Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it…

…in bodily ills there is [no] difference about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly wants health.  No one says “I am tired of this headache; I want some toothache,” or “The only thing for this Russian influenza is a few German measles,” or “Through this dark probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism.” …

Chesterton (1910)

I went to a party not so long ago and met a couple of medical students. Among other things I was fascinated to find out that they have been told that when seeing a patient they should ask:

“How do you feel about this appointment?”

and

“What are your expectations about this appointment?”

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that the trend that says professionals are meant to care more about people’s feelings than about their professional responsibilities has spread to medicine. However, thinking about it, I don’t think there is any danger of it getting anywhere near as bad as in education. In medical matters we might like the idea of doctors being compassionate individuals who care deeply about our feelings, but we remain absolutely clear on the fact that the main thing we want from them is to be restored to health. Faced with a serious illness we would rather be treated by Gregory House than Patch Adams. We can clearly see that a doctor’s bedside manner; approachability, even their compassion, are side issues compared with the effectiveness of their treatment.

Unfortunately, while we all have a good picture of what it is to be healthy, we don’t seem to share the same kind of insight into what it means to be educated. Newman (1873) asked:

If a healthy body is a good in itself, why is not a healthy intellect? and if a College of Physicians is a useful institution, because it contemplates bodily health, why is not an Academical Body, though it were simply and solely engaged in imparting vigour and beauty and grasp to the intellectual portion of our nature?

People have to ask themselves what education is for, in a way they would never ask what health is for. People speculate that education is for the sake of the economy; for social cohesion; for personal fulfilment; for gaining qualifications; for training revolutionaries, or for the preservation of tradition. As in so many other areas where the aims are less clear than medicine: “some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease.” Chesterton (1910)

Some of the things schools do now, such as encouraging students to make their own choices about illegal drug taking, taking kids skateboarding, or teaching them to express to value all opinions (especially their own) are to me little more that a diseases on the body of the school. Other parts of what schools do, no matter how desirable, are clearly not part of the aim of a school. So for instance, at an INSET recently, we were set the task of identifying from a list what was the purpose of a form tutor. Options like “to be friendly” or “to value each student as an individual” were put forward. All very worthy, but clearly these are virtues in a form tutor, akin to bedside manner in a doctor, not the purpose of a form tutor.

The other side effect of the vagueness of aims in education is that quackery and nonsense can never die, whereas ineffective medical procedures and treatments can, at least some of the time, be exposed.  All that happens when a teaching method is found not to work in some way is that the purpose of it is adjusted. Bad teaching methods can first be put forward as a way to improve academic learning. When this doesn’t happen they can be put forward as a way of developing skills for adulthood. When this doesn’t happen they can be put forward as a way of socialising students for life within the school. When this doesn’t happen they can be put forward as a way of encouraging creativity, and so on indefinitely. By contrast, it is obviously it is unlikely that patients would be encouraged to keep taking medicine that simply doesn’t work by redefining the disease. Nobody is told: “well, this medicine hasn’t cured your rheumatism, but keep taking it, it might cure your broken leg”. Similarly, no doctor would view all “experimental” procedures as axiomatically better than established ones or be told that if a patient wasn’t getting better that the problem was not the treatment but their own unrealistic expectation that their patients should get better.

Teaching is just too far from being a science. The judgements cannot be clinical. We can imagine areas where doctors have to consider their aims (e.g. for procedures such as abortion or cosmetic surgery, or for conditions where there is no treatment or where treatments have significant side-effects) but most of the time they know what they are aiming for. By contrast, teachers have to make value judgements before they even start and continually revise them because a healthy intellect is harder to conceptualise than a healthy body. Teachers have to decide what an educated man or woman looks like, in order to teach their students the kind of knowledge and skills they will need to become one.

Then, of course, they will be told to stop trying and just entertain the students and raise their self-esteem instead.

References

Chesterton, G.K., What’s Wrong With the World?, 1910

Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University, University of Notre Dame, 1873

I used to wonder why teachers had it in for OFSTED, the school inspection agency. The inspections were a hassle, and very stressful, but they weren’t that often. If every five years somebody wanted to pop in and tell me my lessons were good then it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for me as a teacher. My experience was also that the judgements given by OFSTED inspectors seemed much better than those given by managers. They seemed more focused on learning and behaviour, and less on playing games and inclusions. As somebody who was concerned about poor schools then it seemed to make sense that this form of accountability existed and the schools which most failed their pupils would be identified.

My opinion has changed. OFSTED has ceased to be a regulator; it is is now a magic word. The word “OFSTED” has mystical power over teachers. It is used by the dark wizards of senior and middle management to cast a spell on gullible teachers which saps their will and turns them into bad teachers. It works like this:

If you have a bad idea then saying “OFSTED” turns it into a good one. For example: “Students should be working in groups every lesson. It’s what OFSTED will be looking for.”

If your staff don’t respect your judgement, then saying “OFSTED” reminds them of their wretchedness: “If anybody here thinks OFSTED is definitely going to consider all of their lessons to be excellent then you might have another opinion about this, but unless that is the case then you need to listen to what I’m saying.”

If you are a manager who isn’t very good at teaching then you can even things up by using the power of OFSTED to screw up other people’s lessons. For instance you can say “You must not spend more than twelve minutes in the lesson teaching, it is (or is going to be) one of the new OFSTED criteria” and people will believe you.

It is only a matter of time until senior managers cease to using any vocabulary other than the word OFSTED, and will be free to simply address the school at INSET meetings by saying “OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED” conveying meaning only by the pace at which they speak and the tone of disapproval in their voice when they are looking at anybody who is not as fully OFSTED compliant as themselves. (I believe this may already have begun to happen in some schools.)

Now, in almost every OFSTED I have ever been through there has been an intense period of advice from managers, LEA consultants, advisors and the like, usually based around trendy ideas and box-ticking followed by a last minute revelation that OFSTED actually want something completely different (and more obvious) like marking in books, schemes of work for every subject, results that suggest students actually make progress. Advice given pre-OFSTED is usually terrible, and I have got my “goods” in OFSTED observations by ignoring it. Better advice is available from asking teachers who have recently gone through OFSTED what they got it in the neck for, and being ready for trouble. At the last OFSTED I went through, on the Sunday before the inspection, the headteacher rampaged through my department looking in every exercise book for signs of marking, having only just realised that this was important. Having reached a state of apoplexy with what he found, he arrived at my classroom to find me sat there marking and was extremely grateful. I knew what I needed to do, even if the many expensive advisers had left it to the very last minute to suggest that this might be an issue.

This is because OFSTED is a bullshitter’s charter. People who nobody would ever listen to based on their track-record or their qualifications gain power through uttering the magic word and watching people panic. It doesn’t matter what OFSTED actually want, there is just enough ambiguity for people to pretend they have an insight and then watch everybody dance to their tune. Worse, they have this effect even on people doing a good job, who will only get worse by listening to bad advice. Forget results, forget teaching, forget what works, every mad initiative and silly suggestion is justified by the magic word.

Here’s my solution: get rid of performance-related pay, reward good results with OFSTED immunity. Schools where the results show students make good progress should not have their teaching and management inspected. Teachers who get good results should be given a notice to put on their door saying “Successful classroom, so just fuck off” which compels all inspectors to leave them well enough alone. Members of SMT for any school which gets an “outstanding” from an OFSTED should, either simultaneously or one at a time, be given the opportunity to slap the lead inspector in the face for wasting everybody’s time. Any headteacher who turns around a failing school should be allowed to go to Christine Gilbert’s house on New Year’s Day for the next four years and empty a bucket of live eels over her head and pee in her fireplace. Accountability needs to be about identifying failure and doing something about it, not bullying the successful into becoming more like the failures.

“Contrary to popular belief, the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think, because the brain is actually not very good at thinking… Compared to your ability to see and move, thinking is slow, effortful and uncertain.”

Dan Willingham (2009)

“Enjoyment of learning and attitudes … Are pupils happy with their work? Are they proud of it? Are pupils interested in their work and in what they are learning? Or are they easily distracted?”

OFSTED (2009)

“Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably.  The lesson is, never try.”

Homer Simpson

Learning is hard work. It can be interesting. It can be inspiring. It can be satisfying. It can be rewarding. It can even be enjoyable. What it can’t be is indefinitely easy. Unless you are wasting time learning trivialities, then even if you are a very fast learner you will reach your limit and sometimes find yourself out of your comfort zone. Eventually, you have to engage in the uncomfortable pursuit of thinking. Eventually, you are exposed to more knowledge than you can comfortably absorb without mental exertion. Eventually, you will feel at least some desire to give in. Eventually, you will require some discipline to make progress, whether it is your own self-discipline, or external pressure applied by your peers or your teacher.

Now, this is pretty much common sense. Isn’t it?

Well no. The belief that there is a short cut to learning is widespread. Perhaps we all have a special learning style, which if utilised would mean we grasp everything easily. Perhaps clever use of ICT can speed knowledge straight into our brains. Perhaps we can be taught extensively without ever losing interest, just so long as what we are learning is made “relevant”. Perhaps science can be relied upon to tell us the perfect way to be taught. Perhaps we can be guided to discover everything we need to know for ourselves without even having to be taught it directly. Perhaps, learning would become easy if we were taught a list of words to describe it. Perhaps, all the difficulty is simply a result of an undiagnosed medical or psychological condition which, if treated, would make learning easy.

This might all be nonsense, but it is what many people want to believe. It often seems that the people who believe it, even teachers who believe it, are rarely academic high-fliers themselves, but this just makes it all the more convenient to believe. Academic failure can be a result of teachers failing to make it easy, rather than our own weakness of will, or lack of ability, when faced with a challenge. Good teaching does aid learning, but now, instead of expecting good teachers to teach us more knowledge for the same level of effort, we expect them to teach us the same amount of knowledge while we make less effort. Suddenly a good teacher ceases to be one who taught us a lot, and becomes one who made us comfortable. Pleasure replaces achievement as the proof of good teaching. If it can’t be made easy it must be chucked out. If it can’t be made painless then it is cruel to inflict it. Students must never be forced to learn, or even suffer the indignity of failing to learn. The learning process becomes more important than the content of what is learnt and the most important thing a teacher can be judged on is whether their students had fun learning. A teacher who is more concerned with the depth of learning rather than the pleasure in learning must hate children. Mr Miyagi would have been a monster. Jamie Escalante was a disgraceful bully. Nobody must ever save us from ourselves. Nobody must ever make us achieve. We can all be happy failures, so long as nobody tries to make us succeed.

References

OFSTED, The quality of teaching and the use of assessment to support learning, Briefing for section 5 inspectors, 2009

Willingham, Daniel T, Why Don’t Students Like School,  Jossey-Bass, 2009

Previously, I talked about Assessing Pupil Progress (A.P.P.), the latest bats-arsed initiative foisted on teachers in core subjects. It consists of a list of “Assessment Foci” (AFs) which have to be ticked off as students achieve them. I described how A.P.P. was incoherent, and based on ideas that had repeatedly failed in the past. I also expressed concern that it was being used for summative assessment in place of more reliable methods of assessment.

Here I will suggest how middle managers stuck with implementing A.P.P., i.e. those who can’t simply refuse, can do so without having to change their assessment routines very much, or making their department do anything too demanding.

Here’s my suggestion. Get your list of AFs. (I am assuming here that you have already been given these by whoever is forcing A.P.P. on you in the first place. If they haven’t there are a number of websites where you can find them.) In order to avoid identifying my subject, I will take the AFs, in the example that follows from the nursery rhyme “Monday’s Child”. Then, assuming you already test your students regularly (and extensively) wait until it is time for the next scheduled test. Then go through the test paper and pick somewhere between five and twelve questions (the more often you test, the fewer questions you will need) which match up well to some of the AFs. This will take a bit of time if you use a multitude of different tests, but, it shouldn’t be too difficult and if you have a large department should not take very long.

This should give you a list of key questions with corresponding AFs.

e.g.

When teachers mark the test, they will mark it and calculate the grade/level as normal.

However, as well as this they will fill in a table like the following (which has been printed out for them) which lists the names of the students in the class and the key questions:

Teachers indicate where a student has got full marks on aquestion, or where a student has scored nothing.

E.g.:

This is the one extra bit of work for classroom teachers, however, it is something that can be quite useful for formative assessment. It is certainly something I have done without ever intending to use it for A.P.P.. This data can then be entered in a spreadsheet or database for all students. (Okay, this bit requires some work, but hopefully it can be passed on to admin staff.)

Now, either by setting up a database to do it for you, or by cutting and pasting from the spreadsheet (on Microsoft Excel, the “Paste Special” option may be useful for transposing) you can create a new spreadsheet or database table in which the questions have been replaced with the AFs:

With each further test you can add to this data. You can leave the data in this format or use sorting (on a spreadsheet) or reports (on a database) to manipulate this data into something more individualised:

E.g.:

Use the grade given by the test for summative assessment, and present this AF-referenced data whenever you are asked for evidence of A.P.P.. I believe this is all a relatively small amount of work to comply with A.P.P., assuming you already have a suitable testing system in place. More importantly, it allows you to keep existing tests where they have worked well, and bolt A.P.P. on top of them, rather than replacing tests that work with A.P.P. bollocks.

That said, any further suggestions or enhancements to this method would be welcome. (Please don’t bother suggesting ignoring A.P.P. or forging all the data; the above assumes that you can’t get away with that.)

When we go back to school in September one aspect of teaching life should have changed for good. Due to an agreement made several years ago, qualified teachers, other than supply teachers, should no longer have to do cover, except for emergencies. (For those non-teachers reading this, cover is when, during “non-contact time” you have to take another teacher’s lessons because they are ill, on a trip or too important to actually have to teach their own classes.) There is no requirement that covers have to be for a teacher’s own subject, and in bad schools (i.e. most of them) classes will act up for teachers they don’t know. As a result, particularly when you are new to a school, covers tend to be a mix of baby-sitting and riot control, and only every so often is anything resembling a lesson allowed to take place.

Cover has always been a good way of telling how much a school cares about its teaching staff. This has been particularly in the last few years as many schools have significantly reduced the amount of covers, while the worst managed schools have continued as if workload agreements didn’t apply to them.

Here are some of the things schools can do to make covers as unpleasant as possible:

1) Make covers frequent. If a school really doesn’t care about teaching staff then dumping lots of cover on teachers is a cheap money saving option. It lowers morale, makes teachers more stressed and reduces time for marking and preparation, but unless you actually think that teachers should do their job well, there is no reason to avoid making their job unnecessarily difficult.

2)  Make covers unpredictable. If teachers do not know in advance which hours of the day covers will take place, and could lose their non-contact time at the drop of a hat then they are unable to plan their day properly. As a result they will end up rushing to do all their preparation before school, or after school the previous day, even on days when they should have non-contact time. Mornings will be spent playing “cover roulette” gambling on whether you will be taken for cover or not and coming up with alternative schedules for the day’s work depending on whether or not you get taken for cover.

3) Organise covers informally. Leave it to people who are already busy, or even to absent teachers, to prepare lessons for teachers doing cover. Inevitably, most lessons end up being worksheets and wordsearches. Often teachers turn up to find no work set; sometimes because nobody has remembered to set it; sometimes because it has been left in the wrong place; sometimes because it has been destroyed by a student. Or the work may require resources that simply aren’t available, or only be enough for twenty minutes of an hour long lesson. And let’s not forget the 11 words which make up the worst cover-work of all: “They are working on their coursework. They know what to do.”

4) Pay no attention to who is being given covers. So for instance if there is a year 10 boys PE cover and the choice is between Mr Brown, an MFL teacher who is new to the school and doesn’t teach year 10, and Mr White, a PE teacher, who has been at the school twenty years, and is head of year 10, then give the cover to Mr Brown. If you are well established in a school then cover lessons become a convenient place to do marking while children sit quietly copying from a textbook. If you are new to a school covers are likely to be some kind of riot. At one school I worked at this distinction was so well recognised that I found that if I took a pile of marking into cover lessons the children just assumed I was important and behaved accordingly.

On top of that, there are things schools can do to really get the message across that when it comes to covers they are treating teachers like shit:

1)  Make it clear to staff that you are deliberately trying to give them as many covers as possible. This one is hard to believe, why would bosses who treat their workforce badly publicise it? Yet I have frequently been in meetings where senior managers explained quite happily to staff that they were trying to find out what the maximum number of covers they could make staff do is, apparently under the impression that teachers would be so grateful that the school was trying to follow the rules, that they wouldn’t actually think “why are they trying to make things as unpleasant as possible for us?”

2) Don’t give SMT anywhere near as many covers as mainscale teachers, even though they have more non-contact periods.

3) Make excuses for making the cover situation so bad. For instance, claim that supply teachers can’t be trusted, or that non-teaching cover supervisors are incompetent, and that only people who already have a full time-table and backlog of work can be trusted to do the job properly.

So, goodbye, and good riddance, to covers. You will not be missed.

This is another follow up to my blog entry about Optimism. In particular, I will be elaborating on the following comment:

“There is only one part of education that I am not optimistic about. I am not optimistic about attempts to perfect human nature. The moment I know that a scheme, or an aim, is based on the idea that students will be changed on the inside, then I know that we are wasting our time. The moment that education is meant to be a replacement for religion; when it is to tamper in the stuff of people’s souls; when it is meant to result in some secular form of salvation, then I do feel dread.”

I’m not sure whether it is because we live in a post religious society, or because there are some people out there who simply see the red mist whenever religion is mentioned, but there followed some discussion after this about what I meant, so I thought I’d talk about it here.

I am referring to a couple of ideas I associate with religion.  The first is the notion of the transformation of the self. This is very much tied up with the second idea, that of salvation, a belief that the individual, the community, or the entire human race can or will change and transcend our current, often difficult, existence. A good argument can be made that this belief reflects something fundamental about human beings. John Gray, in his book “Black Mass”, makes a very good case that this type of thinking has remained at the heart of secular philosophies. In communism and liberalism alike, there is a belief that human beings will progress, not just through technology, but morally as well. Transformation becomes an inevitable, historical process of development rather than something personal or divine. Instead of salvation happening throughout history, or outside of history, as it happens in religions, it is something that history proceeds towards.

Gray is not religious himself, and has often used parallels with religion as a reason for criticising ideologies. However, in recent years he has described himself as more sympathetic to religion, seeing religious salvation as far more benign than its secular equivalent. If salvation comes from God then the human race does not necessarily have to be led kicking and screaming to salvation. If salvation is a historical process, understood by enlightened minds, then the enlightened can push that process along. Humanity can be recreated in line with expectations. Inevitably, a lot of the greatest evils in recent human history have come attached to talk of “progress” and visions of where humanity should be forced to go. Worse, anything that appears to be “progressive”, anything that disregards authority, tradition or an existing way of life, is likely to be a step on the path towards salvation and should, therefore, be supported.

Now, in education, it almost goes without saying that bad ideas have been justified by labelling them as “progressive” and contrasted with “traditional” (and, therefore, inferior) ideas. Similarly, other aspects of educational orthodoxy, such as the denial of human nature, can be related to the idea that human beings are set upon an inevitable path to salvation. Moreover, we can see education systems being designed with the purpose of bringing about a particular view of how society should be, not in terms of issues like economic well-being, equality, justice or efficiency, which are inevitable concerns of governments in the modern era, but in terms of a philosophy of humanity. It is here that educationalists end up sounding like religious leaders.

This is not an understatement. Compare these phrases:

“enable all young people to become … confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives”

“[give] inspiration and help  … to the young men and women of our time in their efforts to live productive and fulfilling lives”

One is an aim of the national curriculum, the other is something the Pope mentioned as an aim of scholarship.

How about these two?

“essential for building a good society and for true integral human development”

“at the heart of positive human development, effective social groups and societies”

One is used by the national strategies site to describe the skills learnt in SEAL lessons. One is used by the Pope to describe adherence to Christian values.

How about these two?

“… be able to make successful relationships, to be capable of being (and disposed to be) loving and kind”

“Be generous, be loving and kind, look out for your neighbour and look out for the poor.”

One is from Guy Claxton’s BLP book, describing what we want students to be like, the other is from an American archbishop describing the values which set saints apart.

Now, how many of you can tell which is which, without following the links?

Of course, I have described a situation, but I haven’t really explained why it is a bad thing. After all, if actual religions are in decline in the UK then perhaps schools should act as pseudo-religions. We do have faith schools in this country, so why can’t we have schools preaching a secular, humanist faith?

The key difference is that parents can choose to raise their child in a religious tradition and send them to a faith school which reflects the values of their faith community. Nobody gets a choice about the values of secular schools other than those in charge of education.

Now I do not object to the beneficial effects of being part of a community, and, as schools are communities, I am quite happy for schools to have a civilising effect on students. I do not object to teaching right and wrong where it consists of habits of good behaviour on a day-to-day basis. I don’t mind teaching habits of moral behaviour where they are the habits needed to function as a school. I do object to passing on values decided by politicians and educationalists acting as if they are the priesthood of a new religion. For instance, the recent suggestion to ensure that schools teach that domestic violence is wrong  suggests that right and wrong are something that can be laid down in the National Curriculum, as if ministers and curriculum designers are moral paragons and teachers are in need of their guidance on whether domestic violence is acceptable. This is an attitude in which the education system does not just attempt to reflect the values of the community but is conscripted into an attempt to dictate what those values should be. It suggests:

“… society will wait upon its self-appointed moral teachers, pursuing the extremes they recommend and at a loss when they are silent. The distinguished and inspiring visiting preacher, who nevertheless is a stranger to the way we live, will displace the priest, the father of his parish. In a moral life consisting or suffering the ravages of the armies of conflicting ideals or (when these for the time have passed) falling into the hands of censors and inspectors, the cultivation of a habit of moral behaviour will have as little opportunity as the cultivation of the land when the farmer is confused and distracted by academic critics and political directors.”

Oakeshott (1948)

It is not that a secular school can teach no values, but that there are values that are needed for the school to function effectively as a school: a belief in academic achievement; an accepted right to learn; a respect for authority, which are more important. The problem is that these values, which should be practised habitually if schools are to succeed, are dying out in our schools, while we are wasting time trying to identify and preach the values of an ill-considered, secular religion.

References:

Gray, John, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Penguin, 2008

Oakeshott, Michael, The Tower of Babel, Cambridge Journal II, 1948

Apologies if you are outside the UK as you may not be able to view this.

I thought it made a few interesting points.

In light of what I was saying earlier about Optimism, the following is some feedback I received recently about my blog by Private Message on the TES website . It is by no means atypical:

Dear oldandrew,

I’m reading a thread on the Bevaviour Forum at the moment, on which reference is made to your blog.

I just wanted to say (as someone who only did their PGCE year not that long ago, and have read your blog for a few years now) what an excellent site it is. I knew teaching wouldn’t be an easy job to do, but I was quite shocked at what actually goes on in many schools these days. During my PGCE I was verbally abused, had someone walk out of my lesson, and encountered racial abuse targeted at me. I was at least heartened (if that’s the correct term) when I started to understand that it wasn’t just me when it comes to the poor behaviour I have seen, and at least it is normal for it to happen in many lessons. That didn’t actually make the job easier in itself, but at least I have come to understand that it isn’t something I have done myself, or that I deserve it!

I enjoy the job in that I think it can be a very rewarding career, but I did somewhat become cynical during PGCE lectures with regard to some of the strategies and whether they would actually be effective. Some of the advice you have written on behaviour management I have found to be very good (and have put it into practice). I also decided to stop reading ‘getting the buggers to behave’ which, going back to the start of this, I found made me feel like everything I had encountered was my own fault.

Thanks

I thought I’d share this as it sets out exactly what this blog is for. It is not one long whinge, nor is it a place for people who have already had enough. It is for teachers (and others) who are interested in the truth about what is going on in our schools, and what can be done about it.