"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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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'

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.

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.

Stuff and Nonsense

Sitting in assembly the other day, I suddenly became aware of the self-righteous and utterly ridiculous twaddle that schools forcibly stuff down the collected maws of those of us who otherwise have the pleasure to work there or are incarcerated therein, against their will, on a daily basis (their implication, my words).
"As you all know," said the deputy, "we are an anti-bullying school [...]" and so she went on.
And that was where the twaddle became so eminently clear: Are there any pro-bullying schools out there? Or how about schools that don't respect rights? What about schools that don't espouse healthy eating and instead feed their pupils on saturated fat and carbonated soft drinks through an intravenous drip?
How about schools that have a ritualistic tyre burning ceremony to kick off every day before serving a lunchtime menu of deep fried panda, rather than recycle?
Who are we fooling and, more to the point, why do we spend so much time jumping through these well-intentioned hoops.
Just a thought.

Outdoor Learning v. Learning Outdoors

At the turn of this new school year I made a promise to my class and, in so doing, a challenge to myself: To spend at least one session a week outside.  The grand intention behind this seemingly simple pledge was to fill the hollow words of good intentions with some substance.

As a self-professed 'outdoorsy' type I realised that, in spite of so much bluster, the number of outdoor learning sessions I had planned and delivered was woefully small.  By endeavouring - and making public - my outdoor intentions it meant that I felt compelled to consider ways and means of stepping out of the classroom.

In order to better engage the children in the process I also mentioned to them that I'd be asking them which sessions they thought could be delivered outside.  This required that I be much more organised than has previously been the case.  Presenting the children with the Significant Aspects being delivered the following week and asking them which ones they thought could be delivered outside and then seeing which day was the most appropriate has meant that I have needed to be flexible in my planning and in my delivery, aware of when I have support and ready for anything from a weather perspective.

Children and their parents / carers have been advised that we would be going outside each week and, therefore, to come to school prepared.  In these balmy September days when the weather is still clement, outdoor learning can and often is fairly spontaneous, but as the nights draw in and the temperature starts dropping, that spontaneity evaporates.  By being organised and checking weather forecasts the hope is that there will never be a week when we cannot go outside.  I even made the most of the free waterproof ponchos on a recent open top bus tour in order to ensure that rain didn't get in the way.

So far ... so dry!

As mentioned in a previous post, I feel there is a link between the great outdoors and the SAMR model although I feel that we are, at best, prone to convincing ourselves that outdoor learning is happening when we are simply learning outdoors.  To my mind, there is a step change required in our approaches if the outdoors is to enhance the learning and not simply act as a surrogate or substitute classroom.  Yes the children love being outside and so any lesson is going to be more memorable as a result, but I do think that there's much more to it and much more that needs to be considered if such lessons are not to be contrived.
Has my teaching changed as a result of my outdoor yearnings?  Only marginally.  Why?  For the simple reason that simple substituting of "in-" for "out-" is just that, simple.  Transformation of the teaching side requires a re-imagining of the structure of the curriculum; a re-imagining in which the outdoors takes the lead.
Has learning changed as a result of my outdoor yearnings? More so.  Why?  In part I think this is due to the removal of the pressure to learn.
The classroom itself is, for some children, a highly stressful environment in which learning is expected of them and failure a grave concern.  In the medium of the outdoors, the lack of walls, desks, chairs - the lack of confinement in general - gives them headspace and takes away the usually implicit expectation that they will learn or, if not then they have failed.
Children who fear failure in the structured environment of things as simple as multilink cubes, lose their inhibitions and trepidation when said cubes are substituted for leaves or sticks or a combination of both.  They are able to apply a looser definition of what is right or wrong and, as a result, exhibit less consternation for the learning.
It's early days but watch this space!

Here be monsters

In the mi(d)st of the background reading for my Masters, I stumbled across an article (http://www.livescience.com/18678-incompetent-people-ignorant.html) that suggested that the less intelligent you are, the less intelligent you realise you are and, as a result, when asked to adjudge how you have fared in a piece of work, your lack of intelligence leads you to believe that you've got everything right.  Those with a modicum of nous will recognise that they can't possibly have got everything right and so will demonstrate said knowledge by giving themselves less than full marks. 

In the dog eat dog world of primary state education, pupil voice is one of a multitude of buzzwords currently swarming in, on and around every classroom.  Involve them in the planning, the marking, the feedback, running the class, running the school and choosing the headteacher.  As a teacher I can just sit back with my feet up, dunking chocolate Hobnobs (other brands of chocolate coated oaty biscuits are available) into mugs of freshly brewed tea.

Or not.

The fact remains that however much voice we give our charges, the above appears to hold exponentially true for them ... And even for those deemed to be more able.

Self-assessment in the primary classroom - below a certain age, perhaps - is an exercise in futility.  Their naive self-belief is unfathomably brilliant but we shouldn't try and convince ourselves that it's doing anyone any favours.  If they think they've done amazing work then that's great until such time as they get feedback that underscores their entirely understandable mediocrity.  Is that of their peers any more valid?  I'd be inclined to say no; it's as unintentionally misguided as their own and similarly blind to said mediocrity.

Should we celebrate mediocrity?  Of course not but I think that there's a threat that, at times, we do.  All with the best intentions, of course: the hallowed Grail of increased self-esteem and/or confidence.  As mentioned herein -  http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/self-efficacy-and-learning/ - monsters lurk in the shallows of well-meaning praise; the depths are a different matter entirely in this world of ever increasing accountability.

I'll continue to seek the assessment views of my class as I'm hoping that practice, on their part, makes perfect, but I'm not going to be holding my breath or basing any judgements on what they tell me.

Dig, if you will, a picture ...

Yestereve, at the tail end of a CAT session in which we had shared some good practice, sought pupil voice in the white noise of the feedback cycle and generally patted ourselves on the back for what we are doing well and skulked - like a shamefaced pooch accused of raiding the dustbin while pleading innocence despite the tinfoil blizzard that has beset the kitchen - in the face of indepth scrutiny that might reveal us for the charlatans we really are, we cast a weary eye over a chapter or two of a book in which it was mentioned that, if learning is to happen, volition and motivation need to converge.

This got me thinking ...

I've always said, somewhat facetiously, that when I was at school my teachers would try and goad me into action by suggesting that if I didn't extract my proverbial finger, I'd be lumbered with a B for my efforts.  

My silent but subconscious retort was always - contrary to that which I outwardly displayed to my concerned parents, academic tutors and anyone else with a vested interest in my education - "What's wrong with a B?"  I almost wonder whether I'd have accepted the B then in return for fewer classroom hours and less agro on the homework front.

Through every exam I ever did, up to and including my undergraduate degree, I coasted.  I did what I had to and no more.

Aged 32 I signed up to do my PGCE and there and then it was that the volition/motivation lines crossed.  I loved what I was doing, I wanted to do well.

32.

Thirty two.

I have 26 children in my class at present.  

Since qualifying as a teacher I have taught upwards of 200 primary aged children.  Some of them will undoubtedly follow the same trajectory as I did and for some it will take even longer.  Some will have peaked already and others will peak just when current assessment strategies demand that they should.

What does it all mean?  No idea.

As I said, it made me think.

Once SAMR unto the breach, dear friends.

In recent weeks, I've found myself being continuously professionally developed in Gaelic, the Outdoors and Tablets; a satisfyingly broad range of topics designed to itch the scratch that is intellectual intrigue and global fascination.

Leaving aside the glottal assault course that is Gaelic for the moment - although I feel certain I will address its idiosyncrasies at some point - the latter two appeared to overlap in ways in which I hadn't dreamed they would.

The SAMR model, should you care, identifies 4 stages in the implementation of new technology moving from Substitution through Augmentation and Modification to Redefinition (https://sites.google.com/a/msad60.org/technology-is-learning/samr-model).

I'm not going to pretend that I'm any kind of expert but it struck me during the session on outdoor learning that a similar model could be applied to the outdoors.  Simply taking the learning outside - substituting the classroom for the great outdoors - is a noble endeavour in itself but redefining the way something is taught through the opportunities afforded by the world beyond the classroom windows I something else entirely.

Exactly how to do this I am not yet in a position to explore, but I will be and I can't wait.  Anything thoughts, suggestions, ideas and the like are more than welcome either here or @alwiello ...

A return to the measuring of school efficacy?

In their most recent diktat, the DfE in their self-assumed guise of Knowledge Tsars, would appear to be deliberately poking an already irked education profession with yet another stick labelled Assessment ("Reception children to face compulsory tests from 2016").  Poking, beating, whipping, flogging, whatever you want to call it, the time in which we teachers can actually do what we're trained to do is being increasingly worn away by the relentless desire to measure: Foundation Profiles, Phonics Screenings, SATS ... by the time they're 11, our little people have been poked, prodded and measured in a manner more befitting the innumerable residents of Hungtingdon Life Sciences than the youth of the 21st Century.

But ...

The baselining proposed in the above article does, hear me out, have its merits.

If we take the DfE at their word and they do do away with KS1 SATs, if schools and progress are to be measured at all* then there needs to be something to measure against.

To my mind, any baseline test should aim to establish basic levels of knowledge - in this case, what a small person knows.

Small people know lots of things and know how to do lots of things.  Some of them know more than others and can do more than others.  Some can read, tie their shoelaces, colour in neatly, recognise their letters, count to 20, say please and thank you, dress themselves and so on.  Others are equally adept at playing with their own poop, chewing things, falling over, sticking everything in their mouths and the rest.  Baselining of each would inform us of where they are starting.

But - yes, another one, and this is perhaps the biggest of all - such a thing in no way indicates what the child is likely to achieve in their life either academically or otherwise.  It is a mark in the sand and no more.

If a child ends up leaving primary school still eating their own poop and falling over then either there are issues with the child or the school has really not done what it's meant to do.   If, however, progress has been made in any way shape or form then well done everybody.

Baselining is not and should not be a measurement against a prescribed standard; it should be a starting point against which to measure progress:  See what the children can do, celebrate it for what it is and then let them develop, grow and learn.  When they leave school (secondary, preferably, but the assessment obsession is a strong one and I can't see that happening!) see how they're doing; see if they can do what you'd expect an 11 year old to be able to do, be it a handstand or the x times table.

So how does this affect school efficacy and its measurement?  Ignore the baseline and celebrate the progress the children have made and how many of them can do what an 11-year-old (not a 13 or 16-year-old) should be able to do.

I suspect that the intentions behind the proposed assessment of small people is just that, suspect.  It would be nice to be proved wrong.

*I'm assuming here that the likelihood of schools not being measured is slim to non-existent.