Why Teach?

I was asked some months ago, to look at what the research has to say about excellence in subject specialist teaching. Immediately I discovered there was precious little that fell into this category. You could probably give Guy Fawkes a decent sending off on the combined mound of research on school leadership and improvement. But high quality research into what it actually means to be an outstanding chemistry teacher, historian or linguist is harder to find than a rational thought on the Local Schools Network’s website.

Yet my experience working in outstanding schools taught me very quickly that it is precisely that subject focus and passion, which lies at the heart of so much that pupils would describe as excellent teaching.

Somehow, we seem to have lost sight of this core value and in its place we are fed an image of the excellent teacher as a model of kindness, generosity and mumsy self-sacrifice. One look at the videos used to promote the Teaching Awards is enough to demonstrate the truth of this.

You don’t have to look very hard to see where this skewed thinking has come from. In an article in last week’s TES, defending that sad symbol of sixties naivety, Summerhill School, Tim Brighouse displayed not the least embarrassment in declaring, I chose to teach to make the world a fairer and better place. There was no question of where people like me would teach and send our children – the state maintained sector. The choice was a kind of litmus test of the integrity of out idealism.

Politics aside, my advice to anyone considering becoming a teacher in order to make the world a better and fairer place…grow up.

Michael Gove at BETT

It’s been impossible to avoid Michael Gove’s BETT show speech this week but I’ve only managed to find the time to actually read the thing in full today. But I guess that’s more than most of the techno-twitterati will do before they dive in with their opinions and views. Actually reading stuff doesn’t seem to interest the most active, vociferous individuals in the world of educational ICT.

It’s a skilful, diplomatic job, which on the one hand flatters the industry and the BETT audience, while simultaneously slicing the jugular of many ICT teachers. The thing that most impresses me is the determination to focus on teacher training at the expense of kit and plumbing but the examples given do make me a little nervous. They smack too much of the same old flash-in-the-pan projects and initiatives which burn brightly in the light of their own publicity but rarely set fire to anything else.

More optimistically, the online conversation Gove urges BETT delegates to participate in (again a bit of a tough call…they’d have to write) contains an insightful posting by a Dr Geraint D’Arcy.

Not only do we need to return to a place where future computer scientists discover their interest and skills in schools, the entire ICT in education conversation needs to include the serious, cultural elements which are naturally the concern of any good teacher or scholar, but tend to test the limited attention span of the average BETT presenter.

Culturally Disenfranchised Children and Classroom Dynamics

It’s a potential cliché but the world of education policy making and research is largely populated by people who are either wholly unfamiliar with the realities of teaching, have minimal experience of classrooms, or have been out of one for far too long to understand the issues. 

So for me, it has been an extremely valuable refresher, to have spent some time in recent weeks back in a classroom, teaching real kids and not theoretical ones. 

Over the years I’ve taught in a whole range of schools and classrooms, but you never stop learning and this week I’ve relearned something of huge interest and value. 

The dynamic of any, single class or group of children one teaches, is unique. There are no two classes that are ever the same and that creates a major issue for teachers in terms of behaviour management and learning. If the dynamic of a single class is dysfunctional, if the balance between those children able and willing to learn and those disenfranchised from intellectual activity (learning in the widest sense) is awry, then teaching becomes impossible unless something radical is done to rebalance the class in favour of those willing to learn. 

One of the most depressing things to witness in a classroom is the pain on the face of a positive child, who finds herself in a class of children, to whom healthy society, its ethics, values and social mores, are entirely alien. 

Sadly, such classes are common in challenging schools and many professional teachers devote much of their energy and skill attempting to placate and control the disenfranchised, at the expense of the culturally healthy, when what needs to happen is that the disenfranchised are removed and re-educated to a point where they can participate in a balanced way. 

There is nothing to be gained whatsoever by persistently trying to educate them in a formal classroom setting. They neither understand it nor value it. 

More on Cheating

Why am I not the least surprised it is an ICT GCSE exam which has had to be postponed because of cheating?

As an academic English teacher and scholar, I was genuinely shocked when I left the profession for business years ago, to find so many of the figures whose voices were listened to in the world of educational ICT, were dramatically inferior to the teachers and academics I’d been working with for so many years.

Though no longer shocked: I think the time for real academics and scholars to assert their subject-specific voices and drown out the techno-guff still being peddled by so many, is long, long overdue.

Model Schools and Digital Learning

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington recently published Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning, a genuinely intriguing, cogently argued white paper about how digital technology could improve and alter the entire teaching profession…for the better. It was this promise that in effect lured me out of the English Literature classroom myself over a decade ago but I have to say…I’m still waiting.

No geek, and anything but a Luddite, I am frequently deeply frustrated by the inane material educational technology gurus exhibit at events and conferences. The loudest voices urging the profession to enter the twenty first century and embrace their digital future are so often wholly out of touch with the reality of the contemporary school and classroom.

Reading the Fordham paper at a time when I have recently been in both an excellent private school and a state school striving to instill civil behaviour in the classroom, made me reflect on the whole idea of the school as educational tool.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have taught and worked at both ends of the scale of what constitutes a school. Most teachers never do. They find their careers fenced somewhere in the middle or worse. I know that in the UK we have some of the world’s greatest schools, educational tools that provide those lucky enough to be pupils in them with the very best foundations on which to build an adult life. The Fordham paper acknowledges the value and special nature of in-person teaching and bricks and mortar schools but I doubt whether the authors stopped very long to understand what a good school really is, never mind a great one.

So I ended up asking myself a question I asked a long time ago when I first left a great school, seconded by the then department of education to work in a local education authority that had failed so badly, it was effectively privatized. (From the sublime to the subprime!) Why waste so much time and effort on visions of improved or new forms of schooling, when there are models of what works beautifully, all around us to learn from?