Tag Archives: Education

There’s nothing quite like teaching

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Sometimes when I’m reading an education blog I notice that comparisons happen between teaching and other jobs or professions. It goes something like this:

“Teachers may be treated like this, but you wouldn’t treat an airline pilot that way…”

Or

“Doctors have this, but teachers only have that…”

I’m sure I’ve done it myself. My wife is a GP and I’ve often found myself musing on the ‘what if’ teaching was like medicine.

But the thing is, there’s nothing quite like teaching.

It really is unique.

Yes, many people are involved in education to some extent – either as parents or in the workplace – but teaching is unique. No one else goes to work with the sole purpose of just teaching: expanding students brains; giving them knowledge; providing opportunities to practise new skills and become better people.

No else experiences that ‘gets it’ moment – the instant when you perceive that the student has just made a significant leap in their learning, increasing their knowledge or gaining new understanding. It’s a magical thing and we get the joy of seeing it happen every day – not just every once in a while. Think about it – in some professions they never have that moment.

There are other things to do. I read somewhere that the only profession with more interactions per hour than teaching is air traffic control. Oh, I’ve just done it. I’ve made the comparison with another profession. That’s the sign that I need to stop.

Teachers: you are amazing.

There’s no need to compare yourselves with other careers or professions – you are unique. Be proud of it.

The Importance of Motivation

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In an ideal world all students would skip happily into schools determined to extract every ounce of knowledge from their able teachers. But it’s not an ideal world and that’s why motivation is important.

Like many, I have marvelled at Sugata Mitra’s success at enabling children to learn to use computers and the internet without even needing to know English. His ‘Minimally Invasive Education’ success in that area had proven results, however I struggle to see how it would translate to my context. If I were to setup a ‘Hole in the Wall’ in the Grosvenor Shopping Centre in Northfield to reach the 40% of the local community who don’t have a home computer nor internet access, I’m not sure if I would have the same results. The fact is that we have free internet access already in our local libraries and yet this service is not oversubscribed with people desperate to gain the benefits of becoming computer or internet literate.

And when Mitra quotes Arthur C Clarke in his Ted Talk on the subject, “any teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be,” I worry about how he is interpreted by his listeners. Can everything be taught by a computer in a wall? Can anything be taught by a computer in a wall in the UK?

I think motivation is the key that turns the engine of education.

In India, where Sugata Mitra’s seminal work took place, there is a national poverty target of 23.9% by 2015. They are not on track to meet it. This means that more than 1 in 4 families live in extreme poverty. For children this means hunger, dirty water, poor sanitation and quite probably living amongst the freely roaming dogs and chickens. For a family, a single educated child can mean wealth beyond all previous comprehension. Therefore the motivation for education is extremely high.

In the UK, the situation sounds similar. One in four children are living in poverty, claims the research. But surely this is a different kind of poverty. In the UK poor children can still expect food, housing, clean water and a free(ish) education. In the UK the electricity supply is pretty reliable, whereas in India even middle-class folk can’t expect to have a 24 hour supply of electricity.

So it would stand to reason that the motivation for education in the UK is not quite so strong as in India. Not all students skip into my school determined to extract every ounce of knowledge from their teachers.

And it is for this reason that schools need some way of motivating their students to learn. Please hear me right: what I am not saying is that we need a new National Curriculum subject entitled “motivation.” But I am saying that motivation is an important issue that needs addressing in any school. How we do it is another question, for another day.

What are schools really for?

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In a previous post I quoted the research that shows that schools contribute around 20% to the achievement of any particular student. The other 80% comes from a student’s family and community.

This opens up a question then – what are schools really for?

Should we

see them as ‘education-only’, with the intention to do that 20% really brilliantly?

Or should we

see schools as a vehicle to break into that 80% – to break into families and communities, making school’s not just about education, but about social services, family support, better parenting, medical aid and so on…

For those of us who would like to see schools treated as the former, it is depressing when government and media make decrees as if schools are the panacea for all society’s problems.

Policies such as judging schools with league tables, or judging SMSC (Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural education) in Ofsted, are both methods to try to force schools to break into that magic 80% of achievement that is actually held within the student’s community. Similarly fads such as SEAL, P4C, VAK learning styles and the like, whilst they can have their own educational merit, can also be used to force teachers into educating into that same 80%, when perhaps their efforts would be better served focussing on the 20%.

Myself, I’d like to be able to that 20% really, really well, without working in the fear that I am actually being judged on the entire 100% of a student’s life chances.

The Purpose of Education is Hope

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Contributing to this year’s Purpos/ed 500 word campaign.

Education is how a society maintains and improves itself. Yet, while education is a relatively straightforward process, that very definition causes problems for discussing its purpose. Depending on whether you have a traditionalist or a progressive perspective, you will either place more emphasis on educating for the maintenance of past standards or educating for a brighter future. Add that to the various cultures, sub-cultures and expectations that exist within a modern multi-cultural society and there exists a vast complexity of purposes for education.

That’s my cap-doffing to the broader debate.

In my own setting there are roughly three groups that we educate, each with their own perceptions on what education is for:

  1. Education for success – these families believe that the school system will give their children opportunities. Despite limited success at higher education themselves, they want that for their children.
  2. Education for happiness – these families just want their children to be happy. Often with negative experiences of their own time at school, they want their children to feel safe and content within school. Success is often linked with celebrity and being able to get the latest DVD before it is out at the cinema.
  3. Education for hardship – these families want their children to be able to survive. They tell their children ”if someone hits you, hit back harder”. They often see school as that annoying place that phones the social worker too often. Sometimes there is illiteracy in the family.

While each of these groups have radically different expectations of society, and therefore the purpose of education, they do have one thing in common – they all need hope.

I am aware that for some, the word ‘hope’ has negative connotations. They think of ‘hopes dashed’ and this leads them to regret. However this is not ‘hope’ as in the aspirations you may have had, but the Hope that things can be better, or at least as good as they once were.

So how does this translate into teaching? The obvious answer is to start a new core subject of the National Curriculum and start running ‘Hope classes’. I’m joking.

Group 1 –  they need so much knowledge at the end of primary school that they can fly into secondary school and perhaps become the first in their families to go to university. Good teaching helps these children love their learning.

Group 2 - good teaching again leads to happiness. The families are surprised at how their child can be both happy and doing well in reading, writing and mathematics. They start to believe that maybe their child can learn enough at primary not just to ‘get through’ secondary school, but to do well there.

Group 3 – good teaching brings success for the child. The family is (in the main) proud of this success and begins to gain a faith in a previously-despised school system.

In each of these groups good teaching produces hope. Hope that things can be better than they were.

So, when I’m stuck I remember: bring Hope – teach well.

What’s being abused here – the teachers or the data?

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I was surprised to see the report on the BBC a few days ago about teachers being abused online. Surprised for two reasons – firstly the headline statement read that over 4 in 10 teachers had been abused online by pupils or parents and secondly that I had contributed to the NASUWT online survey which generated the results.

The email I received from the NASUWT

I was pleased to receive the email, because we’ve begun to have some highly positive experiences with Facebook at my school. I wanted to share them.

We had encountered some unpleasant Facebook incidents some two years ago and so had decided to set up our own Facebook page. It may be just good luck, but it seems that merely having a Facebook presence has deterred any pupils or parents from saying anything inappropriate. Both pupils and parents refer to the page to find out what’s going in school – maybe that has ameliorated their language on the platform.

Anyway – I know that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, so I was hoping by contributing to a big online survey about social networking that a growing number of schools who are using Facebook positively might be discovered and reported on. Nope. Not this time. There was nowhere to record number of times abused = 0. There was nowhere to record positive statements about social networking sites.

It seems that just by filling in the survey I was recording that I had definitely been abused online by either parents or pupils or both.

But if that’s the case I don’t get where the 4 in 10 teachers comes from. You see only about half the teachers in the country belong to the NASUWT. Even during the strike ballot last year less than half of those voted – I can’t imagine that more teachers would respond to an online survey than vote over striking over pension changes.

Furthermore, looking at the BBC report I can see no reference to the data of the survey, no methodology. There’s no numbers saying how many people were actually questioned (I’ve no way of knowing whether it was the online survey I took part in that generated these numbers). The BBC have previous on this. Back in August 2011, they took a report from Plymouth University by Professor Andy Phippen to claim that 35% of teachers have been bullied online. Again there’s no numbers. 35% of teachers sounds bad – but if only 20 teachers have been questioned, it’s not much of a survey.

Delving further, the Andy Phippen survey exists, but again its methodology is questionable. We finally have a number of responders – 377:

In total 377 people responded to the survey, providing a solid, broad base for the
rest of the research. (p4)

We discover that these responders have answered an online questionnaire which they were sent to via ‘teaching mailing lists’ (p3) – although that still doesn’t tell us by which criteria each mailing list was generated.

The crunch for me comes with the question that generates the 35% of teachers have been abused online. I was expecting to see some words akin to:

Have you ever been subjected to any online abuse?

But instead I see the question:

Have you or colleagues ever been subject online abuse?

Or your colleagues? Or your colleagues? What on earth does that do to the data? I work in a small Primary school. Aside from ‘my colleagues’ from other schools that I work with, I have 30 colleagues from solely my school. Given that my school could be about average (and it certainly isn’t), my one vote actually counts for 30. That means each of the 377 responders to this survey are actually answering the key question, not for themselves but for 10, 20, 30 maybe 100 or more colleagues. If we average at 30 that means that there are actually 11310 people in the survey. And 117 out of 11310 as a percentage is 1.03%

So 1% of teachers have been abused online.

Don’t get me wrong, that is still a terrible number. With nearly a million teachers in the country, that means there are over 10000 of us who’ve gone through the pain of online abuse. It’s great that the government funded Safer Internet Centre exists to provide counselling and support for those teachers and strategies to reduce online bullying in the future.

But that’s not the issue here. The issue is that bad data has been used to create a statistic that just isn’t right. Now I’ve got no way of knowing the actual number of educators who have been abused in the sample of 377. The minimum number is 117, because that is how many have been reported. It could, of course, go much higher, but the questioning in the Prof Phippen survey isn’t good enough to find that out.

At least, to give Prof Phippen some credit, his survey does actually have the sample size in it. No joy from the NASUWT survey. The press release about the survey just tells us that  42% of those responding to the survey reported online abuse.

Hang on! “Of those responding?” “Of those responding?”

Again. That could be 42% of 50 people, making the survey next to meaningless. But now think back to the survey – it was a survey of online abuse – there was no opportunity to report ‘no abuse’. And only 42% of those responding said they had been abused? In a survey where you can only say “Yes I have been.”

This quite simply is at best bad data, and at worse is plain lying. And of course the BBC and other reputable news media such as Channel 4 here, and the Independent here are completely taken in by it.

To be fair to the Independent they did interview Chris Keates to find that 1200 teachers had responded to the survey, but nobody asked about the questioning. With around 300 000 members, a response of less than 3000 is again in that ball park area to indicate that about 1% of teachers have experienced online abuse.

For the last time, online abuse of teachers is a terrible thing, but we’re not going to fix it by inaccurate data and sensationalised headlines during conference season.

Yes: schools should be fined for not teaching reading

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So, the recent report on the Summer 2011 riots recommended that schools should be fined for not teaching reading. I agree.

Michael Bond, the author of the much loved Paddington Bear, was on the BBC on Monday morning. He said that the two most important things you can do with children are spending time with them and teaching them to read. He went on to say that reading must start in the home.

And for many families this is the case. Reading does start in the home. Children are exposed to books from birth. They are read to every night. They understand which way to turn the pages and which way to read the script. They may even recognise a few words.

However this is not the case for all families. For some children their first exposure to books is at school. For a sizeable minority in my school this is the case. And for many more, whilst the children still have had some exposure to books, they still enter school behind the national average for reading.

In my school we have to teach reading. Merely giving the children a home reader and hoping doesn’t work. The children have to be taught how to read from scratch.

In contrast, at the school where my own children go, less teaching of reading is needed. This is because in general the children enter the school more able to read and continue with more home support of reading as they progress through the school.

Yet funding is more or less the same. Yes, my school probably does pick slightly more special needs funding, but it is for the few children who are a long way below the national average, not those who are slightly behind. And despite that, the teaching of reading at my school really works. Where nearly 80% of the children enter the school behind the national average, less than 20% leave the school behind the national average.

We taught reading well to a lot of children.

I suspect the measure being suggested by the panel that investigated the Summer 2011 riots would suggest fining schools like us for allowing some children to leave us at a standard that is lower than the national average. But wouldn’t be great if it was a measure that rewarded schools who actually teach reading and don’t just leave it up to supportive parents.