Category Archives: Education

Educational underachievement and possible racism

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Very recently, I was reading this book:

Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s going on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with progress

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I feel like I’m hearing a lot about progress recently, and not just from “Progress 8.” More and more, our dialogue about education seems infused with progress – first there was “progress within a lesson,” now, progress over time. And what’s not to like? Clearly, the children in our care should be moving on, and improving day to day, year upon year.

And once I think I would have welcomed this: our focus on the C/D borderline, driven by league tables and a desperate need to stay afloat with budgets tied to student numbers, seemed to ignore both the top and the lowest achievers.

Or did it? In the fortunate position of working in small schools, in my experience we’ve always focused on pushing every child, even the lowest achievers, over the C-threshhold that will undeniably open more doors to them. I’ve written about how in my school 95% of students walked away with a C or above in English Language – and that my biggest regret is the 5% we didn’t get, when I knew it was possible. In my previous school, that figure was 98% last year – I wish someone would write more about that! (Caroline, Lizzie… I’m looking at you!) Moreover, the top were not left to languish; in my new school’s last year 11 cohort 35% achieved A or A* grades.

My problem with progress is not concerned with the top achievers. Any measure forcing schools to also stretch those with high prior attainment seems sensible. My problem with progress is when turning an F into an E carries the same incentives as turning it into a higher benchmark.

Cognitively speaking, I can’t find evidence that any child is not capable of achieving a C in English; all I can find evidence of is that they’re not capable yet. Some students need more time; through a variety of factors, whether that be poor attendance (so often linked to other social issues) or being in the early stages of learning English, or else labeling with any of the various acronyms denoting their ‘difficulties’ with learning. All this tells me is that they need more time, more attention, more intervention. And we need higher expectations.

Too often, students coming into secondary school with low prior attainment are victims of a social system which engrains disadvantage and ensures a cycle of poverty, and of an educational system not yet advanced enough to work through those gaps in their learning. The problem with progress, for me, is the potential there is to further engrain this problem, so that we end up fulfilling the low expectations society has had for certain children from birth.

I’m not sure I can ascribe to a system where an equivalent D represents a good thing. I’m tired of people telling me “that’s a huge achievement for that student,” because it might be, but we can do better; they can do better. We need to have bigger ambitions of our own ability to transform the life chances of every single child; not just the borderline children, of all children. In the new 9 to 1 system, I need to know what represents the ticket to the future, so I can ensure all students achieve it.

We don’t have to look far to see schools which are coming close to ensuring that all their students have access to any life they could desire; King Solomon Academy in London has used high expectations and epic amounts of work to secure useful outcomes for almost every student in their care. Then, of course, there are America’s high performing Charter Schools which send every child to university.

The problem with progress is when it comes with a lack of an end game. It is the kind of word which makes it acceptable for professionals to say: “we can’t change society/the welfare system/the class system/the parents” – when in fact we can change the outcome, and overturn the whole.

TLT

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Immersed in the insularity of a new job in a new school last year, TLT13 passed me by. The first awareness of it for me was seeing exciting looking tweets and blogs on and after the day, when clearly it was too late to join in. This year, though, I was determined to be on it – which made me feel even more delighted to be asked to present something as part of the literacy strand.

A train journey with a dear friend and past colleague provided me with plentiful food for education thought, and by the time we arrived at Southampton I was already percolating a “things I would like to be better at” mental list, which overflowed as the day went on.

Tom Sherrington

Creeping into the lecture theatre, only slightly late, I was relieved not to have missed Tom Sherrington’s opening. He spoke passionately about leading a new school, this time a large comprehensive, and noted pleasingly that what applies in a grammar school applies “even more” there; he also remarked that the extent to which expectations can be low is amazing. Candidly referring to teaching his year 8 class as “feeling like someone who has just done a 10K run with no training,” he went on to explain that teaching is really rather straightforward (not easy; never easy – but definitely straightforward): know what you are trying to teach – the key concepts, the objective; and keep the pitch high: never lose sight of the top end, while bringing the other children with you. He showed his famous tweet: “if there was no OfSTED, no SLT… just you and your class… what would you choose to do to make it great? Do that anyway.” He clarified at this point that he did not mean there should be no accountability; rather that if what you are doing in your classroom is amazing and it is working, no-one will mind.

Referring to the new behaviour system being rolled out in his school, he noted that for classroom teaching to have its desired impact, the culture and systems first have to be in place: without these, all else is meaningless. Too much teacher time, otherwise, is spent controlling behaviour and not teaching. (Incidentally, I remember a friend of mine moving to teach in a private school where lessons were 35 minutes long. I asked her how she got through the curriculum, and she replied “well, no-one misbehaves, so the lessons don’t feel that short.”) Tom went on to explain that children need to feel confusion and struggle in their learning: if they are getting everything right, the lesson is not challenging enough.  Tom also remarked that his school had scrapped levels on reports, saying he “can’t justify another 6b meaning nothing.” He noted they will fill this vacuum with something better, and I can’t wait to see what that might be.

Kev Bartle

My first session of the day began with a clip of some rather peculiar, red-haired, 80s looking woman singing. I had long suspected it, but I then knew how completely amazing Kev must be, both as teacher and headteacher. His session made close reference to the OfSTED clarification for schools document, and he began by noting his annoyance that many SLTs aren’t yet getting it right with OfSTED: when they are doing things “with OfSTED in mind”, it is often the OfSTED of five or eight years ago. Opening with the wise words: “there is no such thing as progress within lessons. There is only learning”, he was scathing on the preponderance of mini-plenaries and other such AfL strategies reduced to progress-prop gimmicks.

On lesson grading, Kev noted that even if you observe a main-scale teacher for 30 minutes six times a year (this is approximately five times more than I have ever been observed in a year), that still represents only 0.4% of the teaching that teacher will do over the year. Referring to the policy exchange report “Watching the Watchmen”, he reminded us that OfSTED inspectors can see the same lesson and give it every one of the four arbitrary grades.

On lesson observations, he asked why SLT “who teach the least” should be the ones to lead on teaching. While I agree that a top-down approach to observation is not favourable, I can’t help but look at the SLT in my own school which contains some of its strongest practitioners, and my line manager (deputy head) who remains one of the best teachers I have ever seen in action. Kev went on to explain why learning walks and book looks were also a waste of time if done in a top-down fashion; better practice, he suggested, was to have a department look through books together and discuss each other’s practice. Of “data trawls”, less is more: in Kev’s school, they enter data for year 11, 12 and 13 only twice a year; this ensures the data is reliable and robust, and not the product of an over-tired teacher putting in any old thing every half term.

Kev had strong words to say about consistency: teaching is about humans – messy, uncontrollable humans; we need to open ourselves up to uncertainty, and mystery. He put forward an alternative set of ideas on how a school might be run, largely built on trust, and assuming the best of people.

Chris Hildrew

I was so excited to finally meet Chris in person, having long admired his blog, but first I had to be bowled over by his phenomenal talk. Chris was speaking about progress and assessment within a “Growth Mindset” school. With the dynamism of a Mr Keating, children-on-desks educator, he told us we had to begin by thinking of the “X kids” – the “mutant kids who can do it.” We had to consider the students who had most excelled in our subjects, and what they had that we could replicate in schools.

Immediately, the pastoral implications of this jumped out: no-one really believes children are naturally Shakespeare; rather, they have self-esteem and self-belief, along with the self-awareness to know how to change and develop into better students. Achievement and mindset go hand in hand.

Importantly, growth mindset must not become reductive; a tick-box on a lesson plan or a resource sheet. Rather it must become embedded at a whole-school level, as Chris has written so eloquently about in his blog.

Along with this, we need to build demand and a high level of challenge into our curriculum, knowing where we want our students to get to and then plotting how to arrive there. Chris spoke of asking subject leaders to tap into their core moral purpose: why should students study their subject? And with that in mind, bend the (very flexible) National Curriculum to that purpose.

Echoing what Tom Sherrington had said, teachers saying students have “nothing to improve” clearly need to set the challenge bar higher; what more could they read; what more do to broaden their knowledge? Chris also outlined his school’s method of tracking progress, which looks very exciting, and I can’t wait to hear more about it.

Chris Curtis

Like everyone I had heard speak so far in the day, I longed to be a student in Chris Curtis’s classroom. His opening salvo: “how is writing an essay like going on a date?” immediately made the room buzz with activity and excitement. He noted we are often busy moulding the next journalists, and not academic writers; something to be mindful of with the advent of the new GCSEs. Proclaiming “death to the PEE format,” he showed us something much better: point and then development. Using the fantastic resource below, he guided us through how to develop an idea, and gave us plenty to take away into our own classrooms.

It takes a village

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In the last week and a half, I’ve gone home twice. This is unusual for me, as generally I’m a terrible daughter. I let myself be swept up by all-consuming London.

Leafy Suffolk is caught between Summer and Autumn. I’ve carried my coat on many trains. And I’m caught between the old and the new; in my fifth year of living in this city, which often feels like Suffolk’s antithesis.

On Monday, I went to my dear Aunt Josie’s funeral. She wasn’t too old, and I think we were all a little shocked to be sitting there, listening to her brother’s moving words. He described her life. Born in the village, Josie grew up in the village, married a man from the next village over, and convinced him to live in her village with her. They lived there together, across three different houses, for all the 37 years of their marriage. (That day, every time my Uncle said “my wife,” my heart broke.) Josie worked in the village, mainly as a cleaner in the school and in others’ homes, raised her only son in the village, and four years ago tragically laid rest to him in that same church she had married in; that same church I sat in and listened to the words describing her life.

“Why are they making such a fuss?” we were told Josie would be thinking, as we wept and comforted each other in a warm-cold church. We were reminded of her love and warmth; always a cup of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge for whoever called to the door. Always welcoming, interested, full of love. The church burst with bodies, disbelieving that we had lost a soul so full of kindness and care for all of us.

I don’t go home much, but when I do I see Aunts and Uncles I haven’t seen in up to ten years sometimes. They never berate me; never make me feel the guilt I should; they hug me, kiss me, and tell me they are proud of me.

I am proud of them. Leaving the village has been the path of my last ten years, but the village raised me, as it raised Josie, and the village will not forget me, as it will not forget her.

It has been ten years since I left school. The “ten year reunion” was something that filled me with both excitement and dread, and it came the same week as Josie’s funeral.

The oddly familiar faces of Saturday seemed many worlds from the world of Monday. Retracing the steps of our shared childhoods, old annoyances seemed suddenly sharper; old fondnesses equally so. I remembered, as we all might have, the person I was, along with the person I pretended to be – the one who might even have belonged in that cocoon of private school privilege, the prize I so luckily won in an age of assisted places.

I might not ever reconcile the disparate parts of experience that have made me; I might always feel a tension between the world I have come from, which envelopes me without hesitation in my darkest moments, and the world which formed me as part of my education. It takes a village of experience to raise a child; we cannot excuse our influences, and nor should we feel we have to.

Research Ed 2014

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There’s a kind of brutality about holding an education conference on the first Saturday of the first week of term. Last year, I had just begun a new job in a new school, and I remember half sleeping through a session in the afternoon before calling it a day early. Whole months blurred by thereafter. Not so this year.

John Tomsett, Alex Quigley, Rob Coe, Stuart Kime

My day opened with a session in the stunningly be-windowed Old School Hall with some helpful thoughts on research in a school setting. Tomsett noted that working in a school was not about research vs. evidence, but about the two taken together. He remarked that his school development plan consisted of only two aspects: 1. Improve the quality of teaching and 2. I missed, possibly distracted by the countless humans attempting to enter a room clearly squished to capacity. Quigley explained we need to move beyond guesswork, but that this was hard as schools are always changing – both internally, and externally due to political implications. As well as piloting a series of RCTs, Quigley’s aim is to put research in the hands of teachers, giving them time to look at and understand it. Coe and Kime relayed the challenges and expressed the need for robust evaluation. I admire what they’re doing, and am excited to see what the outcome is.

Dylan Wiliam

The creator of AfL was my next session. Wiliam began by reassuring teachers in the room that doctors do not always follow the evidence, with apparently 40% of GPs prescribing antibiotics where they know it will have no impact, i.e. for viral infections; to make patients feel better. Education research was, he explained, “messy.” Wiliam ran through the issues of RCTs, which essentially boil down to: you can’t control what humans say or do at every (any?) moment in time. The most helpful take-aways for me were his comments on the EEF’s teacher toolkit, which ranks interventions against the cost and the “effect size.” He noted that this only reflects how these interventions are currently used, and not their potential; if setting has an adverse effect on students (minus one month in learning), this could also reflect schools’ tendencies to place the best teachers with the C/D borderline classes, and neglect the higher and lower achieving classes. Wiliam said the best teachers need to be with the students who need them the most; students who need to go furtherst. I can’t help but agree wholeheartedly. Feedback, which ranks very highly for effect size, can, when poor, make things worse for children. Research of this kind can only measure outcomes; we really need to drill down into practice as a next step.

Philippa Cordingley

Cordingley spoke of her study into Teach First schools (which are, by definition, schools which are low achieving in exam results and/or serving economically deprived communities), and what made some schools “Exceptional.” In terms of exceptional, she explained many were “Ofsted Outstanding”, and others achieved more than 75% A*-C (including English and Maths) at GCSE level. I think it is worth bullet pointing the practices of exceptional schools, as explained in the session:

  • All teachers took responsibility for their own CPD and sought to improve
  • Teachers had deep expertise and knowledge of the curriculum, and saw this as more important than improving their pedagogy
  • Coaching/mentoring was incredibly structured and formal
  • There was a structured learning environment for teachers in improving their practice
  • Leaders in the school were aware of modeling themselves as learners rather than experts
  • They invested in teacher education
  • They had a single model of pedagogy which was clear to all teachers, and which all teachers bought into, and there was a shared understanding of what made fantastic teaching and learning
  • Performance management was rigorous, resulting in some persistent underperformers leaving and the other previously underperforming teachers improving
  • They were interested in working with the community
  • They worked hard to involve parents
  • Rather than focusing on behaviour, their focus was on improving teaching and learning; behaviour often improved after the teaching
  • Department meetings were where teachers talked about teaching
  • Teaching and learning practices were underpinned by theory and research

This might reflect my own confirmation bias, because all of the above sounds sensible, but the other findings sound a little muddy to me: group work was used more in exceptional school, except for in MFL lessons. More interactive learning methods (games, puzzles, websites) were used in the exceptional schools in all lessons – except English, where lessons were more traditional. I can’t quite square this data, and I began to wonder about how much of the research we could take at face value, given the small sample size. Nonetheless, some helpful ideas.

Michael Cladingbowl

The Director of Schools for Ofsted seems an affable chap, calm and pleasant. By no means an evil devil ogre. He spoke sensibly of Ofsted’s overall mission: to improve schools’ improvement, as per its statutary duty. He reminded us of the not-so-distant past, where 2.3 million children were in “mediocre” schools, which had often been that way for generations. He also remarked that “he history of inspection [was] littered with the corpses of those who have tried to do too much.” Clearly, much needs to change with the inspectorate, but in trying to do all things they may well succeed in none. He referenced the false dichotomy between knowledge and skills, noting “a sensible teacher does a bit of both.” Previously an English teacher, Cladingbowl was well aware of the power of language: the language of Osted, he remarked, had too often seemed to be the language of “warfare”. I greatly approved of his suggestion to view it instead as a “dance”, as I think that definitely sounds more fun. He noted that inspection must be designed to inspire curiosity and not compliance; teachers and indeed schools cannot be afraid to take risks. He hinted of the bright future, coming to a school near you soon (September 2015), where inspection would provide clearer evidence to parents, and inspectors would be solely contracted and trained by Ofsted. He mentioned that eventually (and there was a vagueness about the time period of this eventuality) there would be less focus on grades, and a change to thinking about whether a school is good enough, as well as “telling the story” about the data, answering the question: “why are the outcomes of this school as they are?”

Tom Sherrington

I was very excited to hear Tom Sherrington speak, as I’ve been an avid reader of his blog, where you can in fact read his overview of this session. Sherrington dug deep into several key areas of research, usefully glossing works as he went. He began with Hattie’s on homework: although the overall effect size seems small at 0.29 (0.4 is apparently the level at which an intervention has a meaningful impact), on closer inspection this is an average of the primary school impact (0.15) and the secondary, 0.64; so in fact, homework can be an extremely effective lever for student achievement. Later, Sherrington emphasised that we must take care that results are not just the average of extremes. He also warned that when research is presented as a “digest”, “soundbite” or “headline”, it can lead to bad decisions: the detail is crucial. He went on to mention Bjork on memory, considering that students retain more knowledge when their learning is spaced or interleaved. The implication for schools, he went on, is that they need to consider how much weight to place on this evidence: especially as this could lead to a complete re-working of the curriculum, we need to be sure. He then explored two pieces of research, and explained the pitfalls and drawbacks of each, reconfirming what William had said earlier about the messiness of education research, and dealing with humans in general. Although overtly aware of his own confirmation bias, I liked what Sherrington said, because I probably have the same bias. He referenced a rule in his new school about “green pens”, and noted that is we are to make certain pedagogy practices “law”, we have to have evidence and a degree of certainty in its efficacy to achieve the buy-in of teachers. The essential message: don’t take anything on face value: interrogate the detail.

New year’s resolutions

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Every August I make New Year’s resolutions for school. Occasionally, by week four, I realize these were entirely misguided. The ones which don’t seem to work are usually the ones which go against what is naturally right for me. I’ve mentioned that last year’s resolution, which was essentially to be more stern, didn’t work so well. I’m a smiley person. I have to have a bit of a joke with students, or they can tell I’m just pretending. Undeterred, I continue to make resolutions.

1. Happy teachers

I love my department, both collectively and individually. I genuinely believe that teachers are better at their job when they are happy. For some people, happiness cannot be found within their particular school for one reason or another; and of course, some will always decide to move on. Yet I want to strive this year to ensure all teachers are as happy as they can possibly be. To me, that means supporting, rallying and knowing when to stop talking. It also means listening to concerns and needs, and changing practices which are causing unhappiness. This might sound overly simplified, but I do think it is that simple. Happy teachers, happy students, happy school. 

2. Empowered department

My department is amazing. They have the results to back it up, and should be shouting from the rooftops about their amazingness. There are many ways to empower a department, and I’m going to start with meetings. I have run too many department meetings. It is time to supportively delegate. I’m definitely not the last word on very many (any?) practices, and have learned so much from my colleagues already. I’d like to assess where we are at the start of the year, and then explore who is nailing it in areas we’re not all nailing it. For example, in my year 11 this year no child achieved an A in either language or literature. This is a first for me, and I’m worried about bringing my future students to that high level. Conversely, in one of my colleague’s classes, every single child achieved an A or A* in English Language. I’d like to know what she did, and I’m sure the whole department would.

3. 100%

I’ve written about 100% very many times, so it should come as no shock that I’d like 100% of our year 11 to achieve A*-C in English Language. Yes, I know that we really need to be aiming for Bs; yes, I know I should be thinking about Literature as well. But we need to begin somewhere, and this is where I will begin. The new year 11s are inevitably a different group, with different starting points. They are also tenacious, hard-working and committed. These attributes have long triumphed over “prior attainment”, and I see no reason why they cannot this year.

Results

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The best reaction to giving someone results is definitely “you’re joking.” This can be of the whole cohort, or individual students. “Read it again,” is also lovely. The traditional “YES” is also good to hear.

I am, of course, immensely proud of the individual students who have defied expectations and achieved awesome grades, leading our department to celebrate 95% A*-C grades, including 35% A*/A. I’ll blog more about what the department does throughout the year, but suffice it to say, for now: they are magic.

I’ve received a lot of misplaced congratulations. Lovely as it is, having been in a school a single year does not make these results mine.

The results are first and foremost the students’: an incredible group of young people who worked incredibly hard. Then their teachers, who have worked hard for five years to put the kids in this position. Then, I think, the Headteacher. These year 11s were also her first year 7 cohort as a new Head. The great education they have received has everything to do with the kind of school she has run and the expectations she has of the students. And of course my predecessor line manager, who teed the students up in the previous years, built a fantastic team and then supported me throughout this year.

As crucial as it is to acknowledge a job well done, we have to look forward. I’m a huge fan of American Charter Schools, some of which are operating in areas of nearly 100% of students on free school meals and sending whole cohorts of students to prestigious four year university courses. Closer to home, schools like King Solomon Academy, whose students achieved astonishing results which have the capacity to transform their life chances, provide an inspiration and benchmark for what we aspire to. Even 100% A*-C in a single subject would be a failure of sorts; students need to achieve Bs in a host of subjects in order to have the door to A-levels and thus top universities open to them. We have to learn from successful institutions and allow ourselves to dream big; to perhaps “fail” again, but to (hopefully) fail better.

fail better

Teaching memoirs

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I love a good teaching memoir. During my first year in the classroom, I relied on the Teach for America memoirs (which are legion) to provide hope that I would prevail, despite current adversity. I’ve also included some organisational biographies and books of leaders which I’ve found especially inspiring.

1. Taught by America, Sarah Sentilles

This is the first Teach for America memoir I read. Sentilles joined TFA as a member of the 1995 corps and was sent to Compton, a city south of Los Angeles. Her beginning days as a teacher will sound comfortingly familiar I think:

I woke up before 5am each school day, made myself breakfast and packed a lunch, drove to the nearest copy shop to make copies for that day’s lesson, and then hightailed it to Compton. I taught thirty-six students all day, and then I cleaned my classroom, graded papers, planned the following day’s lessons, drove home, opened a can of something to eat for dinner, and practically fell into bed. I often cried myself to sleep. The next morning it started all over again.

If nothing else will, these American teachers will make you grateful for your school copier (even if there’s a huge queue after 7:30am and it jams five times a day). The issues of unsettled homes are writ large in this book: Sentilles contends with an ever-changing register of names as children leave and move into the area. Despite these struggles, there are some truly heart-warming moments in this book – although the ending can be hard to swallow if you’re a hardened teacher (I won’t give it away here).

2. Hands up! Oenone Crossley-Holland

This is the sole Teach First memoir of a participant I have been able to find (if you know of another please do let me know). Crossley-Holland’s placement school was alleged to be the one near my own placement, and a girls’ school as well; I thought I’d find plenty to learn from here. I wasn’t disappointed. The writer takes you through several “typical” days, and some of the challenges (both external and emotional) of working in a “Teach First” school. I found the style of the book warm and the writer extremely likeable. Her dialogue is convincing and the students warmly depicted, with a real sense of them as humans, often flawed by factors not of their own making, and eminently lovable.

3. Whatever it takes, Paul Tough 

This isn’t a memoir, but rather a biography – yet it is also informative of the challenges facing our students, and inspiring in one man’s quest for educational equality, crusading outside a classroom. Geoffrey Canada, a teacher by trade, took it upon himself to transform the life chances of children growing up in Harlem, creating the “Harlem Children’s Zone”, and Tough chronicles his movement in this book. This book is a must-read for any would-be education-reformers, as well as anyone with an interest in the backgrounds of the students they find in their classrooms. Depressingly, it also shows us how vast the issue of educational inequality is; at the same time, one might also conclude that more people with Canada’s dedication can do much to turn the tide.

4. The Best Job in the World, Vic Goddard

I’ve never tried to hide it: I am a massive, massive fan of Educating Essex (any international readers: this is a Channel 4 series which documents the year in the life of an exceptional school in Essex, England). Goddard, in the series, is seen in headteacher-guise; a very human headteacher, but still one with all the confidence such a role illuminates. His autobiography shows us that such certainty is created, not inborn, and Goddard takes us through the highs and lows of his career, whilst simultaneously repeating his rallying cry to those new to the profession: become a headteacher; it is the best job in the world. There is much to learn here, both about teaching, learning, behaviour management and, especially, leadership.

5. Teaching in the Terrordome, Heather Kirn Lanier 

This is another TFA memoir, one about an English teacher. It is suffused with genuine humility, such as Lanier’s retelling of her first lesson with her students, where she wants them to see reading as a door to new and undiscovered worlds:

‘See! It looks like a door!’ I close the cover to illustrate, then open it again. I nod. “A book is a door! Reading is a doorway into a new world!’ I raise my eyebrows, I smile. They stare back blankly. They show no signs that they are enthralled by the prospects of visiting new lands via literature. No music plays in the background, and I win no one over.

The sheer belief you have in your students is often met with complete and utter apathy at first; in Lanier’s disfunctional school in Baltimore, she overcomes challenges I could only imagine, and reveals more about the disfunctional American system than perhaps any other memoir I have read.

6. Work hard. Be nice. Jay Matthews

This is another biography of an organisation, this time KIPP: a chain of hugely successful charter schools which have gone on to inspire many of their UK counterparts. This is the story of Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, two of my heroes (and it is well worth following both on Twitter); of their initial experiences in the classroom (both were not born teaching prodigies, comfortingly) and their unstoppable drive to change education for the better for as many children as they could. The story is peppered with anecdotes which show the human and reflective side of the educators; my favourite is the one of the student who can’t finish her homework because she is addicted to television (something I sympathise with). Feinberg visits her home and asks the mother for the television set. She protests that it is their only one, and he responds:

That’s fine, but you tell me you are powerless to stop your daughter from watching it, so it seems to me the only way to make sure she doesn’t watch TV is to take the TV out of the house.

After the incident, Feinberg humbly admits he has overstepped the mark, yet there is something heroic in the anecdote I think we can all gain from.

7. Radical, Michelle Rhee

If ever there was a truly “Marmite” educational reformer, it has to be Michelle Rhee. She is known to many through her appearance in the documentary “Waiting for Superman”, wherein she becomes chancellor of schools in Washington D.C, said by some to be the most malfunctioning system in the states. Her central aim is to put students first; unlike my educational inspiration, Dr Irene Bishop (CBE; Superhead) who contends that to put students first you must look after your staff, Rhee often accomplishes this aim by firing “inadequate” heads and incentivising the best teachers financially. Although this sits uncomfortably with me, her invective against mediocrity is compelling. We must always be familiar with what we disagree with. And I don’t disagree with her aims, her intentions; only at times her method. Rhee’s style is powerful and she really takes you on her journey through education, as well as leaving you will an irrefutable call to arms.

This post is un-finishable; I have not explored There are No Children Here or In the Deep Heart’s Core, two of my very favourite books, as they mainly reiterate concerns above – but I would urge interested readers to read both; the first set in Chicago, the second Mississippi.

Finally: readers, please direct me to more teacher memoirs; share your favourites and, most importantly, go and write your own so I have more to read.

Self-evaluation: a year in review

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For any of you who do not know, this has been my first year as Head of English. Having previously trained on the Teach First programme, I would still maintain that the first year of Teach First is the hardest. But this year has felt more like that year than I had expected it would.

I’ve become used to people asking me: “were you Head of English in your last school?” At the start of the year I heard this question several times a day. I saw it as a challenge, and felt defensive when explaining that I wasn’t. I see now that the questioners were nervous about their school; English (along with Maths) is a great driver of a school’s success, and they didn’t want some idiot at the helm of it. Now, when people ask me this, I see it more as an opportunity to be proud of what I have done in this first year, as it has less the tone of “and do you have any idea what you are doing?” and more with the tone of “and you have done it for a whole year without me yet asking if it was your first?”

I’m still worried that I’m also apparently Head of Media Studies, although you wouldn’t think it from the two fantastic Media Studies teachers in the department. They have run the subject together, and the synergy between them is absolutely gorgeous. Constantly co-planning, sometimes co-teaching, always refining what they are doing and turning (unprompted) all of their amazing lessons into wonderfully transferrable Schemes of Work, I know I have to do better by them next year.

The walk to and from school has never seemed more important. As a teacher, and especially as a trainee teacher, I took for granted being able to moan, whine and cry to those in my immediate vicinity. Making mistakes this year has often meant upsetting or inconveniencing those people, and so moaning, whining or crying to them would be particularly misjudged. I’ve taken the walking time to try to put the day in perspective, but too many times I have marched home in anger, or shlepped home in defeat.

It took me a long time to recover my vision, which had seemed crystal clear at the end of last year. In those first weeks and terms, I felt like I was stumbling from crisis to crisis without a long-term view. Two aspects helped me regain this: one was my line manager’s vision (more of which below), which seeped into my bones through constant repetition, and the other was blogging, taking assemblies and speaking at events, where I have been forced to clarify what I am doing and why.

I have been nothing but blessed in the incredible team of teachers who form my department and make it work. My overwhelming disappointment is that I have not harnessed their talents at too many points this year. As the year has gone on, however, we’ve started to move as a unit, which is the only way to make a department work. They have picked me up at my lowest points and been more lovely than they had to be to me throughout this year. Sharing an office with them means no day passes without true, belly-laughter and feeling awed by the generosity of humans, who are brilliant teachers, who give infinitely more to their students than any contract stipulates.

Apart from these crucial colleagues, I couldn’t have survived the year without:

  • Dance – I’ve made a core group of dance friends who have often picked me up after a hard day, made me laugh and talked through my many problems selflessly. I can also continue to attest to the necessity of having a hobby where you can lose yourself and become a completely different person, if only for a short time. This has been central to retaining my sanity.
  • Twitter – This is where I go to be inspired, and to also be challenged in the work I do – is my direction right? What are other people doing? Wow – other people are doing that? How can I do that? Is that better than this? I have also loved the warm exchanges I have had with so many countless Twitter-ers this year.
  • My own students – each of my classes have made this year easier for me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I haven’t worried about them, because you always worry about your students, but I’ve never had such a reassuring bunch of classes. They have all ticked over, being quietly amazing, and have made my life as a teacher incredibly easy. My kids this year have believed I teach them well, even when I have had a million other priorities; they have been beautiful in lessons and have made incredible progress because they believed in themselves and worked very, very hard. I’m lucky to carry two of these classes forward to next year, and desperately sad to be losing my adorable year 7s, who have always made me laugh and smile.
  • My line manager – at times this year, too many times admittedly, I’ve been standing in the middle of a metaphorical road transfixed by oncoming headlights and he has gently pushed me in the right direction. He listens to all my ideas, and gently guides me towards the better ones; always refining, and challenging me to refine, my thinking. The clearest visionary I have met, he asks of everything: “is this the best thing to serve our children? Are we doing right by our children by doing this?”
  • My family – by which I mean my parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles – from near and afar their support and love has never meant more. They have always supported me, and their belief has helped me through the darkest of times.

Next week will be a calmer one, with around 50 year 6s at our summer school, and following that I am resolving to take a chunk of time off. Although already I am desperate to begin formulating plans and shaping ideas, I know from experience now that too little rest will undermine my best intentions. Happy Summer, teachers!

The “Summer Dip”: an assembly

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The “Summer Dip”, or “Summer Slide”, is the term we use to refer to learning lost over the long summer break. It is a phenomenon almost every teacher, and many a parent, will be well aware of; however I wondered if students knew? Furthermore, I wondered if they knew that they could “beat the dip” by reading a few books? I decided to do some research, and from that research grew last week’s assemblies.

I began the assembly by re-capping my previous assembly on reading, boiling those ideas down to three points:

  1. Every book will teach you something – whether it is something about the world you live in, about you as a person, or just about the kind of books you do or don’t enjoy;
  2. Books give you access to emotions and experiences you’ve never had – so, you can go places you’ve never gone, and be people you’ll never be;
  3. Reading makes you smarter.

I recapped the National Literacy Trust’s table with the cold hard figures: of students who read every day, nearly a third were achieving above their expected little. Of students who never read, over a third were achieving below their expected level.

I then introduced the idea of the “Summer Dip”. Admittedly, most of my research is American-based, and so imagines a summer holiday which is, inconceivably I know, even longer than British schools’ ludicrously long holiday (6 weeks for any international readers out there). That said, I think obfuscating this worked well, as clearly students do lose learning over the summer, and my message wouldn’t have been as useful if I’d caveat-ed every statement to year 7 with “however, we should allow for the data being slightly unreliable because…” I find assemblies deal better in certainties.

That said, this document does uphold the evidence that children make the most progress during the Summer term, and the least in the Autumn term. Terrifyingly, it also tells us that “In reading, nearly 40% of children go backwards between the end of year 6 and the beginning of year 7,” though this of course may well be a by-product of the expectations of teachers and modes of assessment changing between primary and secondary school. Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence tell us that, for most teachers, the student who is comfortably on a 5c at the end of the year does not usually begin the following year on a level 5. The scary American research puts the learning lost for students at between 2.5 and 3 months. Obviously, I opted for the latter, asking students to imagine that everything learned between April and July would just… Disappear. Terrified faces looked back at me.

Now came the kicker: research, albeit research conducted in the states, has shown that reading as few as four books over the course of the summer can help to prevent the dreaded slide. Four books! Some students looked genuinely relieved, and I iterated my understanding that many of the students before me would read far more than four books over the course of the summer.

But how? I showed them a map of the libraries, and shared the link to their opening hours. I explained that for building your own library (I think I put it: “for books you can take home with you forever, and hug them and love them”), the Oxfam bookshop nearest us sold second hand books for only £2.50 each; and the (admittedly slightly evil) online seller Amazon sold books for one penny, meaning that including postage you could have a book of your own from their for £2.81.

I diverged for a couple of minutes from reading to share some ideas for staving off “achy hand syndrome” – you know, the first week back when you can’t even finish the date without it hurting (or for teachers, when the first set of books to mark takes an unreasonably long time).

But then back to reading.

I shared with students 5 of the books I’m hoping to read over the summer, which allowed me to refer to many of the reasons we choose books to read. I began with Plainsong, which a sixth former recommended to me. I moved onto The Edible Woman, which a parent governor had told me to read. I referred to Murakami’s After Dark, explaining that as someone who had never visited Japan, I loved the opportunity to walk Tokyo’s streets through Murakami’s prose. I mentioned Will Grayson, Will Grayson, as the book-du-jour my year 9s are all reading. And then poems by e.e. cummings, explaining that I need to read more poetry (and giving me the opportunity, in alluding to cummings’ peculiar views on punctuation, to share my favourite cummings quote: “since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you.”

To finish the assembly, I shared tailored recommendations for each year group for reading, which were also on a hand-out given to tutors. And for the final piece, I read the first page of one of those books to the students (some thing I have written about before and do weekly with my own classes). I will never grow used to the reverent silence of children when being read to. The power of the story is a beautiful thing.

And the results? So far, so promising. My own children bounced up to me, proudly saying they liked the assembly and would definitely be reading four books at least over the summer. I hoped as much, given they have also had me banging on about reading to them four to five times a week. What I love, though, is the students I don’t know coming to talk to me about reading. It allows me to know a much larger proportion of the student body. I even had a student say she was going to see if she could volunteer in her local library over the summer, which was especially wonderful, and another student who raced straight to the library to take out Wonder, the book I had read to year 7 from.

Summer Dip