The Great Grammar School Distraction of 2016

The recent debate about the proposed grammar school expansion is interesting but it’s just another distraction from the real issues that affect education.

These issues are

1. the quality and quantity of teachers available to teach.
2. The growing emphasis on the performance of schools over the performance of students, therefore increasing the amount of gaming that is in the system and consequently increasing the amount of dishonesty amongst teachers and children.

If grammar schools were to address either of these issues, then they would be a good thing. But the impact of grammar schools would be peripheral and indirect at best.

It’s interesting how three years ago a crisis of a lack of headteachers, was responded to by introducing a new curriculum and how a year ago the crisis in teacher recruitment was met by radical changes in how children are assessed. Then in June the Public Account Committee reported that ministers have no plans to address the recruitment crisis. No. Instead they would like to expand grammar schools.

Two of my children go to a grammar school. They are both thriving. They are thriving because the school is full of great teachers. The great teachers go there because grammar schools find it easier to recruit because they have higher performing students from more aspirational families. And far fewer behaviour problems. However they are still vulnerable to bad teachers. My son had one last year for a few months in his computing lessons and he actually went backwards. It’s the teacher that makes the difference to the child.

I have no problem with grammar schools. But every child in this country deserves great teachers. If we restructure to more grammar schools does that then mean that some children get the best teachers and the rest will just have to get by?

No. We don’t fix these issues by restructuring the school system, it has to be more direct than that and focus on the teachers themselves: what make teachers great? And what keeps them great without burning out?

The Encouragement Box

What’s your stick?

In my last post I wrote how I had lost a considerable amount of confidence in my previous post. These next few posts are dedicated to how I’ve begun to regain it.

Confidence is a strange thing. You can have confidence in yourself, but people can lose confidence in you no matter what you feel. Confidence can be affected by external factors, like what people say about what you do or how you work. But you can affect your own confidence too, make choices that increase or decrease how confident you feel about something. In fact the verse of the day that I read this morning (Hebrews 20:35) it said: “So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.” Confidence therefore is something that you can choose to get rid of. Or maybe we can choose to stop doing the things that once made us confident, and therefore we lose confidence.

During the Summer this was made clear to me at the New Wine Summer Conference. During a talk by Danielle Strickland a question was asked: “what’s your stick?” Danielle Strickland went on to relate the story of Moses who when finally he had got his people the Israelites out of Egypt was presented with the seemingly impassable boundary of the Red Sea. The Egyptian army, the mightiest army of the time was on their tale, time was ticking and it seemed that the Israelites were doomed to be destroyed. They moaned to Moses who in turn reassured them that everything would be alright if only they stood still. But God’s response contradicts Moses. He told them to stop crying out and get moving and he reminded Moses to use his stick (OK, the passage says ‘staff’, but that just makes me think of Gandalf.)

Oh yeah, thought Moses, my stick. The same stick that I had with me when God, the infinite being, spoke to me from the burning bush. The same stick that I had when I called ten plagues down on Egypt. The same stick that turned into a snake and ate all of the snakes of Pharoah’s wizards. That stick.

That stick.

I forgot that I’ve been given things that have got me through tricky times before. These things are the metaphorical equivalent of Moses staff. Or maybe Moses staff is the metaphorical equivalent of them. I’m not quite sure which way round it is. These habits have worked before but I’ve forgotten them, fallen out of practise at using them, but they are the best things at reminding me, who I am. They keep me confident. In other words, I had thrown away some good habits – chosen to lose my confidence.

And they are simple things. Like being creative – writing some words or a song to express how I feel, singing, playing my guitar, praying, singing in tongues, cycling. These are things that don’t take much time or effort. And they are good for me.

And of course these things are different for different people. As you read this you will know that you have a good habit which when you practise makes you feel good about yourself. You’ve probably got more than one. Practising them keeps your confidence up, so do them. Do them more. They’re good for you.

The Importance of Confidence in Teaching

I’ve written before that I believe four things define a teacher:

1. subject knowledge
2. pedagogical skill
3. motivation
4. confidence

I think too often schools over-focus on one of those areas to the detriment of the others. It may be that a school works on team building to develop the motivation of its staff, but neglects to look at the pedagogical skills that are needed to teach good lessons. I’m sure you can think of your own examples where schools work too hard on one of those qualities while the other three are going down the pan.

As individuals we all have our different strengths and for me my subject knowledge has been strong whereas my pedagogical skills have been developed thanks to the grace, patience and expertise of a whole host of teachers I have worked with over the years. I’ve never really considered that a lack of motivation or indeed confidence would affect me, although I have seen how it has affected others over the years.

But as I reflect on the reasons for my necessary ending at my previous job, I realise that I had lost some confidence. As I began to receive both public and private criticism of my practice I found that I worked harder to fix the problems which had been identified. But the criticisms didn’t go away, my confidence did instead.

One example is a lesson observation that I knew was coming up on a Monday morning. I’ve been observed many times, but never under such criticism and I found that I worried about the lesson all weekend: planning and re-planning what I would do, unable to focus on the things we were doing as a family and losing sleep.

When the two observers came into the room on Monday, I found that any confidence in my ability to do a good lesson just drained away. Some elements of the lesson went well, some didn’t and the external criticism increased. As my confidence decreased I found that in turn it affected my motivation. I was not looking forward to the school day and I was not enjoying the interactions with the children or my colleagues as much as I once had. Seeing the people who were observing me just in passing around school made me feel physically sick, so I did my best to avoid any interactions with them.

In short, whether or not the original criticisms were deserved, by this point my confidence was so low that I was actually under-performing. Something had to change – another realisation that led to my Necessary Ending that I have written about so much recently.

Over the summer break I learned some things about regaining confidence. Now at a new job with my confidence firmly back in place and feeling motivated to get up and teach every day it’s time to write about some ways I’ve found handy to increase confidence. But they’ll have to wait for another day.

My Uncle and the Secondary Modern

ClassDojo is Awesome

I’m new to a school and wanted a way to motivate the children but use the school’s behaviour system at the same time.

I’ve come from a school where I was both the technology lead and the behaviour lead to a school where I am neither. At my previous school I had built up Google Apps from scratch and a behaviour system that worked. At my new school I was just getting my head round Outlook for the first time in about 10 years.

All I had was the internet and the memory that someone had once recommended using Class Dojo for classroom management.

So on Monday morning I realised I had failed to print out any sticker charts for the school’s house points. I wasn’t that confident with the school’s printer or indeed using Publisher, which I am well out of practice with. But I had the internet.

Twenty minutes later Class Dojo was up and working, filled with the names of the children in the class with the generic rewards rep[laced with the rewards that match the system of the new school. I had even grouped the children into their ‘houses’.

It is literally awesome. It had saved me time, the school paper and the boys love it. Ace.

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ClassDojo is Awesome

I’m new to a school and wanted a way to motivate the children but use the school’s behaviour system at the same time.

I’ve come from a school where I was both the technology lead and the behaviour lead to a school where I am neither. At my previous school I had built up Google Apps from scratch and a behaviour system that worked. At my new school I was just getting my head round Outlook for the first time in about 10 years.

All I had was the internet and the memory that someone had once recommended using Class Dojo for classroom management.

So on Monday morning I realised I had failed to print out any sticker charts for the school’s house points. I wasn’t that confident with the school’s printer or indeed using Publisher, which I am well out of practice with. But I had the internet.

Twenty minutes later Class Dojo was up and working, filled with the names of the children in the class with the generic rewards rep[laced with the rewards that match the system of the new school. I had even grouped the children into their ‘houses’.

It is literally awesome. It had saved me time, the school paper and the boys love it. Ace.

Gender discrimination in my classroom? Never!

“You’re running like a girl!”

It was some time ago now when on a field somewhere in Birmingham I was shocked to hear the teacher in charge of the other school’s football team shout that. Presumably he was trying to encourage one of his football players to do better. And with righteous indignation I relayed what happened to my colleagues the next day. Of course I would never do anything like that.

And so for many years I have taught in various places and circumstances, content in the knowledge that I offer equal opportunities to the girls and boys in my class. Or so I thought.

This year I have started teaching at an independent boys school. One of the big changes has been getting used to calling the children in my class ‘boys’ and not ‘children’ or ‘kids’ or even ‘kiddiwinks’. (Sorry about that). But an interesting and more subtle thing has happened too. Starting the school has challenged how I view class dynamics.

Here’s an example. When I joined the school a couple of that staff who taught them last year informed me that a certain boy ‘is a lively one’. I immediately started thinking about which sensible girl I could put that boy with to calm then down. And then I realised there were no sensible girls, because you don’t get girls in a boys school.

And another example. I printed some display banners in outline so that they could be coloured by the children. That way the children could have more ownership of their classroom. And I wondered to myself which girls would volunteer to do the task. And then I realised no girls would do that task, because there are no girls in boys schools.

How fascinating.

Of course the boys did the colouring. And the lively boy is just that – lively, but quite able to respond to instructions. So there are no problems. But it’s made me wonder about the assumptions I’ve made for years.

Is there anybody else out there that does the ‘sensible girl’ thing? Or lets the girls do the colouring while the boys play with the marble run and the Brio? Or is it just me?

Passcode on iPad Google Drive app is genius

Passcode on iPad Google Drive app is genius

Don’t wait for the incompatible wish to come true.

People don’t think the same

Proverbs 18v6 (The Message)

One of the lessons I learned in ending my previous job was that people don’t think the same as each other.

It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? People are different, so clearly they think differently from each other. But I had made a presumption that we were all at least on the same bus as each other. But I was wrong. We’re not.

In my last post I mentioned I had read Henry Cloud’s book ‘Necessary Endings‘ and how helpful that had been. As I read through Chapter 7, entitled ‘The Wise, the Foolish and the Evil: Identifying which kinds of People Deserve Your Trust’, I realised I had made a couple of catastrophic errors in how I related to various people who were working with me to improve the school. Firstly I presumed that others thought the same as me and secondly I presumed that all the advice I received would be wise.

Henry Cloud says this:

“The truth is that not everyone on planet Earth is like you. Not all take responsibility for themselves or care about how their actions are affecting other people or the mission. Moreover, some are even worse than that. Some people are actually out to do you harm.”

Necessary Endings, p120

Reading this chapter was vital to me because it made me realise where I had gone wrong in my communication with other people. Cloud is clear that one of the main differences between wise people and foolish people is how they receive feedback – wise people listen and respond, whereas foolish people shift the blame and make it your fault. I was in the position of seeking feedback in how to do a couple of parts of my job that I hadn’t done before. But when advice and feedback was not forthcoming I began to lose hope. When I was told I had to improve without advice or feedback entirely in my own strength the hope drain continued. By admitting my errors and failures in the journey of the school from ‘good’ to ‘requires improvement’, I had expected to be advised on how to put things right. Instead my failure became part of the narrative of the school. Now I was hopeless.

Up to this point I had mainly focused on how well I was performing at the various functions involved in my role as Deputy headteacher. Now I was confronted with the fact that my communication to others had contributed to a narrative in which my position was increasingly untenable.

Cloud’s solution about dealing with foolish people is to stop talking. “Talking about a problem with a fool does not help it all.” Cloud writes. At the end of the chapter, he talks about getting to a ‘good hopelessness’. I mentioned earlier that I had been beginning to lose hope. Now as I read ‘Necessary Endings’ I realised that actually that hopelessness was a good place – I was hopeless for my role at that school, and that meant I could venture into the unknown of finding an exciting role somewhere else.

And that’s what I did.