Wednesday, June 13, 2018

"The Evaluative Gaze"

This morning, I read this article by Carol Black about what she calls "The Evaluative Gaze"; that slightly patronising 'look' with which we teachers over look our charges' work and with which we judge and grade their efforts.

It's an intriguing viewpoint, particularly relating to how there are possibly children out there who hold back their best work from we, the arbiters of all, so that they can maintain some ownership over it.

It made me wonder when this happens? At what point in a child's life do children start to conform? At what age to children lock on to the fact that life is a game and it's all about point scoring, metaphorical and literal.

My son is about to start school. He is a curious, inquisitive, lively little person who loves his own company as much as the company of others. He will spend hours engaged in his own games, drawing things over and over again until they are right in his mind. He will clamber and climb and wend his way up, over and under anything that comes his way again and again until he has mastered it and then he will move on. He says whatever comes into his head and he makes sense of the world around him using the contexts and ideas he has observed or heard.

He doesn't seek approval and in fact, as parents, our proudest moments are when he says or does things that have nothing to do with us but that he has simply chosen to do just because.

I'm all for praising children and spend a large part of my day trying to find reasons to do exactly that but this article made me think about what I'm praising the children for?

Am I praising them for conforming to my expectations or genuinely valuing them as individuals and the work they do for me. Am I praising their work for its merits or against a generic one-size-fits-none standard by which I have learnt to judge a child of a certain age and stage?

This quote I found particularly intriguing given that we are in the throes of "transition". Is it fair on the children in our classes to be handed over to us with a label? Once I've been labelled, why should I not live up to it?


A truly intriguing piece, and beautifully written to boot!

Monday, June 11, 2018

Alternative Education

I was reminded just now of this talk by Sir Ken atobinson, "How to escape education's death valley" and there were a couple of lines in it that made me think.

He talks about the success of so-called Alterantive Education practices in the States and proposes that if they’re so successful why are they the alternative and not the norm?

He also alludes to the fact that the verb to teach is both transitive and instransitive. In its intransitive state, who is to say whether learning is happening? In order to make it transitive we need to remove the mechanistic view of education and give teachers control and trust them to do what they’ve been trained to do; we need to give them the freedom to enthuse and inspire curiosity, not simply jump through hoops.

You’ve probably seen it before but it’s worth another go.

Saturday, June 09, 2018

The L word

A short note of the subject of Professional Love.

On the back of my last post on the subject, I made a decision to use the word in class, not directed at individuals but just to use it.

"I love it when I ask for volunteers and everyone puts their hand up!"

"I love your enthusiasm, Bob, but can you put your hand up if you’re I’ve got something to share?!"

Has it made a difference?

I don’t know yet but just trying to find a reason to say it makes me feel better and that’s got to be worth something, right?

Thursday, June 07, 2018

A paucity of experience

AT the end of this term, I’m taking my class on two trips in quick succession. The first is costing £4.00 per person but will, I expect, be an experience the likes of which many of the children in my class, possibly the school, have never had. It’s not entirely surprising as the Royal Highland Show and many of the families in the community in which I work are on vastly different orbits.
Tractors, chickens, cows, quad bikes, chainsaws, ducks, horses and all of the associated language, measures and sheer scale of things will, quite possibly, be overwhelming.
The smells, the sounds ... incidental learning and experience will come at them thick and fast. Some will struggle, others will thrive but it can’t help but add something to their experiential stock, even if it’s only the fact that they don’t like it; at least they’ll be able to say why.

The second trip is costing £1.60. Many of the children have, unsurprisingly, done it before. What is incredible is the number who haven’t.
We’re going to the beach. On the bus. We’re leaving in the monrning. Spending the day there and then coming back again.
Again, the sights, the smells, the sensations for those who’ve never been to the seaside will quite possibly be overwhelming. I get excited by the beach and I live a five minute walk from it. Imagine, if you can, going for the first time ...

Yesterday, as part of #30DaysWild, we ran and played in the school garden barefoot.
Grass and tarmac and a little bit of dirt, the odd upturned log for the brav; Common or garden barefoot sensations.
But sand!
Wet sand. Dry sand. Cold sand. Warm sand.
And seaweed. Seaweeds.
And shells.
And worm casts.
The sea and the waves.
Seagulls living up to their prefix and not grazing on Pringles in the playground.
Digging and delving.

Some of the children in my class have never been to the seaside.

Our children are measured and assessed on whether they can decode an assortment of letters. Whether they can spell the word when they’re asked to.

S A N D ...

We know that it’s so much more than a sum of its sounds. Our job must be to fill those phonemes with feelings, with meaning. Fill them with smells and sensations.

People I’ve spoken to remember days spent sitting on the grass with Mrs _____ reading them stories. They remember who they were sitting next to, how they felt and what the weather was like. They can’t  remember the story, the lesson or what went before or came after but the sensation of sitting in the grass with the sun on their face and the muted sounds of everything when you’re outside has stuck with them ...

Our job should at least involve an element of addressing the paucity of experience that so many of our children have. To help them to make sensory sense of the words they read and hear. Literacy, after all, isn't about sounding out or decoding, it’s about understanding; not in the dictionary definition way but experientially.


Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Love. Love. Love.

We had an intriguing discussion in the staffroom this morning on the back of this article that a coellague had shared, all about what is referred to as “professional love”; the emotional connection between we as professionals and the often vulnerable people with whom we work.

There’s plenty of evidence that supports the fact that it’s all about the relationships that we have with our charges. How we make them feel is an important part of the mix.

The intrigue stemmed from the fact that all of my colleagues had been told "I love you" by one of the children in their class at some point in their teaching careers. They, in turn, had responded saying that they loved them too. Or they’d given them a hug, a squeeze, some often form of professionally affectionate response.

I’ve been called Dad but that’s about as affectionate as it gets.

We talked about how this was almost certainly down to my being a male teacher and the inappropriateness of such a conversation were it to happen..

Does the fact that it’s never happened mean that I’m heartless and the children I teach don’t think I care? Or is it simply the ages that I’ve taught until now? What, indeed, would I say if  one of them said they loved me? Do either of us need to say it in order for the sentiment to exist in a professional setting?

I don’t know the answer and neither did my colleagues, but it made me think.

Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Get digging or get going.

On the back of seeing Resilience: The Bilogy of Stress & The Science of Hope you come away feeling an enormous burden of responsibility, tempered by a healthy serving of resignation/futility at the uphill struggle that so many people face when “getting through this thing called life.”
As a class teacher it’s easy to see the challenges and overlook the opportunities: To bandy round gripes about insufficient funding and the trials of inclusion.*
But we need to be more positive or at least suggest solutions. 
I like to think I’m generally a pretty positive person who doesn’t go looking for problems. Who deals with what he has, makes the most of the scant resources he has to hand and takes the approach that if you can do something to solve a problem, do it; if you can’t, don’t bang on about it.
Perhaps I haven’t been on the block long enough to see the same old things come around again and have insufficient history against which to compare the present. I do find the mantra of “we’ve known about this for years; how’s this ‘new’?” really quite tedious. If it’s being spoken about now, it’s because whatever was implemented before, didn’t work, and besides, inaction is hardly a bold step to solving things.
There’s an old proverb of unknown origin which suggests that the best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is now. 
Well, the oaks of yesteryear have been blown down so I suggest we all get planting. If you can’t  be bothered to do the digging, give someone else your spade.

Incidentally, the film was enlightening but I’d say that you get as much bang for you’re buck from Nadine Burke Harris’ (@DrBurkeHarris) TED talk which you can find here.



*not my words!

Monday, June 04, 2018

What if ... ?

When I sat down for my first lecture during my PGCE, I realised that I’d found where I wanted to be. There were people telling me stuff I didn’t know about child development, about brains and learning, about cognitive science and neuroscience and about how to help a child understand adding.
I was surrounded by relatively like minded people with whom and from whom I learnt just as much. It was inspiring, thought provoking and fed my curiosity about all manner of things.

After qualifying, I kept going. Kept trying to find out more about this peculiar craft into which I had recently plunged. I did my Masters which involved reading more and trying to find out why sometimes things stuck, somethings didn’t. Why my colleagues behaved the way they did and why they didn’t.

I read the stuff I needed to read and wandered off down blind alleys reading stuff that just intrigued. I read that stuff anyway but it gave me licence to graze on research papers and things that I couldn’t otherwise get my hands on.

And it’s not just reading: Courses, Teachmeets, Twitter, blogs ... there’s so much out there on which to graze, to challenge my beliefs, propose answers to questions I have and solutions to problems I’ve encountered.

At the moment, I’m wandering through the excellent “What if Everything You Knew About Teaching was Wrong?” by David Didau (@LearningSpy) and it’s made me think about so much that I think everyone should read it if only to disagree!

It’s made me think about how I deliver my lessons, how I assess, how I plan. It's made me question my own beliefs, to consider personal biases and think about how they affect my beliefs.

It's made me challenge perceived wisdom regarding the curriculum, to reflect on what I do and why I do it but also to reflect on what the children in my class do and why. It's added weight to questions I already had and has confirmed my confirmation bias ...

It's made me question even more what I do, what my colleagues do, what the children in my class do. What the senior management team do, what the government does and what other ways there might be of doing things.

As I said, I think anyone with anything to do with education should read it, if only to help them justify their beliefs and challenge the status quo, personal, professional or otherwise.

Sunday, June 03, 2018

Trust in me ...

Someone once said to me, “there’s nothing that can’t be cured by rubbing money on it.” I can’t  remember the context but I do remember thinking how astute an observation this was.

With the benefit of 20 odd years of life between the statement and today, I realise now that there’s a big difference between a cure and a short term remedy.

In this article, two inputs were seen to have the greatest impact on educational outcomes: teachers’ pay and student:teacher ratios but not  necessarily in the way one might think. There is, for example, an optimum class size below which things stop working. Similarly, there is an optimum salary beyond which you start attracting the wrong people.

Given that such knowledge exists, it’s incredibly frustrating to see governments tipping money into a huge pit promoting populist agendas but which have a limited/negligible impact.

I’m not demanding greater pay. I’m not demanding anything beyond a bit more thought; I’m fed up of being given things by well-meaning political types who think they can solve things by throwing money at them. I wouldn't mind if they asked us what we wanted.

My answer? Trust in me to do what I’ve been trained to do.


Saturday, June 02, 2018

Let them play ... even the older ones

There's currently a lot of discussion about the importance of play and with it a gradual swing towards a more play-based curriculum, particularly in the Early Years, which I think is a great thing. I worry about the creeping measurement of play as it becomes more embedded in the curriculum but that's something I've spoken about before so am not going to say anything here and now.

But regarding play in general I feel very strongly that by 'eliminating' play from the primary classroom further up the school, we are missing out on a valuable learning opportunity.

In the home environment, or the park or during the holidays or any other time away from school, children choose who they want to play with, to interact with. Generally they choose to spend their free time with people whose company they enjoy, who share their interests, although some might argue that often it's the parents' choice rather than the children's!

At school, they are thrown together with people who they don't get on with. In the playground they select from their friends: In class, however, they are asked to work with people that they might not 'like'; they are forced to work with children their parents haven't vetted. 

By disrupting friendship groups in the classroom and allowing free play, it's intriguing to see how quickly they manage to resolve issues, find areas of common interest and interact with people they previously wouldn't have had time for. To my mind, that's a lot of learning.

Equally, how often have we given our classes a new resource to support their learning only to find that they have all turned their multi-link cubes into guns and are taking pot shots at one another?

I'd argue that with the introduction of anything novel, we need to give them time to play before we ask them to engage with it from an educational perspective, if only so that they can get it out the system. In some instances, play could actually be the step up to the intended learning.

An example? I gave my class a big bag of wires, batteries, bulbs, buzzers and switches to see what they could do. I let them play with it. They knew what the bulbs were and what they did and so it was a short step to trying to get them to light; the buzzers and switches were then swapped in: The first pair who got the bulb to light were desperate to share their findings with their peers.

Play is part and parcel of childhood and childhood doesn't stop at the end of P2. Let them play. Even the older ones. They will learn so much that we strive and contrive to teach ... 

... and we won't even need to plan it!

Take me to the river ...

As a vocal supporter of state education and an employee of the state to provide such a service, I feel that when it comes to opinions about where things are going right and where they’re going wrong, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about. I don’t know everything but i like to think I’ve got more than a rudimentary grasp of the facts.

In schools at the moment, there is a lot of talk about the impact of inclusion whereby there’s is a presumption of mainstream and every child should be catered for in their nearest school unless there is a well documented reasons why not. As the parent of a child who will almost certainly require more support than many, I’m delighted as I think that she will benefit greatly from being in a mainstream environment and, let’s face it, the opposite of inclusion is exclusion and that doesn’t sound great.

There are children in our classes who battle daily with all manner of issues. Crappy home life, poverty, hunger and who make it into school each day. Old Mr Maslow would rightly point out that they’re not  going to be in the right mental space to learn but as spaces go, the structure, consistency and safety of a school classroom is hopefully better than the shitstorm of the rest of their life. They may not behave as the majority behave and they may have huge gaps in their learning but I strongly believe that a mainstream setting is what they need.

But I have an issue with the word, or indeed the perceived definition of the word ‘mainstream’.

I’ve seen mainstream defined as the middle ground between full inclusion and special schools which is about as broad a definition as you can give. To my mind, however, I feel that this mainstream has been made to be more like a canal than a river.

A canal is a solitary channel down which everything flows at the same speed. Calm, still waters carrying their load from one end to the other: a picture of Victorian ingenuity and industrial efficiency.

A river, on the other hand, meanders it’s way through the landscape, skirting obstacles, speeding up, slowing down and, more importantly splitting and braiding. The rushes and rapids, the pools and islands don’t stop the river being the river. They provide alternate routes to the same destination.

The state has a duty to its children’s to provide them with an education but that doesn’t mean a one size fits all solution. For some people, canals are blissful, serene, idyllic and rivers are unpredictable and wild but why do we all have to to travel by canal?

Could we not create mainstream solutions that contain the channels and islands of rivers?

Thursday, May 31, 2018

Best laid plans

You know those days when you've had a great idea and in your head it's going to be brilliant.
The children are going to love it. 
You're going to love it. 
Learning can't help but happen, be it incidental, accidental or wholly intentional - and, in your head, trumpets trumpet, klaxons klax and the whole orchestra soars upon a crescendo of awe ...

... and then you do it.

The trumpets don't turn up. The klaxons are on strike and the whole orchestra has been replaced by a solitary party whistle with a hole in the end.

Yep. Had one of those this afternoon.

We've been looking at maps. Talking about cities. We went outside. Opened the Loose Parts container and constructed a city using what was there.

In my head this was 
a feast of tower blocks,
winding rivers of blue plastic. 
Tarpaulin parks,
and Guggenheim-esque edifices.

One group built a miniature skyscraper (so far so good). Another built Arthur's Seat. Another built a canoe and all climbed in ... some others built a bench and sat on it.

STOP! STOP! STOP!

Did I not mention "SCALE" ... Ah. OK. So. "Imagine you are giants and humans are the size of your thumbs ..."

All it took was that and they were off. We had cranes and canals, footbridges and fountains. We even had a Statue of Liberty.

They stood back. Admired their town planning skills and then I got them to draw a map of it. 26 bird’s eye views drawn to some sort of scale.

Sound the trumpets. Klax the klaxons. Bring out the kettle drums.

We got there. We all learnt something.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Let's flip this thing.



The Scottish Government takes great pride in the fact that A Curriculum for Excellence is one of very few curricula in which both Outdoor Learning and Learning for Sustainability are carved into the very bedrock of everything that it stands for.
Outdoor Learning will almost certainly be discussed (again) later on so Learning for Sustainability is to be tonight's focus.
Learning for Sustainability. It's a huge, nebulous mass of stuff that, much like a Magic Eye image, can only really be seen if your eyes go a bit fuzzy. There's so much in thrall to its gravitational pull that its hard to get your head around.
The phrase for starters is brilliantly* nondescript. It alludes to something but can anyone say exactly what? It seems to encompass everything but consist of nothing. To my mind it has all the hallmarks of an excellent basis for any kind of curriculum planning.
Take, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Image result for sdg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Sustainable_Development_Goals.jpg

The children in our classes need to know about these. As someone said in a room I was in somewhere recently, "there will be 1.8bn young people globally by 2030, whose fires have already been lit regarding the SDGs; we need to feed that fire."
Why are they (the SDGs) not at the heart of our planning? A sustainability-based curriculum that would be able to incorporate all other aspects of the curriculum. Maths, literacy, science, health and well-being, art, social studies and a whole heap more.
Lots of us are doing lots of things to do with lots of them anyway but we get blinded by the need to focus on numeracy, literacy and health and well-being.
Let's flip this thing. Flip it and start with these and see what we can do with them?
Just a thought.


*read 'frustratingly'

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The Definite Article

A Curriculum for Excellence.
What can I say?
I like it.
There. I've said it.

In the OECD report of 2015, it was advised that the Scottish Government needed to continue to be bold and to strive for the "full conclusion of a curriculum that is to be built by teachers, schools and communities."
How awesome does that sound? A curriculum built by teachers, schools and communities. Not a constant storm of excrement from On High but a curriculum tailored, by teachers, to the needs, interests, aspirations of the community it serves. What's not to like?

I first engaged with A Curriculum for Excellence in 2014, full of enthusiasm and excitement. It took about a term before I'd been told by almost everyone that, and I paraphrase, most people wanted to go back to the old 5-14 curriculum. They wanted their hands held. To be told what to teach and how to teach it.

Four years later, the naysayers are still braying for the "good old days" when teaching was a "turn to page 17" type of affair. When the diligent did and the disenchanted didn't. When children were angels to a person and a stern look and a talking to from the head teacher was all it took. When handwriting was immaculate and everyone knew their times tables to 29 by the age of 8.

The cynicism that greets the arrival of anything new is understandable. Most people don't like change. Most people like the status quo. Most people like the comfort of the unbroken. Particularly if you've only got a few more years before you can retire ... what's the point in changing?

Well, the world has changed and education needs to move on.

I like A Curriculum for Excellence. I like its promise and the trust and opportunities it affords me as a teacher. I like that it treats me as a professional with an opinion. I like its flexibility.

What I don't like is how its been constrained by well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempts to, er, guide it. What I don't like is the fact that, despite the promise it appears to show, it's being coralled into a one size fits all box.

Let's embrace THE Curriculum for Excellence. Let's revolt and bring it back under the control of those who are at the coal face.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Once more unto the breech ...

Everything below this post was before.

Everything after this post is after.

I am the same me.

These opinions are mine.

Feel free to join in the discussion with my inner monologue.