Have Fun!

When I say good bye to people I often say to them, "Have fun," and I really mean it.  We only have one shot at this life so we might as well enjoy the ride.

A little while ago I taught a particular sixth form student who would come into lessons on a Friday afternoon and declare, "I don't want to go to work tonight."  He did this week after week until eventually I said to him that he didn't have to go to work.  He replied that he did have to go to work or he would get sacked.  So then I told him that he really did not have to go to work, it was his choice to go and he went because he did not like the alternative.  He had a choice to make.  I can't remember him complaining about his Friday evening shift ever again.

I think it is important that if someone is not enjoying something that they stop and reevaluate.  Sometimes the thing that they are not enjoying is unavoidable - washing up, for example - but often it is avoidable.  Sometimes with a small tweak it can be eliminated, although sometimes a lot more than a small tweak is needed and it might require a lot of upheaval to effect the change and it might require a lot of soul searching to decide if the upheaval is worthwhile.  But my point stands, why continue to do something that is no fun, or perhaps positively draining?

Obviously, this can apply to all aspects of life, but it certainly applies to our life as teachers.  Teachers are great at filling their days with tasks that are not strictly related to teaching and learning.  For example, the football team that you've been running for the last four years even though your subject specialism is History.  Perhaps you feel that your coaching is getting a little stale and you could do with a break, but who will take over?  Actually, this is not your problem.  You may well be, unwittingly being taken advantage of - Fred always does that team.  If you give sufficient notice that you will no longer be looking after the team then their is no problem.  But what about the children?  What if no-one else steps up?  Don't guilt trip yourself.  The chances are someone else will step up, perhaps there is a new teacher who enjoys a bit of football coaching, or perhaps an established member of staff will take over.  But more importantly, what about YOU?  It's your life and it's your choice.  There is no point in living your life just to please others.  The choice that you made several years ago that was right at the time may not be the right one now.

We all have choices.  They may not all be pleasant or easy, but we have them nonetheless.  It is important that we use good judgement in making then and we weigh up the different options sensibly before we exercise our choice, but it is our choice to make.  And we certainly have a choice to have fun!

Who's it For?

Workload is always a hot topic for teachers and I have just come through a particularly tough time myself.  I really love my core job.  Teaching young people is great.  Being with youngsters day in day out may not be everyone's cup of tea, but they have enormous energy and they do not have the cynicism and world weariness of so many adults.  Young adults so often live for the moment and enjoy life and being with them is a real privilege.

Introducing them to new ideas and new skills is an enticing challenge. Thinking through a way of introducing a difficult concept and then leading learners through a well planned and resourced sequence of lessons is what I enjoy; it is why I am a teacher.

Unfortunately, during the last few weeks I confess, I have taken by eye off the teaching ball and I have been concentrating on admin.  If I don't complete admin tasks on time I will get it in the neck from someone, but if my lessons are a little below parr when I am not being observed, then no-one will notice - and that's my core responsibility.

The main problem I have been dealing with is completing different tasks for different people - all in the same time frame.  I am sure that some of you are already thinking that with a little better time management I could have spread these tasks out.  Actually, if the documents that I have been working on are to be current and valid, I could not spread out the tasks; they all really did need doing in the same time span.

Teachers do not have one boss, as most people in other industries do.  For some tasks I am responsible to my department, for other to my pastoral team, for others to the senior leadership team, and for others to outside agencies such as the local authority or exam boards.  Nicky Morgan, the current Education Secretary, recently ran a workload survey in conjunction with the TES, which was certainly a step in the right direction.  I am certain that one of the main drivers of teachers' workload problems is that we all serve several bosses.  If each of these bosses demands a time limited task to be completed at the same time, the candle gets burned at both ends and the teacher in the middle gets burnt out.  Each of the tasks will probably be very valuable but the different bosses do not liaise with each other and coordinate the work, and in some cases this would be impossible, but it is still the teacher who is left to square the circle of demands on his time.

It seems to me that despite schools' best intentions - and my school really does prioritise teaching and learning - it is too easy for the teacher's core activity to be superseded by admin that come from too many sources, which cannot be right.

Too Late?

In another time and in another place, I used to be a physics teacher.  Everyone in the department had dreadful problems introducing simple formulae, such as speed = distance/time, to GCSE classes.  The resistance to the idea that we could use mathematical techniques in science lessons was immense and deeply rooted.  It was very clear that in the learners' conception of science, there was no place for calculations.  Of course their view of science and what it included had been formed by their experience in school over the previous nine years.  Let's face it, if they hadn't encountered formulae in science in all this time, then perhaps they had a point.

All those years ago, we came up with a radical solution.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of GCSE learners found using formulae too challenging, we decided that learners in Year 7 should get to grips with these same simple formulae.  These Year 7 learners, who where still forming in their minds a picture of science and what it included, could easily do the calculations that GCSE students couldn't cope with.  They could manipulate the formulae so that they could work out distance traveled given speed and time - those GCSE learners certainly would not do this.

I am certain that this was nothing to do with 'ability'.  I am sure that it was more a case of learners closing their mind to things that they did not want to do, or to things that they perceived had no place in the subject.  By introducing the concept as early as we could we broke down these barriers and learners accepted that the concept had a valid place in the subject and that it was something they should embrace.

In the last couple of months I have encountered something similar.  As you will no doubt know, ICT is no more in schools and it has been replace with Computing.  For all of our Key Stage 3 learners this is new, although we have been teaching aspects of Computing for a considerable time.  In Year 9 we are teaching all sorts of concepts that will probably end up in either the Year 7 or 8 curriculum, once things settles down.  One of these concepts is binary.  I have devised a series of lessons to take learners through the basics of binary.  When I taught these lessons to Year 9s including 'top set' learners, I met a great deal of resistance.  Many of the learners had the opinion that concepts of number had no place in their lessons with computers.  Several learners really struggled with the work.  This was a big contrast to the way in which the Year 8 learners tackled the exactly the same work.  Almost without exception, my mixed ability Year 8 learners tackled all of the work quickly, accurately and without complaint.  The only explanation can be that the Year 9 learners, who were on paper 'higher ability', had created barriers to learning in their minds.  I am certain that it was more a case of digging their heels in and not engaging with the task as well as they might.

So, what can you take away from these anecdotes?  Learners construct their own vision of the limits of a subject, which may be different from the teacher's conception of the subject.  These limits are set by experience and their experience needs to be broadened out while they are still creating their idea of the content of the subject.  Also, don't under estimate younger learners; they are often capable of more than you might imagine.  So, if your exam classes are struggling with a concept or idea, try introducing it to them when they are younger when their ideas are still developing.

What's The Point?

As any experienced teacher will know, being crystal clear about the objectives of a lesson is vital to success.  But an even more vital question is: what should those objectives be?

We all have national curriculum programmes of study or exam specifications to cover and rightly, if we don't get these covered in the allotted time then we will be pulled up for it.  Most schemes of work are devised with the idea of covering the material in a given specification and the scheme will ensure that everything is covered in a given number of lessons.  There will also be time allocated to completing any controlled assessment or coursework, if there is any for that subject.

This is all very well, but inevitably, some learners will not make the progress that they should and some will be frustrated when they don't 'get' things that they think they should.  These learners can be in danger of their progress stopping altogether and they can become stuck.  Once learners are stuck, as any teacher knows, it can be a really difficult job to get them progressing again.

If learners are to progress at all they need certain attitudes.  Some learners come to us with these attitudes fairly well embedded and others come to us without them.  There has been a lot written recently about Dweck's growth mindset and encouraging students to adopt a growth mindset.  To an extent I am thinking of the attitudes that learners need in order to display a growth mindset, attitudes such as perseverance, reflection, risk taking, independence, collaboration, and realising that they are responsible for their own learning and that learning is not inflicted upon them.  I am certain that learners will not make the progress expected of them unless they are at least aware of these characteristics or even better, they have them embedded in their actions.

It is clear that lower achievers, and in fact some higher achievers, do not have these characteristics and progress for them, at least in some areas is difficult.  I firmly believe that for this group of students it is worth having lessons where the objective is to improve an attitude to learning, such as perseverance or risk taking.  The lesson can be successfully delivered through the medium of the subject that the learner is studying.  This is one of the occasions where displaying the objectives at the start of the lesson would make the lesson less effective.  It is important they the learners believe, at least initially, that they aren't doing anything out of the ordinary.  The lesson will be more effective if the objective emerges naturally from the tasks that the learners are engaged in during the lesson.

In my subject, computing, it is vital that the learners are risk takers and will persevere in the face of failure if they are to progress.  It is vanishingly rare a programmer working on a program will only meet success.  The usually experience is that a programmer will meet a series of setbacks - failure - that need to be overcome before the program works properly.  Recently I gave my Year 9 class a series of programming tasks of increasing difficulty.  The first ones they could do without too much effort, but when they were attempting the later ones they were experiencing more and more failures - increasingly they needed to persevere and take risks.

At the end of the lesson I asked the students how they felt when they were doing a task and failing repeatedly.  They could describe this really well; they talked about anger, frustration and annoyance.  I then asked them how they felt when they had completed a really difficult level.  Once more, their replies were excellent - elation, ecstatic and overjoyed.  I asked them to relate these two feelings and they soon realised that there was a direct relationship: the more they suffered the greater the feeling of success.  I then related this to perseverance and risk taking.  Most of them took on board the idea that these too attitudes are a requirement for success in programming.

I am certain that this experience will help the learners when we go on to more complex tasks.  At the very least I will be able to say to them, "Do you remember how you struggled and how you felt when you were successful?  You need to persevere and take risks on this task too.  Then you'll feel the success."

So, You Want To Engage Your Learners More Effectively?

Do you want to know why some learners are really disengaged from lessons?  If you want to get an idea across to your learners then you have to give them some sort of emotional stake in their learning.  Advertising executives and politicians have known this for years.  Cars are not sold on their mpg figures and the capacity of their boot.  They are sold by appealing to the buyer's emotions.  For years Audi has sold its cars with the slogan, "Vorsprung durch Technik."  The fact that few people know what it means does not matter.  People just assume that it has something to do with quality German engineering and therefore it must be good.  All the talk in the political arena about immigration has little to do with the facts; politicians are blatantly appealing to voters' emotions.

So, what has this got to do with the classroom?  If you want to engage your learners then you really should try to engage their emotions.  Imagine a lesson about nuclear power.  Imagine that the teacher has put the objective on the board: to understand the advantages and and disadvantages of nuclear power.  I bet that more than 50% of the class would turn off as soon as they read that.  Now imagine the next door classroom where the teachers has put up a headline: "Permission to Build Nuclear Station in [insert name of the next town] Granted," along with a photo of a nuclear power station.  I bet there would be a buzz in the room straight away.  Suddenly, the learners have a stake in the lesson.  The lesson could be constructed to look at the advantages and disadvantages and next lesson there could be a full blown debate about the issue.  I am certain that, in their research, learners would unearth most of the hard facts required in this science lesson.

Recently a colleague started a Year 10 lesson by telling the class that Facebook would be enforcing a strict minimum age limit of 16, and that all the accounts of those under this age would be wiped.  As you can imagine, the learners were engaged from that first moment.  The only problem was containing and channeling the students' reaction effectively.  I am sure that the lesson was far more memorable than, objective: the advantages and disadvantages of social networks.

A few days ago I taught a lesson about copyright.  I put up on the board a series of scenarios for the students to consider.  Is it alright to copy homework?  Is is alright to copy a cd to listen to in the car,  or to give it to a friend, or to sell it?  What about downloading music?  Or using a photo you have found on the internet on your Facebook page?  All the questions were designed to be issues that the learners deal with themselves.  I put the questions up and let them talk.  I did not intervene, I just let the discussion develop and it was very interesting hearing the different points of view that the learners expressed.  Eventually we came round to the idea of copyright and why it exists.  Again, the learners' reaction and engagement was far better that if I had started with, objective: understanding copyright.

If you really want to engage your learners in their learning, you must engage their emotions.  You must provoke a reaction so that they really think about what you are presenting them with.  this is especially important if what you are teaching is very factual.  It is a bit like poking a stick into a wasps' nest; you get a reaction, you get emotional involvement, and you get engagement.

Playground Culture

I was amazed to hear my son utter the immortal words, "Quis...ego," when he came home from his school, which is a 'bog standard comprehensive'.  When I was a schoolboy - in the depths of the last century - at a traditional English school where we studied Latin, there were often cries of "Quis" closely followed by "Ego".  Us boys were so lacking in gumption that it took our Latin teacher to explain to us why we used these terms.  Quis is Latin for 'who?'  Quis was called when someone had something that they did not want any longer.  It may have been some food, a marble, a conker or other small item.  So, quis was code for 'who wants it?'  Ego means 'I'.  So the call of 'Ego' simply showed that the caller wanted the item.  The first person to call ego received it, which meant that at times there was a veritable chorus of boys shouting 'Ego!' You has to watch out as sometimes the item was something that you really didn't want, rubbish, for example.

As soon as I heard the phrase I quizzed by son about it and how it is used in the playground.  He confirmed that it is used in exactly the same way as it was in my school which is over 300 miles and over 30 years away.  I asked him if he knew where the words came from and he had no idea - much as I hadn't all those years before.  My son had more of an excuse though; Latin is not taught in his school and hasn't been for decades.

I have to say that I was secretly pleased that this tradition from my own school days is being continued but I would love to know how it has survived.  I would like to think that it has been used in the playground all that time and it has been passed on from generation to generation without a break.  There is another possibility.  Perhaps it has been reintroduced into the school by a pupil from another school who has brought the tradition with him.  I think I may well have to do a little detective work on this one.

How ever this piece of playground lore has survived, it is interesting that it has.  It has also outlived the school subject that brought it into being by some margin.  This devise clearly has an ongoing currency in schoolboy culture or it certainly would have fallen out of use.  It would be interesting to know if my son's children will use 'quis...ego' in their playgrounds in years to come; I know my father would have certainly have recognised it.

In a Position to Learn?

Some of you will know that besides teaching, I coach rugby. I was coaching scrummaging recently to two groups. One group consisted of fairly experienced scrummagers who had played regularly for both the school team and their rugby club for a number of years. The other group were complete scrummaging novices.  I went through the absolute basics with both groups, mainly concerning achieving the correct body positions. It was interesting that at the end of the session, all the novices had better technique than all the experienced players.  It was clear that the experienced players had got away with poor technique and had been fairly successful with it and they were not very receptive to having their technique questioned and making an effort to improve it.

For me, there are several lessons for the classroom here. First, people who have no preconceptions can often progress fastest as there is nothing to unlearn, providing that the learner wants to learn the new skill. The learner's mind must be opened up to learning and then rapid progress is possible. This emphasises the importance of high quality first teaching. If the skill is taught rigorously and robustly then a new skill can be established quickly.  On the other hand, if the skill is taught poorly and a less than optimal technique is taught, then the learner can be at a permanent disadvantage.

Second, if the basics are not practised then the skill will deteriorate and bringing the skill back up to scratch can be difficult.  The learner may well think that they can perform the skill sufficiently well, let's face it, their experience tells them that they are right.  This shows that basics must not be taken for granted and that they need emphasising and making explicit especially when more advanced skills are being worked on. It is important that previous work is revisited and key points brought out before more advanced ideas are introduced.  This can lead to people moaning that they've done this before.  The trick is to dress up old ideas in new clothes so that learners don't necessarily recognise that they are doing the same thing again.  Changing context can work well here.  We have already seen that a skill can be established quickly with high quality first teaching, but it can only become embedded if it is revisited.

Third, people who think that they know what they are doing can be reluctant learners. Perhaps these people believe that they are expert because there experience tells then that they are doing well.  They are often unaware that another level of learning exists and, because they do not believe that another level exists they are unable to access it. These people simply rehearse their own tried and tested method without really engaging with a more expert mode. Perhaps they need to be put in a situation where their method no longer works and they are forced to confront the shortcomings in their method.  The challenge is to get these people to realise that their own method can be improved upon and that a more refined method may be more efficient and require less effort on their part.

Finally, I really do believe that teachers who get out of the classroom and do other things become better teachers.  I often find it interesting when inspiration strikes.  So, get outside the classroom and keep your eyes and ears open, you never know when you might get a deeper insight into your teaching.