Top Posts of 2014

The following posts got the most views in 2014. Some of them weren’t actually written in 2014.

1. The Darkest Term: Teacher Stress and Depression
2. A Christmas Miracle – OFSTED Get It Right For Once
3. What OFSTED Actually Want
4. How to Destroy NQTs
5. What OFSTED Say They Want
6. OFSTED Go Mad In Coventry
7. Goodbye, Mr Gove
8. Why That OFSTED News Is So Important
9. A Guide To Scenes From The Battleground
10. Good Year Heads
11. Arnold Hill Academy Responds to the OFSTED Shambles
12. A New Primary Teacher Writes…
13. How have OFSTED behaved in the last 2 weeks?
14. Tristram Hunt proposes something which may just be worse than OFSTED
15. A Very Short Summary of the Phonics Debate
16. Progressive Teaching Methods In the Primary School
17. A Brief History of Education Part 2: The 1944 Education Act
18. More OFSTED Good Practice that isn’t
19. Is Phonics Being Implemented Correctly?
20. That Primary School Teacher Post

I’m not going to try to write a review of the year, as that’s become something I tend to do on my blog’s birthday. Nor am I going to make any resolutions, other that to keep the blog going for as long as I can.

Take care, and have a happy new year.

Please Help With The UK Education Bloggers Spreadsheet Version 4.0

The Echo Chamber

The latest version of the spreadsheet of bloggers can now be found here.

Because of all the new blogs that have been found, there is an even greater need for work on filling in the spreadsheet. So can you please, please try to do as many of the following as possible:

1. If you are a blogger, make sure your own details are on the spreadsheet and are up to date. (Once you have done so, put the date in the final column).
2. Share this post (i.e. the one you are currently reading) on social media, particularly by reblogging and tweeting.
3. Find some time to go onto the spreadsheet and look up some blogs where there are spaces and see if you can find the information needed to fill in the gaps.
4. Let me know about any problems or difficulties. Reading the notes below may solve some of the most…

View original post 487 more words

A Tale Of Two Schools (Or How OFSTED Are Still Pushing Fuzzy Maths)

You may have noticed that I haven’t been scouring OFSTED reports for terrible things for most of this this year. Partly because for some of the year I knew Robert Peal would be doing it for his Civitas Report, but also because the old problems regarding teaching style finally seemed to be sorted, and while people did draw my attention to peculiarities in reports, there was not a consistent problem other than, perhaps, a certain level of inconsistency in judgements that made inspectors very unpredictable.

However, in the last week of term I was contacted by a primary school teacher who informed me:

…in order to meet the demands of the reasoning element of the new National Curriculum, our maths teaching must be inquiry based and founded in solving problems. It is now a whole school target. Pages of correct calculations are bad and we have been told to make question two really difficult because there is no point in children practising things they would get right.

As you may be aware – I wrote about it at some length here – the big disagreement in maths teaching is about how fluency in recall of maths facts and use of standard algorithms should be balanced against fuzzy maths – attempts to develop “problem-solving” and “conceptual understanding” as generic skills rather than part of, or the result of, one’s knowledge. The pedagogical side of this is that fuzzy maths tends to be advocated by those who are less keen on direct instruction, more keen on groupwork and discovery learning, whereas the teaching of maths facts and standard algorithms is usually via direct instruction and sustained practice.

This teacher is being forced to comply with the ideology of one side, the side that is usually fashionable but has far weaker evidence for their position. This is still not uncommon in schools, even though the new curriculum now emphasises the importance of fluency. But what surprised me was that it turned out that part of the justification for this edict being inflicted comes from OFSTED’s opinions about two small Stockport primary schools which were inspected this year. One, Ladybrook Primary School, was subject to a full inspection. The other, Tithe Barn Primary School, was visited by a subject survey team from mathematics. The inspectors who inspected Ladybrook declared it to be “outstanding in all respects” and noted that “Teaching is outstanding and results in pupils making outstanding progress throughout the school”. The maths subject survey inspectors at Tithe Barn, decided that while teaching and achievement in mathematics were good, the overall effectiveness in mathematics required improvement, as did the leadership and management of mathematics and the curriculum in mathematics.

Neither of these inspections seemed to show any sign of OFSTED’s recent unwillingness to prefer one teaching method to another. The report for Ladybrook told anyone looking for indicators of what OFSTED want that part of the reason for giving a grade for outstanding behaviour and safety was because:

Pupils’ attitudes to learning are very impressive. Pupils told the inspectors how much they enjoyed their learning, describing it as ‘interesting and fun’. They explained that they had targets not only in areas such as literacy and mathematics, but also in thinking skills. When asked what thinking skills were, they explained that they were ways in which learning could be improved, such as ‘having a go’ and ‘keeping going’…

Part of the reason for saying the teaching was outstanding was:

…Basic skills of literacy, numeracy and communication are woven seamlessly into interesting topics, many of which are innovative. Pupils develop levels of skill far above those expected for their ages, such as accessing relevant information from Internet websites. Year 6 pupils were seen making exceptional progress in their learning and understanding in a lesson about Japan where they were able to summarise information succinctly from both written and verbal sources. They took turns acting as teachers to small groups of their peers, clarifying areas that some found difficult.

At the same time, as this report was implying that topic based learning (even for numeracy) and letting kids research things and teach other was part of outstanding teaching, the letting feeding back on the maths survey was saying that the problem with maths teaching at Tithe Barn was:

Attention has been given to checking consistency of teachers’ approaches to teaching methods of calculation, but pupils’ mathematical understanding, their problem solving and reasoning skills have not been monitored nor findings used to identify how teaching might be improved…

…because pupils are working at above average standards, more discriminating use of the resources is required to ensure pupils are challenged appropriately and have their understanding deepened.

Pupils’ written work indicates a lack of focus on developing understanding, reasoning and problem solving, in contrast to the strong emphasis on mathematical knowledge and methods, which enables proficiency. The current practice of working through exercises in the textbook means that not all pupils get to complete the ‘think’ question at the bottom of the text book page or to explain their thinking. Likewise, the problems in the text book page are often directly linked to the methods pupils have just learnt, which provides practice, but means they do not have to think hard enough mathematically about how to solve the problem.

Few Early Years Foundation Stage activities, particularly outdoors, relate to shape, space and measures, for example, to support children’s problem solving with and understanding of patterns, shapes, capacity and mass…

…they do not move pupils on quickly enough through repetitive exercises in the new textbooks…

…Children’s knowledge of counting and number is above average by the end of Reception. Fewer children excel in their knowledge and understanding of shape, space and measures, in part because of a lack of resources and challenging activities, particularly outdoors. Your plans to refurbish and improve the outdoor space are timely…

 Areas for improvement, which we discussed, include… adjusting the curriculum so that it meets the needs of all pupils and places a greater focus on developing pupils’ understanding, reasoning and ability to solve problems…. [and] making sure that children in the Early Years Foundation Stage have plenty of chances in the outdoor area to solve problems and reach high standards, particularly in shape, space and measures

I think the latter is particularly clear about the opinions and priorities of the inspectors where it comes to the relative merits of teaching numerical fluency through traditional methods and of attempting to teach understanding and problem-solving through discovery methods.

However, these are just two schools, and there is the argument that if one is performing well and the other is disappointing then there has to be some comment given on what is right or wrong with their teaching and it should be taken to reflect what was seen, not the ideology of the inspectors. If the progressive teaching approach achieved great results and the traditional maths teaching achieved poor results then that should be indicated. It’s in investigating this possibility that the bias in this case becomes clearer as the remarkable thing about the schools is how much they have in common. Both are officially outstanding. Both got 97% of students to make the expected progress in maths this year. Both had around 30 students in Year 6. The only differences that might be relevant when judging their effectiveness is that Ladybrook had far more disappointing results in previous years (which when you only have 30 students’ results to look at in a year, seems an odd thing to ignore when judging achievement) and that Tithe Barn’s last inspection (unless there’s an inspection that hasn’t been published yet) was in 2009. But they look like schools which have maths teaching at a similar level of effectiveness for year 6 in 2014.

This similarity in achievement, is what makes the feedback from inspectors so curious. Now I should, obviously, be careful to say that I’m in no position to judge whether the judgements are wrong, but it’s worth asking what a headteacher of a primary school in that region would think. What would a head do if they knew that 97% making expected progress in maths in 2014 (after years of underachievement) was part of what indicated being outstanding in all respects where a school appears to be using progressive methods?  What if they knew that the same amount of progress in maths, as part of an ongoing record of strong achievement in a historically outstanding school, could still lead to your overall effectiveness in maths being labelled as requiring improvement if you are using traditional methods of maths teaching? I think that it is inevitable that they would conclude that it is still safest to assume OFSTED hasn’t changed when it comes to primary maths. There may, of course, be deeper reasons for these judgements that the data and the comments on teaching methods don’t show, but the message that OFSTED are giving in these reports is that if you want to be seen as doing outstanding maths then forget about results outside the year of the inspection, stop practising number work and switch to doing numeracy as part of projects. Possibly you might also want to consider sending your EYFS kids outside to do shape, space and measure.

One final note, the Ladybrook Primary inspection was done by a couple of additional inspectors. There are other indicators in the report that they may not have been completely on top of what OFSTED are currently saying. However, the Tithe Barn maths report was conducted by two HMI including the OFSTED lead HMI for maths, Jane Jones, who has a long history of recommending fuzzy maths approaches over traditional teaching (most famously in the Made To Measure report of a few years ago).

Top Blogs of the Year : Academies Week 2014

Academies Week have published my (and several other people’s) review of the best blogs of the year.

Harry Fletcher-Wood picks…

Michael Fordham, clioetcetera.com

Michael Fordham’s blog has been consistently superb, offering robust and thought-provoking argument in elegant prose. I approach each post with anticipation and trepidation (many highlight traps that I’ve fallen into). His thinking is primarily about the discipline of history teaching: as such, some posts act as references (I often recommend his summary of the incoherence of levels) or stimuli to change (notably his suggested improvements to assessment).

Continued in

Year commencing 2014

What Would Make Me Join A College Of Teaching?

In my last, but one, post I showed how a professional organisation had in the past ended up as an enforcer for progressive education. In my most recent post, I described how my preferred option for a College of Teaching would be that no one ideological tendency could dominate and why I didn’t think evidence or research could resolve disputes between different tendencies. However, I have yet to describe what can be done practically to ensure that no particular ideology or faction dominates. In order to achieve this I think there are three key principles that must be followed:

1. The College Of Teaching must be based around classroom teachers. And, by that, I mean people who are employed to regularly teach a class in a classroom. Not to lecture in university halls. Not to give private tuition in people’s homes or online. Not to produce teaching resources. Not to tell teachers how to teach, or otherwise coach or train them. Not to run an educational charity. Not to write educational books. Not to inspect schools. Not working for a local authority. Not working full-time for a trade union. Even retired teachers should be out. It must be exclusively for those working as a teacher (or lecturer) in a school or college, for some part of the working week. The various categories of people who are in education but not actually teaching classes are, in my experience, far more likely to be progressive ideologues than actual teachers. They also don’t need more representation than they already have.
2. It must be dependent on classroom teachers. The GTCE had no legitimacy because it was widely suspected that most of us would have rather have kept our money. If the College Of Teaching can attract only a handful of people, then it is not doing its job. Worse, if it has sources of income beyond membership fees then there will be an incentive to pursue objectives related to those sources of income, rather than to respond to what its members actually want.
3. The College Of Teaching must not be dominated by senior managers, or even aspiring senior managers. I’m aware that (particularly in primary schools) SMT may have a full teaching load and even in secondary many will teach more than a part-timer like me, and this is not a claim that SMT are not teachers. But organisations and events dominated by SMT have a very different flavour and culture to those dominated by the rank and file because of different priorities and different freedoms to act.

The following describes what I would suggest needs to be done to implement these principles. Those parts in bold are what I currently think are the minimum requirements  for creating the sort of organisation that I would want to be part of.

To ensure that the College of Teaching is based around classroom teachers, it is necessary for the entire membership of The College Of Teaching to be currently employed as teachers. No associate members, no reduced rates for the retired. While drawing the line between FE and HE is not always easy, those who teach in HE cannot be allowed to join. If people who are employed only in university education departments, other forms of teacher training, or as consultants, can join, it’s over before we have even begun. No classroom teacher can compete with their connections and ability to organise along party lines. Some (and of course I acknowledge it is only some) of the people in this category are people who can organise letters to newspapers pushing progressive education with hundreds of signatures. The networks are there and will be used to crowd out opposing views.

As well as the members, those running it must not be divorced from teaching. Those with governing responsibilities must all be current teachers. Those with executive responsibilities must be teachers on a (time-limited) sabbatical, not outsiders. If any non-teachers are employed it must be in administrative capacity, not an executive one. Ideally anyone employed as permanent staff would be paid less than a teacher would be, so as not to attract people to leave teaching to take such a position. Similarly the organisation must not be given formal responsibilities (like teacher licensing or oath-swearing) by government. The power structures must be built around reserving the greatest influence of those closest to the classroom, which brings me to the second point about dependence on members. An organisation with income from an endowment will be a prize to be captured by a faction. Working directly with other funding organisations will also compromise independence. The only significant ongoing source of income must be from membership fees. If any outside income is needed, perhaps to start the organisation up, it should be in the form of a subsidy for membership fees, i.e. a reduction in how much teachers pay for membership, not an alternative to membership income. This may make the organisation far more modest in scale than some would like, but we really don’t need glossy magazines, or conferences in hotels, or officers with large expense accounts.

Finally, and this may be the tricky one, the organisation must not be taken over by SMT or aspiring SMT. It is there to help and represent teachers not to help manage teachers or help anyone up the career ladder. There is too much education discourse as it is where heads are treated as the voice of teachers. A big role for those who are not SMT could be one of the most important distinguishing features of the College Of Teaching. Of course, it cannot exclude SMT either, most SMT do teach, but if it is organised around the needs of SMT it will be a very different organisation and the structures should reflect that. All meetings and events must, unless there are good reasons for exceptions, be held outside of the school day. Only teachers with more than ordinary amounts of power or influence in a school can get away during the week on a regular basis and there is little point in setting up an organisation to represent those who are already powerful. Distinction should be made between involvement of SMT and non-SMT in decision-making and representation. So ballots of members should record votes from SMT members and non-SMT members separately. Positions in the organisation should be elected on separate ballots for SMT and non-SMT. This is not a minor point, or SMT-bashing, it is just an observation that there are some SMT (obviously not all) who seem to have such flexible working arrangements and great connections, that no classroom teacher could ever compete fairly against them in an election. Ending up with domination, not just by SMT, but by headteachers, is a a very real possibility and the structures of the organisation should take this into account. I would also suggest, as a further way of establishing that the organisation is not about representing the already powerful, that anybody employed by the College Of Teaching in any kind of executive role, be paid a salary similar to that of an experienced teacher, but not a manager or AST.

I should probably acknowledge this as a provisional list. I can be talked around on issues, although I’m not going to be receptive to the argument that teachers cannot manage to organise without help or that a College run by headteachers would be fine. I haven’t suggested a way forward on the issue of research and evidence, despite raising the problems with it earlier, as I think that might take another blogpost some time in the future.

Finally, can I encourage everybody to go to this meeting to express their views. It would be great to have an event full of teachers trying to influence the debate. I think that even those of us who have been as cynical about a College Of Teaching as I’ve been, should at least have a shot at making it work. At the very least, I don’t doubt the sincerity of those hoping to make this work.

Why Evidence and Research Won’t Resolve Ideological Disputes Around The College of Teaching

I wrote last time about how the GTCE, despite being intended to be a professional body, ended up being an arm of the education establishment promoting a very progressive view of the role of teachers and the methods that should be used. I also discussed why I feared The College of Teaching could end up being a very similar organisation and why, assuming I had the choice, I would be reluctant to join. However, it hasn’t been created yet, so the idea can still win me over, and there are certainly people I respect involved (although none of them are teachers) and so I had intended to immediately describe what needs to be done to make the prospect enticing to me. I now realise this is going to take more than one post.

While my starting point was that the College of Teaching cannot have the same ideological leanings as the GTCE had, there is a wider point that any strong ideological stance (including those beliefs whose adherents claim not to be ideological), would make it of limited appeal to some significant part of the teaching profession. I think this is a concern across the board. A lot of people’s main priority is that the College Of Teaching does not get captured by those they disagree with (whether they think that’s a matter of ideology or not). My next post should include some practical suggestions about how this can be ensured, however, I have realised that some people advocating a College of Teaching have assumed that making the ideas it promotes “evidence-based” will be enough to unite the profession.

In this post I simply want to point out that a commitment to evidence or research (I’ve not really distinguished between the two as I’m not sure that matters for this argument) will not be enough to make a body seem ideologically neutral. I’m perfectly capable of challenging what people present as research or evidence. I gave the example in my last post of the GTCE’s research summaries, and have in the past commented about the BERA Social Justice blog, both of which show how research can be anything but ideologically neutral. I would go further and agree with Michael Fordham and Howard Aldrich that even the way research is categorised is flawed.

Now it may be possible to design a rigorous research programme that would satisfy my concerns, but I think it would serve only to cause others to object. Here are some recent examples of people expressing views about evidence in the College of Teaching (and I have deliberately picked people who would not be happy if my views, or even my views about evidence, were dominant in the College Of Teaching):

 

…we are in danger of locking our work into a mechanistic and technical model, losing the creative and progressive power of the work we do.  We are NOT like doctors, or actuaries – there is no simple evidence-based relationship of intervention to outcome.

…More than the suggested representation of all unions, regions, etc – I believe the College of Teaching must also represent all pedagogies and have a formal place to access learning from  educational technology; eg – the success of project based learning in raising attainment, or new models of CPD using twitter.

From Eylan Ezekiel

 

 

According to the website ClaimYourCollege, the college of teaching “will also harness the experience of its members and draw on robust evidence that will speak truth to politicians and pundits – reducing ineffective interventions, policy and practice.”

Whilst I welcome the increasingly prominent role of “evidence-based” and “evidence-led” practices (though I prefer the term “evidence-informed practice”), I am concerned that the concept may be hijacked by those with a particular political stance who interpret evidence and research through the lens of their convictions.

[Then after an explanation of research that differs about the value of technology in teaching]

…So, whose evidence will the college of teaching base its recommendations for practice on? Who will decide what constitutes good evidence? Will we be encouraged to interpret this evidence as teaching professionals or will this evidence be interpreted for us? And would a college of teaching continue to eschew the application of technology to support teaching and learning as an “ineffective intervention”?

From José Picardo

 

…research shows time and again, that the early and primary years set the tone for the future. They can shape minds, strengthen hearts and build learners with the tenacity to succeed. It is my belief that this research, gathered and disseminated by a professional body free from political ideology and vote chasing, would give us the knowledge and autonomy to create the learning experiences that these children need. And for this reason alone, I whole heartedly support the idea of a College of Teaching.

From Debra Kidd

 

With the drivers of markets, managerialism and high-stakes testing in place, it becomes possible for government to step back, safe in the knowledge that a complex web of mechanisms – league tables, performance-related pay and Ofsted – can be relied on to do the work.

The danger is that a College of Teaching simply becomes another element in this web of control that frames how teachers are expected to do their work. It provides the appearance of autonomy and independence, but in reality it serves to reinforce the culture of compliance that bedevils English state education.

This is because what will be valued will be what the College has decided is “what works”. Asking teachers to focus on what works, and privileging the research methods often associated with such questions, runs the risk of creating new orthodoxies. Through this, career advancement remains contingent on implementing what others have decided is “good”, or what constitutes “best practice”….

…The focus on “what works” deflects attention from a wider set of questions about “what matters?” or “what’s wrong?”. For example, teachers are encouraged to ask what works to close achievement gaps in their classroom. But they are not encouraged to ask wider questions on how to close these gaps when governments preside over ever-widening inequalities…

…If teachers are confined to asking “what works?” while only the policy elites get to decide “what matters” then teachers remain shut out of the debates about the really big questions: what is education for and how should young people be helped to understand and engage with the world they are growing up in?

From Howard Stevenson

 

Now if you know anything about my views, and what I consider to be the evidence that underpins them, I find it impossible to imagine that my disagreements with any of the above can be resolved by reference to evidence. I am not arguing here that I cannot be part of a College of Teaching which includes people with views like those above, but I am certain that no amount of evidence or research is going to allow us all to support a single College of Teaching that claims to be promoting “what the research shows”. Research and evidence are divisive, not unifying, forces in education.

Why I’m Deeply Sceptical About A College Of Teaching

I’m planning several posts related to ideas around the creation of a College of Teaching. This is probably the most negative one, the next one will describe how I can be won over.

Likely composition of the College Of Teaching

When the suggestion appeared some time ago that there should be a new professional body for teachers in England, I had my doubts. The GTCE disaster was still fresh in teachers’ minds. This was an organisation that had taken money out of our pay packets to pay for a group of progressive education advocates to tell us they were right. According to the Code Of Conduct the GTCE had put together then (other than some comments about progress and understanding diversity) our responsibility to educate our students could be summed up as follows:

Help children and young people to become confident and successful learners.

Registered teachers:

• uphold children and young people’s rights and help them to understand their responsibilities
• listen to children and young people, consider their views and preferences, and involve them in decisions that affect them, including those related to their own learning
• have high expectations of all children and young people, whatever their background or aptitudes, and find activities that will challenge and support them all
• promote children and young people’s confidence and self-awareness by clarifying how assessment will be used to support improvement, providing clear and specific feedback, and celebrating their success
• communicate clear expectations about pupil behaviour to ensure disruption to learning is minimised and children and young people feel safe and secure
• help children and young people prepare for the future by engaging them with the implications of changes in society and technology and offering them impartial advice and guidance about their future options.

Yes, that’s right. The GTCE had a code of conduct for teachers that didn’t actually mention that we should teach in order for our students to learn, nor for that matter does it mention that it matters what it was our students would learn. And just in case the principles of the GTCE didn’t make it clear that all good teachers were progressives, they also produced “Research for Teachers” summaries which claimed that “research shows” progressive methods were best. For instance this one for maths teachers, which asked us:

Why adopt a pupil-centred approach?

A number of Research for Teachers summaries show how pupil participation varies according to whether the teaching environment is pupil- or teacher-focused. For example, the RfT summary of a study of collaborative learning in mathematics noted that teachers who adopted more didactic, ‘transmission’ styles of teaching, in which knowledge was ‘passed’ from teacher to pupil, lowered the
self-esteem of pupils who were re-sitting GCSE Mathematics.

In contrast, activities designed to promote collaborative discussion were found to raise the pupils’ self-esteem. The pupils also attained higher marks on an algebra test. Analysis of the number of questions answered by pupils in the before and after tests indicated that the improved marks were mainly due to the pupils making fewer errors, not simply because they felt more motivated to attempt more of the
questions.

As many teachers know through their own experience, a problem with teacher-focused learning environments is that they put pupils in the role of consumers of information with the teacher as ‘font of all knowledge’. At the extreme, pupils sit and listen to their teachers talking, engaging in little classroom talk themselves. They tend to work mostly individually on tasks provided by the teacher, such as worksheets and text book exercises. In pupil-focused learning environments, pupils are producers of ideas. Pupils are encouraged to participate and become engaged with learning through collaborative learning activities, peer teaching, projects and classroom talk that require multiple levels of thinking. They create new ideas and materials through projects, usually talk aloud about the way they derived an answer and take the initiative to interact with teachers and peers.

The RfT summaries highlight how it’s not simply a case of doing one or the other; rather it is about creating a classroom environment where all participants – teachers as well as pupils – are co-learners in the educational journey. Teachers who have changed their approach to pupil-centred have found that their pupils are more motivated and engaged. They also have to spend less time than usual managing their pupils’ behaviour.

Now, you must remember this was not from some deliberate grouping of progressive teachers. This was from an organisation that was set up to support us; that we had to pay for  out of our own money. The GTCE was created by David Blunkett as Education secretary and his major political influence on pedagogy was the creation of the National Strategies which emphasised whole class teaching, so it’s probably fair to say the GTCE was not founded to promote progressive teaching, it was just taken over by the education establishment and then used that way. This is the first reason to be wary of any new education body advising us on what to do. It is not enough to talk about a college of teaching that is politically independent; it’s not the politicians who are the ideologues in education. It has to be immune from education establishment take-over. That’s the issue and that’s what will put me off joining.

So far, discussions around a College of Teaching (major developments seem to have centred around The Prince’s Teaching Institute) have done nothing to suggest it would be any different to the GTCE in terms of the influence of the existing education establishment. The biggest red flag, the one that turned me from sceptical to hostile, was that a major meeting to launch it was held on a school day in term time, effectively excluding most teachers who might have been interested from involvement. The next item to have a dramatic effect on me was reading about who was being asked to get involved. The Prince’s Teaching Institute actually wrote the following without irony:

In keeping with the Minister for Schools’ argument in the report that “a new College of Teaching would need to come from within the profession”, the workshop brought together stakeholders from across the education spectrum, including Headteachers of secondary and primary schools, representatives from Unions, Higher Education, Subject Associations, the existing College of Teachers and school employers.

Yes, that’s right. The interpretation of “within the profession” that won the day appears to include everyone except classroom teachers. No wonder they didn’t want to hold their meetings at weekends. This is not a movement of teachers, this is a new education establishment body. And, of course, it would be. If teachers organised a College of Teaching, they’d do it online and mainly in the holidays. This isn’t yet the GTCE Mark 2 because it is still being designed as a body with voluntary membership (although some of the things Tristram Hunt has been suggesting could be overseen by such a body are scary). It is likely to join the succession of other charities that claim to represent teachers of one sort or another while doing their own thing, with its strength likely to be largely dependent on who it can leech money out of.

But, of course, this is early days. Those who think something good can be made out of this largely respond to criticism by asking people to put forward their own suggestions. So in a future post, I will try to set out the minimum requirements necessary for me to consider joining such an organisation. That way, even though nothing I’ve seen so far fills me with any optimism, I can at least have described what sort of organisation might be worth while.

Update (17/12/1014): The words “in my next post” have been replaced with “in a future post” in the last paragraph as I realise there is another preliminary issue to take care of).

Top Blogs of the Week : Academies Week (December 2014)

Academies Week have published my review of the best blogs of the week.

Damned if I do, damned if I don’t

By @ImSporticus

A PE teacher recounts the grim tale of his poor relationship with a parent. He describes unreasonable behaviour on the part of the parent; ill-judged and unsupportive actions by senior managers, and his own mistakes. He concludes that he is in a no-win situation…

Continued in

Week commencing 8 December, 2014

Workload

Back in 2010 I wrote a blogpost entitled “The job that never ends” which attempted to calculate how many hours it would take to do every part of a full-time secondary teacher’s job according to the letter. I tried to avoid exaggerating, but I assumed no short-cuts and based it on what my managers told me they wanted to see. So I assumed lessons wouldn’t involve using one textbook for 60 minutes and would actually take time to plan, and that homework would have written feedback. I found that this added up to 60 hours of work a week, not including any time for eating, recovering from stress, extra-curricular activities or work that went beyond the normal legal requirements of the job. This seemed excessive, more than people could cope with for a career that might last several decades, and not something that seemed appropriate for those who needed to be in a suitable state of physical and mental health to make difficult decisions affecting dozens of young people at a time.

If anything, demands seem to have got worse since then. I didn’t include time for preparing for observations. Although complying with excessively rigorous marking policies were a major contributor to the 60 hour total, this was before the days when senior leaders would demand that work be marked in ways that would enable students and teachers to engage in an ongoing written dialogue. It didn’t assume that preparation would include learning new material to be taught as a result of curriculum changes. It didn’t include the, increasingly common, pressure to provide extra lessons after school for key exam groups. I’m now part-time and, as I get very close to 40, I cannot imagine having the energy to even try keeping up with the demands on full-time teachers, in some schools for a term, let alone two decades or more.

These demands take their toll on teachers in terms of stress at work, and as an obstacle to living a healthy and fulfilling life. A recent NUT survey found teachers reporting the following difficulties:

92% Negative impact on quality of my family or my personal life

81% No time for adequate exercise/physical activity

40% Often miss important personal commitments or family activities

59% Causing stress in my relationship

It makes teaching a less attractive career, and the same survey found that 87% of teachers knew a teacher who had left teaching in the last two years because of workload.

It also undermines us as autonomous professionals. If the workload is such that it is unlikely that any normal person can consistently do all the work to the letter, and that any extra task given to a teacher by their managers may prevent them from being able to cope with their job, then teachers have very little protection in the workplace. An unsupportive manager, who increases workload on those they manage, can cause almost any full-time teacher to be unable to do their job, removing any real job security for much of the profession. Moreover, where we have to struggle to complete our work at all, there is often very little opportunity to do it well. Getting the job done becomes the enemy of doing the job well and it is the children who lose out if their teachers are too stressed and overburdened to do their job as well as they’d like.

Workload is now becoming a political issue, with politicians promising to look into the problem. A DfE survey recently gave teachers a chance to describe their situation. However, identifying the problem and doing anything about it are very different. Reducing class sizes or hours spent teaching will cost money, money which politicians have seemed reluctant to pledge. Much of the workload is caused by the need to provide evidence about one’s teaching for the purpose of inspection or performance management. Without more sensible systems of accountability, again something that politicians have shown little interest in, workload will not be reduced. Even if politicians were to provide some of the resources and freedom needed to change the situation, it would still need to be monitored closely to ensure that the gains reach the frontline in the form of a workload reduction.

While I would encourage politicians to act, that cannot be all that we do to confront the problem. We also need to face it as a profession. That means a willingness to avoid overburdening our colleagues, particularly on the part of those with management responsibilities. It also requires a willingness to challenge excessive demands in the workplace, and the best way to do this will always be through effective work on the part of our trade unions in providing a voice for teachers in their places of work, supported by their members.

On Just Teaching

Since going part-time there are now some days in the week where I have discovered the pleasure of afternoons. One thing that is fairly pointless in the afternoon is education twittering as most teachers won’t be looking at Twitter until the evening. As a result I was a bit surprised to get dozens of retweets and favourites for this tweet last Friday afternoon:

Here's my teaching advice: 1) Just teach them. 2) Make them practise. 3) That's it.

— Andrew Old (@oldandrewuk) November 28, 2014

Clearly, it hit a chord with some teachers. Interestingly though, some people just didn’t get it, so I thought I’d spell it out here.

To get it you have to know what “teach” means. There is a belief that “teaching” means nothing more than what a teacher does, even if that might be activities such as writing reports, supervising the lunch queue or managing other teachers, that are in themselves not the act of teaching. There’s another misconception, this one very common where people are lukewarm about teaching for ideological reasons, that anything which causes a student to learning, even (for the sake of example) locking them in a cupboard with an encyclopedia, is teaching. However, there is more to teaching. In the early 70s, the educational philosopher Paul H. Hirst wrote a wonderful essay exploring this entitled “What is teaching?”, which can be found in The Philosophy of Education (Readings in Philosophy) or Knowledge and the Curriculum: A Collection of Philosophical Papers (International Library of Philosophy of Education). He argued that teaching could only be identified as such when it was intentional; where there was some object, X, to be learnt, and where the specific teaching activity must be “indicative” of X. He explained:

By this I mean that the activity must, either implicitly or explicitly, express or embody the X to be learnt, so that this X is clearly indicated to the pupil as what he is to learn. In this way the teacher makes plain in his activity what he intends to be learnt. It is not I think at all the case that what is to be learnt must necessarily be explicitly discernible in the activity, yet it must be so available in some the sense that the pupil’s learning activity can be directed to this as its object. It is because activities like demonstrating, telling and proving can provide such excellent means for indicating an X that it is intended the pupil will learn, that they play such a central part in teaching… specific teaching activities must be indicative of what is to be learnt and it is for this reason that the opening of windows and the sharpening of pencils could never be themselves the teaching of historical facts or of Pythagoras’ Theorem.

Hirst was not attempting to condemn progressive education in this essay, although he acknowledged that this “indicative” quality of teaching was more strongly emphasised in traditional teaching, and argued that it should be considered carefully be all teachers. However, I would argue that the dominance of progressive education in recent decades has led to a certain lack of clarity about the nature of teaching. For instance, where educational aims are replaced by vaguer, non-educational aims, such as building self-esteem, ensuring well-being or encouraging self-expression it can be hard to determine what the precise purpose of a “teaching” activity is. Where our objectives have ceased to be about the learning of clearly defined skills or knowledge, but are instead about the development of more generic facilities such as “creativity” or “independence” actual learning can be hard to pin down. Where discovery learning, or open-ended activities are used, the indicative property of teaching can be undermined.

So when I suggest “just teaching” as a method, I am implicitly making a stand for the use (but not necessarily the sole use) of the methods of the traditional teacher. I am valuing teacher talk and explanations. I am recommending that there is nothing wrong with telling kids exactly what they need to know and making it clear that they need to know it. That we have been through a prolonged period where this was unfashionable is often denied by today’s progressives, (who presumably are completely unrelated to the progressives of a few years ago who acquiesced in and often enforced Ofsted’s demands for less teacher talk and more development of “independence”). That is why “just teach” is advice that means something to many teachers, and one we are happy to hear.

As for practice, this has perhaps not been condemned quite so explicitly in recent years as the other tools of the traditional teacher, except when described as “drill” or where it refers explicitly to practising the recall of knowledge. In fact, in some cases it has seemed like extensive practice in exam techniques was mandatory. But prolonged practice. particularly in the most basic and essential parts of a discipline, has been squeezed out by a couple of trends. Firstly, the ever present calls for learning to be engaging or entertaining has made prolonged, effortful practice unwelcome. Requiring kids to do the same thing for an entire lesson of fifty or sixty minutes has been seen as a form of torture, and a reason to excuse student non-compliance, particularly if what is being practised is the use of a mathematical procedure or some dry type of written work. Secondly, the (thankfully now dying) idea that in a good lesson students will be showing progress in twenty minutes, had made it hard to argue for the kind of practice in which improvement, no matter how necessary, may be shown only after hours of effort. A superficial engagement with something new is far easier to show in twenty minutes, than a gradual improvement towards mastery in something students could already do to some extent at the start of the lesson. Again, this has been a significant enough part of the culture in recent years that many teachers will welcome the encouragement to get their students practising.

As ever, no doubt many will deny this picture of the education climate of the last few years. They, unlike myself, have never been condemned by an inspector for getting students to work on their own, or told by a senior manager that requiring a student to practising their times tables for fifteen minutes a week was a cause of poor behaviour. They have never been told that any part of mathematics can be learnt by doing five questions, or that students will learn better if they are not told directly what it is they need to know. But for a lot of us, we want to hear that it is okay to just teach and that it is okay to get students to practice, and that everything else is not nearly so important.

And , of course, there are still those putting forward the opposing view as if there was no need to provide evidence for the effectiveness of not actually teaching. Just this week I have read a blogpost (on the website of the SHP, a group that has been very influential in history teaching) where a history teacher advocated the following plan:

I’m going to lay the room out in groups of tables, and upon each table I’m going to provide knowledge in different forms. So one group might have a set of laptops and different films of the topic playing for the children to watch. Another table will have chapters or extracts from historical novels. Another will have contemporary sources, and another historians’ works or text books. I’m not even going to ask them to answer questions, instead I’m going to ask them to work in the way I have been for my novel. That means I just want them to explore the story, and in so doing begin to formulate their own questions about the topic.

Also, the Teacher Support Network, a charity I was very sympathetic to until recently, published the following advice on their blog:

While the basics of science can be taught through a coaching method, it is certainly one of those subjects where you can’t find the answer at the back of a textbook. Experiential learning – taking a hands-on approach – encourages creativity and helps to build a greater understanding.

Children could be encouraged to act as a scientist during a field trip to the local park, during a trip out into the playground, or as an after school activity. Armed with pen and paper, they could be challenged to write down different animals they see, including descriptions and notes relating to perceived movement and behaviours. This type of innovative thinking encourages focus and develops observational skills – something that can’t be taught through management learning – while also being fun and a healthy alternative to desk-based activities.

For so many of those who work in education, the idea that such activities are not the best form of teaching, let alone the idea that they are likely to be less effective than traditional methods, is unthinkable. So those of us who believe in “just teaching” should take every opportunity to endorse it.