"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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.