their parents have to want to take my call, because what I will say will be meaningful. I have to learn from the new teacher, who gives me great hope that what happens in the classroom can make all the difference for these kids. I have to hope my classroom can start to be enough.

Reach Summit

Posted on by
Reply

Reach Academy, a Free School set up by Teach First ambassadors Ed Vainker, Rebecca Cramer, and Jon McIntosh, is now three years into its journey to “transform the lives of all of our pupils by providing them with the skills, attitudes and academic qualifications to flourish in any career and live happy and fulfilled lives.” Following an absurdly impressive Ofsted Outstanding report, the school opened its doors yesterday to share some of its core principles and their learning.

The warmth and humility of the teachers and leaders of Reach radiated, alongside their supreme confidence, now buoyed by system approval, and made for an energetic and challenging day. Three students, impressive in their self-possession, preparation and clarity, opened the summit, telling the story of “Ed” and “Rebecca” (unsettling for teachers used to the traditional “Ms/Ms” but a small paradigm shift I rather liked (respect, of course, comes not from monikers)) and their journey to create a school that would transform life chances for children in their community. Having speculated previously on the underachievement of white working class children, I was especially interested to hear one student remark: “I know I’m part of a group. White British boys underachieve nationally, and I’m not going to be one of them.” I’d be very interested to know the conversations that have gone into such clear but unobtrusive awareness.

The first session I attended was run by the inspirational Secondary Headteacher, Rebecca Cramer, who took us point by point through their recent Ofsted inspection, and shared some tips for preparation.  Chief among the take-aways were: to prepare your paperwork to lessen the burden of administration on the day, know your data fully, and to communicate your beliefs about your school clearly (“the more times they hear that this is an Outstanding school, the more they believe it” – “don’t be too self-deprecating”). Rebecca’s tenacity to ensure the grade would be given was evident, along with her and Ed’s willingness to take on almost all of the Ofsted bureaucracy to free teachers to simply deliver great lessons.

Next, assistant principal Grace Wilcox led us through a clear and detailed session on the new Progress and Attainment 8 measures. Although I had familiarity with these measures, her presentation was invaluable in clarifying key questions I had, as well as raising issues regarding the trade-off between school accountability and what is best for the individual child (Reach’s emphasis is firmly on the latter). A serendipity of seating meant I was placed next to the formidable Max Haimendorf, who I have admired since the Teach First 2010 Summer Institute, where sitting in a session run by himself and King Solomon Academy’s first year 7 cohort, he transformed my own ideas of what a transformative education for children would look like. Unfortunately, our first interaction was in doing some simple Maths together to work out a student’s Attainment 8 score, whereby I revealed (too soon, too soon) that I did not know my times tables.

Finally, a session on coaching run by Beck Owen ran through, and most importantly demonstrated, what a Leverage Leadership coaching conversation looks like. It is always good to revisit and practice elements you have some knowledge of, and I know that asking open questions to coach teachers to improve is one of my targets (in the time pressures of the working week it is often too tempting to say: “do this”).

The day ended with further inspiration, as those who had set up schools shared their learning. Ed Vainker noted that “the things we can easily measure are not always the most important in achieving our vision”, exploring the strands Reach would be focusing on to improve ever further. Of recruitment, he mentioned that sharing of core values and vision was more important to Reach than the technical ability to do the job, which was an interesting prioritisation, and emphasises in some ways that the difference of such a school lies in its mission, not its methods.

King Solomon Academy’s Max Haimendorf spoke next, humbly failing to mention the school’s stunning KS4 results, which are by any measure extraordinary (67% FSM; 93% A*CEM; 76% EBacc). He noted that the school had won over the community by getting them, and the children, excited about the goal to attend and thrive in an academically selective university, but that they were always reviewing their methods, and what needed to occur in every week, every lesson, to make this a reality. He spoke of the need, as an organization grows, to “systematize the things that are magical” to ensure sustainability in years to come.

Finally, Jenny, Vice Principal at Dixons Trinity Academy in Bradford, shared her reflections, speaking of the ease with a very small staff to build strong relationships, and the need to always prioritise these even as the staff body grows as it is these strong relationships which hold the key to overcoming life chances. Most resonant for me was her imploration to “do the boring things well every day”, ensuring all the little things are being followed up. She also noted that they would need to be mindful of intake, to ensure they were always serving the students who motivated them to “get up everyday.” She mentioned that one of DTA’s focuses was autonomy, and scaffolding in this for students to guard against them ending up age 18, at university, and coming home without the structures that had sustained them.

All in all, my key takeaway from this day was that education is changing, school by school. Inspirational teachers build their visions into inspirational schools, of which they become inspirational headteachers. Their dedication to their students leads to results which defy the beliefs of the naysayers, and prove that a child’s starting point need not determine their end. There is a revolution afoot in education, and we need to all be part of it.

 

New year’s resolutions – for other people

Posted on by
Reply

Ofsted

It is received wisdom in the teacher world that Ofsted is not fit for purpose. Too many people have blogged much more eloquently than I to explain why; simply put – Ofsted need to scale back in a big way. They need to be mindful that everything they say becomes gospel in schools that are gunning for Good or better – that is, all schools. They need to look at the data: are results (including student progress from starting points) good? If so, why? What is that school doing well that other schools can learn from? And if results are awful, as they are in too many schools, what does that school need to do to improve, and how can it be supported to improve outcomes for all students? Other than this – do we really need anything else?

Department for Education (political influence on)

Yes, I know there is an election coming up and you want to put out enough policy ideas to make all the interest groups vote for you. But please, enough. Enough of change. I’ve spent my holiday working out how we will implement the new GCSEs and the new A-levels next September, and calling exam boards who assure me their support materials will be out “soon.” It’s not good enough. You can’t tear up KS3, 4 and 5 at the same time and expect us to just do it all without support, while doing the job we’ve always done (teaching children) as well as we’ve always done it (or better). There are not enough hours in the day. So just spend a year consolidating, supporting, reviewing, consulting. 

Headteachers

Headteachers have the greatest responsibility to build their school’s ethos and support their teachers. I’ve been blessed to have only experienced incredible Headteachers, driven by strong moral purpose, who are exceptional at what they do. The Heads I have worked for have challenged me to be better, but have also supported me without question or anger when I’ve made mistakes. I will never forget the first big mistake I made, in my first year of teaching. The Head took me into her office, asked me what I did wrong, asked what I would do if I could do it again, listened to my rubbish response, and coached me to a better one.

Students

We think we know our students, and in some ways, perhaps we do. But in other ways, we can never know them. We can never know the struggles they face, we can never know what their formative years have done to them, and we can never know their true potential. We just need to keep raising the bar. In my second year of teaching, I predicted a student in the lowest set for English a B, thinking I was being very generous. She came up to me with that grade, asking: “do you think I’ll get a B?” I replied, thinking I was being supportive: “I know you will.” She retorted: “I’m going to get an A, Miss – you’ll see.” And she did. And I did.

 Teachers

All teachers want the best for their students, but that aspiration can look different to different people. There are still teachers out there who say: “that’s really good progress for a student like that.” There are still teachers out there who say: “we can’t control their home lives, and so they won’t ever achieve what they could.” There are still teachers out there who say: “you have to understand that this child has special educational needs.” I know there are, because I’ve met them. These statements are wrong. They are wrong, and they underestimate both what the child is capable of, and the adult. We, as teachers, have enormous power to change a child’s life trajectory. Let’s stop being scared and use that power.

Things I have learned this term

Posted on by
Reply

This has been one of the most fulfilling terms of my career, and also one of the most challenging – how often these two seem to go hand in hand. It has been something of an adjustment, having to learn how to manage a department as well as take on new whole-school responsibilities. Not to mention trying to teach. Here are some of the things I have learned this term:

How to do duty… And how to not do duty

In the early days, I felt ridiculous doing duty. I’d knock apologetically at classroom doors, and teachers would scowl as if I were interrupting them – which, of course, I was. Now I’ve done my duty periods enough times, I think I’ve worked out which classrooms I can pretty much leave alone, and which benefit from a “casual walk-through.” I think back to myself as a new teacher, and how I’d have liked SLT to approach my classroom; I’m tougher with the students who are clearly taking advantage; I’m tougher if it’s a supply teacher or an NQT – I tend to haul students behaving less than perfectly away from the former in particular with little discussion. Especially as we come to the end of term, I feel like they are the ones who most need a calmer classroom. I’ve also realised that the more visible you are, the easier it becomes. Serendipitously, a spate of SLT sickness has allowed me to take on more duties; practice makes for some fast improvements.

How to teach less, but well

It has been a big adjustment going from having four classes to three. You wouldn’t think that losing four periods would have such a big effect, but the remaining 15 hours a week I am teaching have become my favourites. I really miss my year 9s, who (I’m almost sad to confess) are racing up to me at lunchtimes to fill me in on how much they are learning with their new teachers and how well they are behaving. Now, I feel grateful every lesson I can shut the door and just be a teacher. At the start, it seemed like this was the least important part of what I do, but after a bit of a battle with my year 10 class, I realise it is the most important. It is worth spending extra time making those 15 hours my best of the week. The fewer issues I have in my own classroom, the more helpful I am in the rest of my roles.

How to take feedback

I am so blessed to have a plain-spoken member of my team who simply does not sugarcoat: I know when I’m doing a good job, and I definitely know when I have to do better. A few weeks ago, she told me, in much more couched terms, that I wasn’t a presence in the English department at the moment; I wasn’t supporting teachers enough. After recovering from this blow, I resolved to do better. How can I ensure I check in with all the teachers I am responsible for, so none of them feel like she felt that day? How can I rebalance my responsibilities so I don’t let teachers down?

How to keep my sanity

That said, the English office is always a place of sanity for me. It’s amazing to have such a team of motivated individuals. We share the office with the Maths department, so they also deserve kudos for keeping our spirits up at the end of a long term. In particular, there are four or five of the teachers who have been permanently stocking the office with chocolate, Haribo and donuts. I need to exercise more restraint in future, but this term these have been all but essential to a healthy spirit.

My favourite thing this term has been observing the three colleagues who have opted into the “Leverage Leadership”-style “developmental observations” – 20 minute drop-ins with brief and focused feedback following (Harry Fletcher-Wood has written about this in helpful detail). It has been really something watching each colleague grow and improve as term has gone on. The Headteacher is fond of telling me that when she is feeling stressed, she goes and “walks around year 11 English lessons.” I know exactly what she means – there is nothing so soothing as watching great professionals at work.

Some thoughts for the term ahead (the year ahead feels too enormous to contemplate):

I will keep writing

Like almost everyone, I suffer from melodramatic crises of confidence, and I have found it increasingly hard to write this term. Or rather, to publish – I’ve written copious posts which now lay strewn in various folders, achingly missing the special something which would allow them to flow freely into the digital world. I’d like to write better, of course, but at times it might be worth just chucking it out there (like this post in fact, which I never intended to publish).

I will support teachers

I have come to realize that my time in school needs to be spent being completely available to the teachers I am responsible for. They need to be supported, and their needs must always, always come first. I know, and must never forget, that it is harder to be a teacher on a full timetable than any of the positions I have been lucky enough to hold: I have never been so viscerally exhausted as a HoD or member of SLT as I was teaching, even with some years of experience, a full timetable. That is the real hard work.

I will be great at my job

In the past, I’ve tried to be all things to all people and have taken on far too much outside school. This led, last year, to a five-month long cold I just couldn’t shake and needing a pair of crutches to move around (a very long story). I need to remember that my first responsibility is to my school, and no matter how exciting the opportunities I might be offered, sometimes it is better to just say no, and instead be great at the day job. After all, I have a long way to go to be “great”!

… but I will take time to do other things

The Head of Maths and I have been talking about going to meditation classes for about six months. I have a tendency to race from thing to thing with little thought or reflection – 2015 is the year to stop this nonsense. I will also see my friends more, even if they choose to live in far-flung suburbs or crazily West.