The Behaviour Guru: Tom Bennett's School Report

King Agamemnon and the Angry Birds: what have we learned in 3000 years?

2013-04-07T09:02:00.003-07:00

Scene: 13th Century BC Greece; the throne room of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. The King waits alone in front of a huge enchanted mirror. Suddenly the surface of the mirror ripples with a rainbow of colour, and two men step through, both dressed strangely.

The King: By Zeus you have returned. To what strange land did Circe's mirror take you?
First traveller: To the 21st century, Lord Agamemnon.
The King: And what marvels does such a future hold? Show me.
First Traveller: It is a world of magic, majesty. (He empties a bag on the floor in front of the King) See: this black box of glass allows the owner to talk to anyone across the known world. Like the Delphi oracle it answers any question man's mind can frame, and like a mechanical homunculus labours silently to its master's tasks.
The King: It shines like a lamp. Here, give me it. (He examines it) What's this?
First traveller: Angry Birds, majesty.
The King: I would know these Angry Birds.

Three hours later

The King: We shall return to conquer these magical swine later. What other miracles will our descendants enjoy?
First Traveller: Every joy and comfort that philosophy can conjure, majesty. The art of the apothecary has been elevated such that many live into great ages of forty, fifty and more. It is possible to wear the same teeth throughout a man's life. Horses have given way to iron wagons, driven by trapped Djinn of fire that roar and steam as they propel men along faster than wind. Great cities stud the world as bright and as tall as Olympus. Men fly around the world inside giant falcons...
The King: Like the Birds that are Angry?
First Traveller: (pauses) Sort of. Sure.Wars are settled as the Gods do; by hurling great thunderbolts of fire across nations, and by all manner of Hephaestian device. It is a world of the casually miraculous.
The King: Astonishing. Nature itself bows to the sorcery of mens' minds, centuries hence. What a future you have shown to me. And you, man: what part of our kind's destiny did you explore? What have you to tell me of our path, millenia from now?
Second Traveller: (puts hands in pockets) Er...
The King: Speak. Your companion has sought the marvels of men's conquest of nature. What did you explore?
Second Traveller: Schools, sir. I spent some time speaking to their wisest augurs, and studied their greatest arts.
The King: Ah, this is happy news! What secrets of men's minds have our descendants divined? What alchemy have the wisest of their mages discerned?
Second Traveller: Well....
The King: Well what?
Second Traveller: Well it is said that children learn best when they are taught by experts, and given new information which they are then asked to recall and explain. It is also said that this should be neither too easy, nor too hard.
The King: (not impressed)....go on.
Second Traveller: (visibly sweating) And they also say that they should probably be tested from time to time. And shouldn't muck about.
The King: Is that it?
Second Traveller: Pretty much.
The King: Hmm. That sounds exactly how my own education went. Is there nothing to match the invention of the Furious Birds of Nemesis? Be careful how you reply, or you will suffer the fate of the Boss Pig in Ham 'em High.
Second Traveller: There's this, my liege. (Pulls out a cap)
The King: What's this?
Second Traveller: It is a Hat of Thinking. Placing it on a child's head gives it the wisdom of Hera.
The King: (trying it on) My mind is no clearer.
Second Traveller: It is because you are so wise already.
The King: Ah yes, I knew that. What else?
Second Traveller: (warming to a theme) It is said that children learn best, not when taught by a teacher, but by each other, in groups.
The King: That seems somewhat counter intuitive.
Second Traveller: You can't argue with science, majesty.
The King: Let it be so throughout the land from now on. And let the spinning wheels of Mycenae weave a coloured hat for every child, until we rear a nation of Apollos. Anything else?
Second Traveller: Yes- the children should be taught through the medium of drama and role-play. They should cast their books...
The King: Nobody has books. This is the 13th century BC.
Second Traveller:....their scrolls aside and be taught instead how they feel about carpentry, blacksmithing, war and nature.
The King: How are they expected to...are you sure this is all legit?
Second traveller: Their sages were quite clear on the matter.
The King: Well...if you say so. I'll have every script and scroll pressed to feed the furnace. What more?
Second Traveller: If it pleases sir, I have a most wonderful thing that will transport teacher and pupil alike to greatness. (pulls out a piece of paper)
The King: A note?
Second Traveller: A design, majesty. It is the architect's plans for the fabled Learning Bicycle of the 21st Century. I wasn't quite clear how it worked, but it seemed very popular.
The King: Let us build a fleet then, and raise an army of....
Second Traveller: ...of Independent, creative digital natives and discovery learning explorers.
The King: You know, for a minute there I thought you were going to say that we had learned nothing in all those centuries. Of course, I would have to kill you for your failure.
Second Traveller: (going pale) Yes, they have this philosophy too in the future. They call it high-stakes accountability.
The King: Instead, you are more the hero than your companion, for his marvels have run out of power and we have no leads or wall sockets to restore the spirits inside. I will announce you as Prince of Education to the people.

[Kingdom promptly falls]

Note:
King Leonidas has 300 Followers.
Xerxes likes this.

What can we learn from the Kryptonian Education System?

2013-04-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

Never mind the Union Christmas Lists, the earthquakes in education, Free Schools, and the whole damn circus. What I want to know is: how smart is Superman? And how did he get like that?

Fortunately the comics provides clues.

Forget all the epistemological argy bargy of cognitive psychologists, handbagging each other with different definitions of intelligence, IQ, Multiple Intelligences and such; in Superman's Universe we have a handy 1-12 scale, which must make comparative assessments over time a doddle. Here's how it goes:

'Highest level of genius intellect currently defined is a 12th level intellect.

this has been displayed as the ability to consciously have 12 simultaneous thought processes at a genius level of intellect being performed concurrently. Intellectual capacity at that level is capable of developing sciences and concepts beyond the comprehensions of even other known geniuses and associated with the potential to master an unlimited number of disciplines. Such intellects are capable of memorizing entire libraries of information, multitasking and building entire mental simulations with the speed and accuracy of supercomputers.

It has been hinted, however, that intellects at a level greater than ten are inherently unstable and prone to erratic behavior'

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/18703/brainiac-has-a-twelfth-level-intellect-what-level-intellect-does-superman-have

This means Brainiac, Sam Freedman, etc. But did you get that last bit? Brainy people are ticking time bombs, so get your G&T coordinator working at the same desk as your social worker and save yourself some time. Unfortunately this scale isn't much use for schools because....

'The entire 21st century Earth's population is considered to be at a 6th level of intellect.'

Ah. Not so useful. Kind of takes the fun out of common assessments. 'Well done, kids, everyone's a level 6. Again.' Superman comes in at Level 8, which means presumably that by the end of Key Stage 4 he'd be expected to get at least an A* in English Language. Funnily enough, level 8 is also where many of our Year 7 kids are coming in from their feeder schools, but when we test them three months later they all seem to drop down about three levels and we get clobbered by Ofsted for value added. Must be that 'dip' thing I hear about.

(Incidentally, for a beautiful discussion on how Superman's super-intellect works, go here, where serious and literate people take time and effort to consider such things.)

Kryptonian Schools

Superman of course isn't a product of just any old education system, not even Finland. He's the Last Son of Krypton, where even the year 1s are hothoused to little Einsteins. Junior doesn't get engineering at age five? Get Junior into a nurture group quick.

'Kryptonians, though otherwise completely human, were superior both intellectually and physically to natives of Earth'

http://superman.wikia.com/wiki/Krypton

So, somewhat of a head start. Kids from Krypton could enjoy further advantages, the likes of which are rarely seen outside of Eton or Wellington College. For example.....

'According to Superman #53, Krypton's inhabitants were humans of high intelligence and magnificent physical perfection.....a super-scientific, intelligent people, and as a great people physically perfect and of immense intelligence and science. On the Planet Krypton, explains Action Comics #233 (1956), even three-year-olds could solve complex mathematical equations.'

http://supermanthrutheages.com/Encyclopaedia/krypton.php

'In Kryptonian schools, lessons were taught with the aid of sophisticated telepathy helmets which enabled teachers to transmit knowledge to their pupils telepathically at phenomenal speed. The treatment of psychological problems was facilitated by an ingenious mind reading device......thanks to the pioneering work of scientist Lon Gorg, whose supra-psyche treatments successfully transformed morons into geniuses.'

http://supermanthrutheages.com/Encyclopaedia/krypton.php

How else was the super-mind taught? Well, by a super teacher of course: in the joyous 'The Super Teacher from Krypton' (Adventure Comics #240 Sept. 1957) we meet...well, Super Teacher, built by Superman's Dad so that even light years away from his dead parents, he can still be nagged into doing his homework:

There are union issues with untrained non humans delivering lessons here that I'll skirt over, let alone health and safety. But I like his style: 'Memorise this instantly' 'Shut the f*ck up' etc. I suppose Jor-El was just concerned that his precious son's eighth level intellect might not be best served by the Hick provision of Smallville High, something that many middle class parents are concerned about when they move to rural areas. Maybe they should build a robot.

This also reminds us of Richard Donner's version of Superman: the Movie in 1978, when we had a clear view of how baby Kal-el's school days went. Trapped in the crystal life raft from the doomed planet Krypton for four years, his Dad (yes, him again) provided the ultimate in in-car-entertainment: school, on an endless tape loop for YEARS AND YEARS. Christ, think of that, morning, noon and night. 'The fruit fly is of the genus Drosophilia Melanogaster......the boiling point of sodium is 1690 Kelvin......blah blah blah.' It's a wonder that Superbaby didn't put his bloody foot through the escape hatch and bail out over Saturn. Jor-El was clearly a fan of direct instruction, which at least, according to Hattie, has an effect size of 0.82. John Dewey and progressive education had obviously not reached Krypton, but then they were a race of intellectual supermen and women, and maybe there's some connection between these facts.

Jesus

As with every educational tourist, from New York State to Hong Kong, we have to answer the question of 'what can we learn from the Kryptonian Education System'? I propose the following:

1. Thought transmitters to be installed in every classroom as a basic right for everyone, not just for independent schools with supportive affluent parents that score highly on the BBC 'How class obsessed are you?' test
2. Every child to be graded as having a level 6 intelligence, immediately, increasing by no less than 2/3 of a level each year in exact increments, automatically, unless higher progress is indicated, in which case we'll make something else up and all clap ourselves on the back for doing such a great job.
3. Create a new post of Super Teacher, encouraging high performance practitioners to remain in the classroom (or indeed hovering high above it) instead of seeking promotion into management. Teach Firsters to be part of the Wave One cohort. Advertising to match this.
4. Design a curriculum where understanding and comprehension is predicated on the belief that knowledge in context is the basis of all intellectual improvement.

I know, that last one is crazy, right? Looks like we're still waiting for Superman.

researchED 2013 Is GO. If you build it, they will come.

2013-03-23T07:17:00.001-07:00

So I’m running a conference this September....

Beginnings are often noisy: babies delivered in an eruption of clamour and viscera; shuttle launches where a dot of metal balances on a skyscraper of exploding fire and prayers. This firework went off so quickly I didn't even hear it until my house was on fire.

Last week: I'm invited to the Teach First launch of Ben Goldacres's 'Building evidence into education' at Bethnal Green Academy. As usual he's fired up and switched on about Bad Science; eloquent, spiky and charging into education. Research in education is one of my hobby horses- mainly because while some of it is excellent (as some of anything usually is) a lot of it is poorly constructed, riddled with bias, and empty of utility. I met some of the usual Baker Day Irregulars, had a coffee, and went back to school to teach year 7s about Jewish food laws, and babysit detentions.

Tuesday evening: I'm watching...well, I'm watching GI Joe, and marking essays. Don't judge me, I do it so others don't have to. Ben and a few others like Sam Freedman and Joe Kirby are talking about the need for teachers to talk about research in education in a more structured way: Ben wants RCTs, others want greater rigour, others are concerned with the link between policy and research, particularly cherry picking retrospective justifications. Sam says, 'Tom should do it,'; Joe, possibly for a dare, echoes. Like Marty McFly I did the obvious, stupid thing, and leapt like a Yahoo into the challenge.

One hour later. An hour is a long time on Twitter, as Sally Bercow knows. Hundreds of tweets from people expressing interest; then I put an email address out, because I'm like that, and a got another hundred. I finally learned how quickly your DM box can become swollen, then auto-emptied by a river of incoming messages. By 1am I had been offered five venues, gratis- all great ones- and had representatives of two dozen organisations that wanted in. Offers of help to set up websites, do admin, design art, host, lend a hand. I went to bed feeling just like that dot of metal I mentioned.

Next morning, it was all still there. Another hundred messages across the platforms, similar to before. I had my first offers of financial support and sponsorship, and more offers of help. People were asking to be put on a mailing list, so I thought I better start one, over coffee and toast.

That lunchtime I spoke to people in the business who advised about logistics; I used to run Soho nightclubs, so I'm not particularly fazed by the thought of having several hundred people under a roof and trying to stop them killing/ mounting each other, while simultaneously feeding them booze and engineering rhythmic proximity like a gang-bang in a lift. Just like your average education conference.

By Wednesday night I was a man, a plan, a canal, Panama. researchED 2013 as it was now called, will be a conference, sometime in early September, where researchers and teachers and interested parties can speak, listen and talk with each other about the role of research in education, and crucially, what needs to happen to improve matters. The difference with this conference from others, is that teachers would have to be involved- have to be, otherwise there would be no point. The abyss between practical experience and dessicated theory born of a Petri dish and tortured until it says what the designer wants, was apparent to me the first day I walked in a classroom. We deserve better; kids deserve better than cargo cult science, or the voodoo pseudo-science created in a few tiny classrooms and scaled up by zealots into universal dogma, often adopted by policy makers.

So: keynote speakers, of course- people need to talk. Panel discussions where debate can happen, with audience involvement. There are arguments to be made and had here. Opportunities for organisations involved in research to recruit teachers, and opportunities for teachers to engage with the research community. I won't call them workshops, because no one will be working, no one will be shopping, and nobody is wearing dungarees.Frankly I think there should also be music, but I'll let you know how that goes.

Wednesday and Thursday night were a bit like Tuesday- momentum hadn't stopped, so neither could I. Two national papers contacted me asking to support, three Universities, four colleges, and a certain Government ministry also expressed interest. More names for the mailing list. Between Tuesday and today I must have logged around two working days answering emails and calling people. In general I'm a bit sceptical about crowd sourcing- as you'll know if you've ever asked a class of year 9s what they want to do on a Friday afternoon- but the expertise offered and the generosity of people this week would melt the most callous of hearts. I asked for help with a logo: done. I asked for help with a website: dozens of offers. I asked for a Wordpress blog: done. Live streaming of the event: done. Website address registered: done.

Because so many people have helped already, I'm going to thank them publicly, properly, once researchED 2013 gets rolling a bit more, but I assure you everyone will get their reward, not in Heaven, but in this life.

As I go along, I know I'm going to need more and more help. But somehow I get the feeling that once you build it, they will come. I know that's an article of faith rather than reason, but the experience so far tells me that they will. The Kids from Fame couldn't have put together a better, more impromptu show. Like Blanche Dubois, I rely on the kindness of strangers.

I opened a Twitter account (@researchED2013) 18 hours ago; as I write it has over 300 followers. Invitations to speakers start going out this weekend, although some have already been signed, and many have asked if they can take part. I'm visiting venues Monday-Friday, so I should be able to announce this week, but I can honestly say that every one of them is a belter. I've had to turn down kind offers of venues I never dreamed I could get, only on the grounds of size, or availability.

But did good win?

This is a pro-bono gig. It's not for profit, and that's at the heart of it. Once I've costed out the project, I should be able to start ticketing the event- there will be a charge to get in, but only what's needed to make it happen. I want this to be something that everyone can come to. The exact date will depend on the exact venue, but if you want to get involved, keep early September free, and hopefully the Saturday.

I'll start using a Wordpress blog and a website very soon to keep people updated about this, but for now, my own poor page will have to suffice.

I still have no idea how GI Joe ended. Maybe we need Heroes of Education action figures? Let me know if anyone can help.

Eduspeak: why Wilshaw still has a battle to change the orthodoxy of Ofsted, Part 1

2013-03-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

1984, George Orwell

Sir Michael Wilshaw, has set his shoulder to the task of turning the tide of Ofsted. Repeatedly and very publicly (recently here) he has stated that, among other things, he believes there should be no preferred teaching style; that lessons observed by inspectors can be dry and didactic, or jolly and jazz-handed, so long as it can be discerned that the students are learning.

I, and many others, welcomed this like Christmas. The bulldozer of Her Majesty's Inspectorate is central command's most powerful lever over the direction of how schools behave. It cannot be over emphasised to the lay person: Ofsted has become, since it's inception, both the lash and the rack of contemporary school culture. Along with league tables and parental choice, it can praise schools or bury them. Gladiators, sweating in the Coliseum knew the same feeling, waiting for Caesar to laud or liquidate them.

The result? As inevitable as the crocodile running off with Mr Punch's sausages: schools spent more time working out how to please and placate the inspectors than satisfy their intrinsic aim of education. Management meetings rocked to the mantra, 'Will Ofsted will be looking for this?' and everyone slapped their heads like monkeys. I can barely describe how angry this makes me. I didn't enlist in this man's army to satisfy a bureaucracy- I came to teach, and protect children, to give them the best of my wasted, unworthy knowledge and hope it serves them.

The new, neutral inspector

You see it everywhere: CPD courses with names like 'Teach the Ofsted way' or 'Integrating discovery learning into your virtual learning platforms the Ofsted way.' Books, INSETs and agendas, all genuflecting at the altar, sacrificing children's interests in the hopes that this year's harvest of absolute grades and relative progress will be a happy one. Will the Gods be pleased? Have we done enough? Are our offerings sufficient, like Abel's, or will we be marked, like Cain, as Unsatisfactory, and doomed to walk the earth, cursed by parents?

Decades of this, and schools have practically forgotten what we came here to do. Rather than craft lessons aimed at excellent learning, many see their purpose as pleasing the Ministry of Silly Teaching, chasing the external metrics of a healthy school instead of working out how to be well. You might as well paint rouge on the cheeks of a cadaver, hang it from a hook and call it a groom. The outcome has become the only goal, and Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant.

Cue, The Inquisitor-in-chief, Sir Michael Torquemada Wilshaw. Unlike many of his predecessors, he's the real deal; he realises that Ofsted has been a dog's banquet for a generation, and wants to change that. He understands that inspectors shouldn't expect a preferred teaching style, because, well, because who gives a damn? There is no one way to teach a class, and plenty of odd dogma that emerged in the 20th century that clearly restricts learning- which didn't stop it becoming compulsory in every classroom, like VAK, Learning Styles and so on.

If someone inspects my teaching, I need some kind of reassurance that the observer knows more about teaching than I do. Frankly, while some are stalwarts, many do not convince. And as it happens, when I know the Dementors are expected, I dust off my Ofsted lesson, do my Ofsted monkey dance, wave cheerio, and then get on with my damn teaching the minute they leave, washing the craven memory away with Talisker later on.

Old Andrew has done a fine vivisection of the problem: The Burra Sahib of School Inspections doesn't look for, or judge schools on teaching styles or groovy hipster dogma....but many inspectors still do. Read OA's blogs on the matter if you're not convinced. The problem isn't Wilshaw; the problem, like a greasy spot, is on the other side of the window pane, and you can polish as much as you like, it won't shift.

'And where is VAK in your planning?'

Which finally brings me to the opening quote. The problem, which I'll return to in a later blog, is the contemporary language of education. For decades now there has been a creeping shift in how it is even possible to speak about teaching, learning and schools. To put it bluntly, there is now a Newspeak dictionary of what it is possible and isn't possible to say. People now talk about students as stake holders, and I think, Jesus, when did that happen? Classes as Learning Zones; corridors become break out areas. Pointless surveys and opportunities to bully staff are justified as 'student voice, innit?'

Worse, it becomes possible to write and speak about education using nothing but these shibboleths, saying nothing, but sounding as if you are. As someone once said, 'For someone who speaks so much you talk a lot of shit.' You can read a sentence like 'A Good lesson, evidenced by the way the discovery explorers were engaged, independently thinking then sharing higher level thinking where their opinions were valued and reflected,' or something equally moronic. And it sounds like it means something. Yet all it does is reflect the ocean of preference and prejudice of the inspector, rather than an even handed duty towards discerning if kids are learning.

The whole language of education has been harrowed and replaced by an imposter language, a Newspeak grown in the laboratories of fashionable orthodoxy and released into the wild. Some concepts are practically impossible to express using it- try saying that kids need to 'get in trouble for misbehaving' and see how many tuts you get; I normally use 'sanction' as a safe replacement. Some words, like 'literacy' have had their meanings speyed and substituted by bloodless simalacra: witness how it used to describe being able to read, write and speak fluently and fluidly in one's tongue, and how it now appears to mean 'can use an IKEA manual and browse for Flash games,' I mean, kill me.

That's what Wilshaw is up against. That's why it's so hard to change things on the ground. The solution, as best I can see, goes beyond simply installing a competent and righteous Top Banana. The whole thing needs a reboot; new inspectors, new training. The old guard won't change their opinions on teaching. You want change fast? Dismiss the thought police and replace them. Otherwise, abolish the whole thing and start again, because Oftsted appears to be dragging the chains of its past with it.

If you're looking for someone to help with the axe, my number's in the book.

Thinking in the right direction; just don't put all your faith in RCTs. Ben Goldacre's vision for evidence based learning.

2013-03-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

But is it outstanding?

Bethnal Green Academy, a soy latte's throw from both hipster Columbia Road and the surrounding estates, was the venue for the launch of Ben Goldacres's new advocacy project: Building Evidence into Education. Nice looking school; it's got BSF written all over every plane and pane. The livery outside the school shouted every second sentence of the latest Oftsed report. Most pleasingly it was styled in the Star Wars font (or as my kids call it, 'That old film').

Hosted by Teach First, the Royal Marines of the teacher profession, we were first treated to an introduction by Dame Gove himself in what was, I thought, a remarkably short set. It was like booking Geoff Capes and asking him to open a jam jar. Goldacre followed; a passionate and determined thinker and speaker, whose Bad Science series shook me, like Hume did for Kant, from my dogmatic slumber.

It's a familiar saw for him: the need for Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to become more prevalent in the social sphere (here represented by education), as they are in the medical profession. He made an interesting comparison: medical practitioners at first resisted RCTs because they were convinced of their own intuition, until it turned out that intuition often led us down the wrong path; eg using steroids for brain inflammation did more harm than help- the reverse of orthodoxy. Now, so are teachers (resisting RCTs, not harming the brain. Oh wait.)

Goldacre's point is refreshing and disarming: we run trials like this for every pill and potion; why not policies, which in the galactic scale of things, dwarf even pharma for dollar tonnage. And as usual, there is a lot of practical wisdom in what he says. I am delighted that the DfE is looking into ways of conducting research that is robust and real, rather than fanciful and driven by dogma.

So why not have RCTs in the social sciences? One possible objection, the ethical, can be easily dismissed: issues of consent, and issues of knowingly withholding a potentially useful intervention from the control group. But we already introduce dozens of interventions in schools every single day. It isn't as if we aren't already drowning our kids in optimistic hoodoo. Why NOT randomise it once in a while? When was the last time we asked a kid's consent before we popped a Thinking Hat on them, or told them to rub their brain buttons?

I think there are, however, some serious problems with the use of RCTs in education.

RCTs aren't the answer to the question 'What really works in schools?' because differences in context can never satisfactorily be ironed out. The causal density of humanity is too high; there are too many factors to establish a reliable protocol that could hope to encompass the variables of the human mind. There are as many factors to juggle as there are grains of sand on the beach. Lazy research is sodden in bias and assumptions, wooly over interpretation and optimism. That said, there is room for quantitative research , some of which will be amenable to RCTs. I've heard social scientists say that the problem is merely one of design; I say the problem is the methodology itself. If you're making quantifiable predictions about the physical world you need to provide unambiguous methods of establishing initial conditions as well as outcomes, possible causal mechanisms, and demonstrate reproducability. That isn't easy.

Also, the problems of cognitive bias, the Hawthorne Effect, the John Henry Effect, the Pygmalion Effect and so on are enormous obstacles to appreciating when an intervention is effective and when it is not.

This is definitely thinking in the right direction. Goldacres's attempt to lasso the spoon bending of social science and pin it down to some kind of methodological rigour, is exactly what I, and many teachers, want to hear, and I absolutely support his attempts to reinvigorate the debate. But there are many obstacles to this, even before considering motivation.

One is time. I work pretty hard. I don't expect a biscuit, because I bet you do too. I'm also pretty good with my time. And I barely have time to do, well...this kind of thing, and the only reason I do is because I cash in hours of sleep like chips in a casino. Doing research into education is going to be a niche pursuit until workloads go down. Like archaeology in the 19th century, it will remain the hobby of gentlemen.

And let's be honest, most teachers aren't scientists. They're as prone to their pet prejudices and tender perversities as most people. Read the Tooley report if you want to see how badly education research can be conducted even by people who should know better. Now multiply that by 100 and you get, I would say, most of us. Many teachers would love to get involved with what Goldacre sensibly described as driving research.But would research benefit? Not until teachers learn what the scientific method is.

Dating for Nerds

So, what next? From the presentations, and the discussion one thing became apparent: this isn't the launch of anything concrete yet. At this point, the program is advocacy. There was no funding committed, no projects starting tomorrow. From one perspective, it's hard to see many education secretaries getting too worked up about RCTs- the average tenure of the Headmaster-in-chief is about 18 months. RCTs can take years; to be efficient, to be meaningful, they have to be as large and long as possible (as the inspector said to the janitor). Why invest in something that a) won't bear fruit until after you've been moved to The Department of Silly Walks and b) Might disagree with your own pet projects? It's always safer to simply pick research that appears to validate your own objectives.

And yet, and yet. Gove was, at least, there. The Dfe's involvement with Goldacre shows, at least, a symbolic commitment to better research in education. And let's not forget the £125 million DfE funding for the Education Endowment Fund (represented here by Dr Kevan Collins) a Sutton Trust start-up devoted to research, some of which involves RCTs. There might be some will there, but it isn't very full-throated.

So much in education is an abstract, an artefact of art as much as engineering. We can barely agree as to what educated means. Or learning. Or thinking. Or engagement. Or creativity. These aren't amenable to metrification.How do we study what we cannot catch?

But to sound a more positive note: anything which seeks to firm up the wiliest of educational research is an asset. Goldacres's profile should help turn a search light upon the relationship between research community and Chalkface warriors. He's absolutely right when he says that there needs to be more communication between the practitioner and the research communities. Teachers make bad researchers, and often, researchers make bad teachers, and the assumptions are apparent in many articles of research I read- where assumptions and biases that would have you laughed out of the physics club are common.

One thing's clear: it's a mess. I'm not so sure, as Mark Keary and Ben Goldacre implied, that we're on the cusp of a Golden Age of research bounty in education. They've been saying that about the social sciences since they were invented, and microscopes and abacuses, which had been so generous in the natural sciences, were turned to the human sphere. We're still waiting for the Industrial Revolution in social science.

One thing teachers need to do, exactly as Goldacre said, is to familiarise themselves with the the principles of science; to arm themselves with at least a basic understanding of what it means to say an intervention is true, or probably true, or probably not. God knows we need to, given the deluge of garbage that we've endured, justified by silly hat research.

So I wrote a book about it. It's called Teacher Proof, and it's out this June.

Read Dr Becky Allen's take on the same event

David Didau also has this to say

How we solve the behaviour crisis part 1: What the problem is, and why some people can’t see it

2013-03-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

I was watching 187, an odd but strangely moving film where Samuel Jackson plays a teacher tormented by his gang-banger students, and I was reminded of Picasso’s proposition that ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize truth’. Jackson works in a downtown LA sink school, where the teachers pack heat in their desk drawers, the kids are screwing in the portocabins, and the head is so allergic to civil action that teachers are ground to a paste by the indifferent cogs of bureaucracy. Sometimes the line between truth and fiction is diaphanous.

I normally shy away from magic bullets. Complex situations are usually immune to simple solutions. But there's something obvious about schools that I noticed the first day I started training, and it hasn't gone away: behaviour problems crush learning, and strangely, many schools don’t seem to know what to do about it.

Apart from that, did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?

I often hear people say that behaviour isn't so bad. That there are pockets of unruliness, but on the whole the view has a rosy, crepuscular glow. For example, former Behaviour Czar Sir Allan Steer said in 2009 that:

‘...there is strong evidence from a range of sources that the overall standards of behaviour achieved by schools is good and has improved in recent years. The steady rise in standards needs to be celebrated....the great majority of schools are successfully achieving satisfactory or better standards of pupil behaviour…’

Learning Behaviour: LESSONS LEARNED A review of behaviour standards and practices in our schools. Steer, Alan, 2009

Ofsted agree:

'According to Ofsted inspection data, the majority of schools have Good or Outstanding levels of behaviour. As at December 2011, 92.3% of all schools in England were judged Good or Outstanding for standards of behaviour. A further 7.5% were judged Satisfactory and less than one percent (0.3%) were judged Inadequate.'

(Ofsted, 2012)

On the surface that looks encouraging- very encouraging. So why do many teachers disagree?

Actually, it is quite bad

'There is mixed evidence on the extent of poor behaviour reported by teachers... However, another earlier survey showed 69% of members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) reported experiencing disruptive behaviour weekly or more frequently (Neill, 2001)'

(Ofsted, 2012)

'SAY 'ALLOW IT' AGAIN! I DARE YA!'

I’ll add that almost every teacher I’ve worked with as a behaviour coach would agree with the latter paragraph, and more personally I’ve never been busier advising teachers crushed by their own realities. I propose that inspection data cannot be relied upon to reveal the true behaviour situation in a school for the following reasons.

1.Senior teachers and middle leaders start hyperventilating about inspectors seeing naughty kids, in an anxious version of the Hawthorne effect. The worst pupils often vanish for a while, mysteriously hidden on trips and temporary exclusions. Staff curiously appear in corridors they haven't walked down in weeks, maintaining order. Often students respond to the observation effect by sharpening up as well. No, an inspection isn't the best time to see behaviour. Like quantum scientists, the observer affects the experiment.

2. Another reason why there is such disagreement about the extent of the behaviour crisis is that the people who think there isn't one usually work in an entirely different school from those who think it does. Not physically different; there are often several different schools in the same spot. Take two teachers: one has seniority, either of rank or tenure. Known to all pupils, enjoying high status, with a light timetable and a career built on the kids knowing what they can do. They usually have plenty of time to catch up with behaviour issues. They might have the privilege of easier classes. They definitely don't have to grind from class to class with barely a breath in between. The second teacher belongs to a lower caste: new teachers, junior teachers, supply teachers. They work in a parallel universe to the first teacher and his kin. Kids mock them, refuse their wishes, and do what kids do to unfamiliar or uncertain adults. That’s what I mean by a behaviour crisis. Every school is at least two schools, alternate dimensions, layered over each other, barely able to conceive of each others existence.

'Nope...no bad behaviour in here...'

3. Consider this: the groups who say there isn’t a problem are mainly composed of people who don’t have to teach difficult classes: inspectors, senior staff, researchers, teachers of biddable communities. The groups who say there is a problem are usually the ones who experience highly challenging behaviour. The former tend to occupy positions of authority and get to write the reports. The latter don’t get asked very often.

Can you see the problem?

Part II coming soon: How we solve the problem

Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art by Alfred H. Barr Jr., published for The Museum of Modern Art by Arno Press, New York, 1980

Viewed on http://www.gallerywalk.org/PM_Picasso.html 10/03/13

https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/DFE-RR218.pdf

Pedagoo Teachmeet London 2013: A Good Day Out

2013-03-02T11:17:00.001-08:00

The IoE had never looked lovelier.

I collect lanyards, just in case I fall through a manhole into the past and I need to get in somewhere to use the bathroom. I think I draw a line when they sport badges that say 'I heart [Insert sponsor here]'. I missed that little gem until after I'd taken it off, unfortunately. Does anyone really heart a company? Even the CEO? I seriously doubt it. It reminds me of the kind of Stalinist cultism that inspires middle-management pep talks in Harvester conferences. You're looking at a man that used to watch grown men stand in a circle, put their hands in the centre, raise them aloft simultaneously and shout 'LET'S GO TUESDAY,' in an ascending note. I've seen things you wouldn't believe.

Saturday saw me chipping along to Pedagoo London. It might have been a Teachmeet. I'm not sure. Everyone I asked had a different opinion about it, but I had a lanyard so I must have been in the right place. Helene O'Shea, the most civil and elegant of Mavens on twitter invited, so I could hardly refuse.

It was held at the Institute of Education, my old Alma Mater, which always means a bitter sweet mixture of affectionate memories and feeling shit about late essays and the general sense that I was an Olympic failure. Built in a time when designing buildings meant scaling up a Stalinist Rubik's cube into terrifying lifesize, it resembles the carved-out mountain that John Conner ends up in Terminator 3. No 3G signal, but I presume they have subterranean warehouses of baked beans so that, at least, copies of Dewey and Montessori survive the cannibal holocaust.

It was also one of those terrifying situations when you realise that people on twitter are actually real, and not some algorithmically generated avatar from Black Mirror. It's great when this happens. It means that in future, when you're discussing things online in the future you can dispense with putting a smiley after anything remotely caustic, and not worry that they'll take the virtual hump, if such things worry you in first place.

I could only come in, deliver my own goods and bail, like some heartless educational gigolo, but it was efficiently planned to the very last fig roll. My session was a hobby horse with which readers will be familiar: junk research in education, so I ran through a rogue's gallery of my most wanted: Learning Styles (Harry's equally shameless classroom cousin), Multiple Intelligences, etc. it was also a chance to talk about the numerous tumours that metastasise in educational research: the Hawthorne effect, confirmation bias, the Pygmalion effect, the John Henry Effect, Novelty syndrome and many others. These frailties effect every scientific sphere, and until they are accounted for, research isn't worth a damn thing. Unfortunately 75% of the educational research I read seems to be blissfully unaware of such things, believing that science, like Adam, sprung ex nihilo, and can be invented in a day.

I'm often accused of being negative about this area, but what could be more positive than making sure that edu research, when it is invoked, is sound? That what we believe and why we believe it are as secure as possible? My teaching career was brewed in the distillery of modern pop-research: if you weren't wearing your Thinking Hat while planning for learning styles you were considered to be unsafe with children. Some of it totters on, like zombies; some of it is nearly dead, like Brain Gym (perhaps the zombies ate the Brains). But new fancies emerge all the time, and It's vital that we don't become part of a new wave of pseudo science and cargo cult educational theories.

The great thing about the Teach Meet phenomena is that it brings teachers together to discuss their own learning interests; it provides an outlet for people to cruise the back streets of CPD, winking at the figures in the bushes and leaning over to unlock the passenger door in the dark. It was genuinely lovely to see so many interesting people putting themselves out on a precious weekend to learn from each other, and everyone I met was very kind (he says, sounding like John Merrick at tea with the quality). Anything that brings teachers together to learn about the things they're interested in rather than what some hard-on with a pervert's eye on the imagined appetites of Ofsted inspectors thinks they need to learn, is a good thing. As long as we don't simply become magpies to the next shiny innovation, the latest gimcrackery to seep from the Petri dishes of novelty and optimism.

In other words, it might be very useful indeed.

The New National Curriculum: Citizenship and Starship Troopers

2013-02-23T04:55:00.001-08:00

Do you want to know more? Usually not.

Come on you sons of bitches. You want to live forever?

The strangest thing to survive the NC reboot is Citizenship. Unlovely, often unloved, it is the ugly duckling of the curricular zoo. Most subjects evolved organically via a natural selection, but Citizenship flopped out of the sterile womb of a laboratory in 1988, following the recommendations of the Crick report. It's aims were strikingly different from its timetabled peers: it sought to actively encourage 'that children should develop as successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society'.

As I have frequently observed, citizenship is one of the most overt methods by which a governments attempt to influence not just what children know and the skills they possess, but also what they value. Once again, the solution to complex societal problems (fractured neighbourhoods, dislocation of new communities, separation by class, age and culture) is attempted by a sticking plaster: teach them to be better citizens at school.

I am weary of senators attempting to fix the world through education, when an example of this ever actually working seems to be hard to find. The reason why education is so sexy to legislators is because children are the least resistant of constituents; disenfranchised from the electoral system, they can be moulded far more provocatively than any autonomous adult. It's a train set of apparent opportunity, but as any leader will tell you, change on the ground is far more difficult to achieve. Changing society from Westminster, or even the HO of an exam board, is akin to playing snooker with lengths of rope. A lot happens between elbow and pocket.

We see another example of citizenship education in Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which Paul Verhoeven translated into a choppy but subversive cinematic satire in 1997. Skimmed over in the movie, much of Heinlein's novel takes place in the classroom. In the imagined future of the Terran Federation, democracy and citizenship take centre stage in education. In this world, the 20th century saw liberal democracies disintegrate due to entitlement without responsibility: "people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted... and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears." The franchise shrank from 'everyone over 18, with a heart beat, more or less' to citizens, a status that had to be earned through community service. This could take the form of military service, but also civil contribution. Non citizens still enjoyed many liberties and rights, but only citizens could vote, having earned it through participation.

The chapters where the protagonist Rico remembers his High School classes (called History and Moral Philosophy) are fascinating. Heinlein is often accused of fascism, glorifying war and promoting the status quo. But did the classrooms of Tom Brown's Schooldays do anything less? Besides, you don't prove anything with fiction, you illustrate it. I once sat through a joyless actor's workshop paid for by the DfE on the Fast track training program, where they demonstrated leadership skills through the medium of Henry V. I questioned whether a story that was essentially, made up, could teach us anything about the real world, other than in an artistic sense. I was told, but this is Shakespeare.' I'm not kidding.

I don't set my shoulder against the content of Citizenship; as a politics/ philosophy graduate, I love many of the topics. But that doesn't argue for their automatic inclusion in a compulsory curriculum. There are a million things that are potentially useful or interesting; why don't we include them too? There was little justification for the creation of Citizenship, and there still isn't. The trouble is, one now needs a reason to get rid of it, because by now there is a skeleton of bodies and tradition that now exists to defend it.

So, the aims of Citizenship are highly suspect; The outcomes are equally nebulous and unsubstantiated. Didn't most of the kids in the London riots get Citizenship lessons? Boy, that turned out well. More scientifically perhaps, was the 2005 inquiry into CE by the House of Commons Education and Skills Selct Committee. They concluded ' It is too early to say with any degree of confidence whether citizenship education is producing the wide range of impacts originally hoped for.' This, after 17 years of the bloody thing. How long would you like? TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED BRO.

There was no need to invent Citizenship; no one was crying out for it. 'Please,' they begged, 'A new topic, a bag of different subjects and things to teach.' It was created in a test tube, and released into the world like GM wheat (which at least has the virtue of clear utility). I know a huge number of kids who think its a CBeebies qualification. Few teachers specialise in it, and therefore it often gets farmed out in many schools to the unqualified and unhappy rump of the teaching body, and only then because it was a compulsory part of the school offer.

More damningly, because Citizenship is usually a short course GCSE, it won't count toward league tables, and many schools will drop it like it's hot. They'll evidence its delivery through other subjects, which is always an unsubtle way of suggesting that it isn't really a subject at all, but a theme. I particularly like the odd jumble of aims: politics, participation, anti-racism, financial management....all it needs is cake baking and astronomy to really unify the theme.

Overt manipulation of the values of children is a job for parents more than schools, especially in the political sphere. If you want children to participate and engage more with political office then we need to ensure that political office isn't seen as a concentric, circular trough of self-interest and promotion. If you want children to believe that they belong to a community, then everyone in the community needs to act as if it exists and matters, every parent, teacher and councillor. Let them see adults acting as role models of kindness, fortitude and humility, and watch as children learn to emulate these values. Insist upon sociable conduct, and patrol that insistence with sanctions and rewards. This is how characters are formed; in a long, slow, complicated process that resembles attrition far more than instruction. Or perhaps the growth of a tree.

If you want good citizens, it can't be taught directly. Citizens, like adults, are raised, not examined. So why has it survived? Perhaps because, as I indicated, it's easier to leave it bleeding in a ditch than to kill it off. Wouldn't it be kinder to put it out of its misery?

My thoughts on the History Curriculum part 2: This island Earth.

2013-02-22T09:21:00.001-08:00

'Et tu, Starkey?'

This is how the draft History curriculum describes its first few aims:

·         know and understand the story of these islands: how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world

·         know and understand British history as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the story of the first settlers in these islands to the development of the institutions which govern our lives today

·         know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history: the growth and decline of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; the achievements and follies of mankind

That last bit is my favourite: the achievements and follies of mankind. Let me only sketch a curriculum from my life and I'll fashion you a puppet theatre of follies that would chill your kidneys.

Key Stage 1 is brief and broad enough. I've heard complaints that this curriculum is too packed. Yet within the sketch of the draft document I see no references to exactly how much time should be spent on each topic, nor the depth. 'We'll never cover it all,' I hear people say. Well, I teach KS3, and I have a non-statutory curriculum too. You pick the depth to which you want to descend, and calculate the time in which you want to achieve it. Curricular design isn't a Meccano set; it's more like an Etch-a-sketch. By the time you hit KS4, there are so many checkpoints to reach that it feels as edgy and spontaneous as a join-the-dots picture, but prior to that, there is a fluidity that can be unlocked.

'Not tonight, (Keith) Jospehine.' Sorry.

In all of the three key stages described there are dozens of points where a globally minded teacher could freestyle off into the world at large: 'key events in the past' (KS1) could touch on Christmas, pilgrims and faiths of foreign origin; the Crusades (KS2) easily encompass the Middle East, the Muslim empires, the rise of Kevin Costner; the Norman Conquest (KS2) could- and I'm sticking my neck out here- touch on France, feudalism, and mainland Europe and its relationship to these islands. Most teachers I know could invent such points of intersection in a heart beat. It might be telling that some of the complaints I have heard are from people who have never taught a lesson, let alone a history lesson.

I teach, at KS3 and 4, RS. I follow a syllabus like Miles Davis follows scales; it provides the notes, and I provide the music. At times I soar away from the sheet music, but I always return to the melody. And by the time exams come around, my students all know the tune plus any riffs and licks I wove into the sequence. So while I deliver, dutifully, the required 'Big 6' religions in year 7, for example, I also drive off the map into lessons on Rastafarianism, conspiracy theories, Wicca, Scientology....whatever brings the best of what I know to them. Sometimes I ask what they'd like to learn, and if I like it as much, that's what we learn about.

The curriculum shouldn't be a straitjacket. It should be a climbing frame; a launch pad. With thought and preparation, it can be. Anyone who has a problem with the idea of a democratically elected body (namely, the government) creating structure for the course, surely needs to take their issues up with the concept of democracy. Besides, there is so much a teacher can do with a syllabus, any syllabus. It's up to us, as professionals, to take the opportunity and revisit what it means to be a teacher. We can be much more powerful, although God knows we have dragged the chains of high stakes accountability around with us for decades. No wonder we often lose the instinct for innovation within our own subjects.

If only the Carry-On team had more input into the NC

And for those who say this is a dead white man History, I say, a) you got a problem with dead white men? and b) The KS3 syllabus is bristling with opportunity to explore social emancipation, suffrage, and the recognition of the rights and liberties of the oppressed. I wonder if I'm looking at the same syllabus as some people. If there's a strong emphasis on eg the British Empire, then that's because the British Empire was enormously significant, and the ripples it generated still rock the water upon which we rest. And if you want a lens through which to examine the world, the Empire provides the perfect vehicle. This isn't about getting kids to button up their tunics and strike up a chorus of Men of Harlech; this can simultaneously be Michael Caine’s Zulu as much as Dabulamanzi kaMpande's.

As to the expertise of the Cassandras, I can only say that education is a battlefield of values as much as one of fact and expertise. There are some who believe that facts are less relevant in a Google age, when children can summon them from their smart phones like wraiths, proving that skills of critical thinking and discernment are more portable, more relevant to a new age.

And then there are teachers like me, who think this is well-meant flower pressing. That children don't know what facts to conjure if they don't know what they are in the first place; that knowledge becomes memorisation without context and understanding; that there are an enormous number of people in the field of education who wish subsequent generations of children to be deprived of the obvious benefits of the quality of instruction that they themselves enjoyed.

It is also ironic that, after so many centuries of teachers, we need to remind ourselves what teaching really involves, and why learning from history is important. Civilisations, like interest rates, can go up as well as down. Ask Gibbon.

White Rajahs and Dinosaurs: The Draft Proposals for the National Curriculum Part 1- History

2013-02-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

'Just blow the bloody doors off the curriculum, Hooky!'

History has always been a battlefield. Few subjects pay allegiance so easily to their imagined relationship with ideology. Like Roulette, your chips are either on red or black-or in this analogy, blue. On one hand there are advocates of liberation history: society seen as a history of class struggle, increments of emancipation, rights, justice and social capital. On the other, the advocates of linearity, chronology, dead white Kings and empires. Frequently this is seen as winner takes all: every chip goes in. But this is a convenient, lazy perspective. The game permits other permutations.

Every leak is accompanied by a perfect storm of ire, thunderous navel gazing and the sound of swords being sharpened. Remove one Churchill, Seacole, Victoria- and prepare for the siege of Krishnapur as their devotees explain how their absence extinguishes understanding of Gallipoli, Crimea, lady’s mourning fashions. Specify their inclusion, and wad your muskets for their defence. Everyone has their pet histories. How dare you omit Amritsar, or the Sepoy Mutiny? shouts one end of the stands, while the other screams for Rorke's Drift and Admiral Beaufort.

A good deal of the non- teaching chatterazzi have focused on content, because it's the easiest to grasp, and because it lends itself so readily to prejudice and expectation.

Victorian London in the 1890s

This debate has, like the event horizon of a black hole, swallowed everything and everyone. Curiously, the last thing that generated this kind of historical heat in the public imagination was Danny Boyle's omnipopular frontispiece to the Olympics' when 60 million Britons put down their Unhappy Meals and thought, 'Hang on, maybe I won't put my head in an oven today.' I've heard some people, normally ones I would trust with keys and lighters, saying that 'this is the kind of history we should be teaching children.' What, the bit where the Queen jumped out of a plane with James Bond? The bit where Isambard Brunel forged the rings of Mordor? It was brilliant, of course, but to understand any part of it, first you have to understand to what it was alluding. Otherwise it's just spectacle. Which for many, perhaps it was, punctuated with Voldemort and Mary Poppins.

Everyone wants children to understand history, but no one, it seems can agree what this means. Real understanding requires the knowledge of facts in context: knowing that, and knowing how it relates to other data. Facts without context are just that favourite of the anti-facts brigade: pub quiz fodder. But facts, coherently juxtaposed, transforms them from islands to archipelagos, to continents of comprehension. On such broad plains, everything else is possible: innovation, invention, intellectual revolution.

Some dead guy

Few things lens themselves as agreeably to this process as history. Until time decides to act otherwise, it flows from past to future on the crest of an unfathomable now, and in one direction only, unless you are a sub-atomic particle, which none of us are presently. To understand one moment, we must understand the moment that preceded it, in a succession of yesterdays that reaches backwards from the Playstation 4 to the Whitechapel Ripper, to the White Rajah of Sarawak, the Diet of Worms, dinosaurs and beyond.

Few would dispute this. The contention rests as much on what is included as what is omitted. Given that any history not personally lived must necessarily be condensed (and even such personal experiences are partial and fragmentary), which stories make the cut? What's important?

Well, from the looks of it, we are. The decision to use the history of Britain as a launch pad to understand the world has received a battering, but where else should we start, standing as we are in Britain? As children our understanding is immersed in 'I'. This egoism slowly melts into an appreciation of the second, then third person. We call this 'growing up'. To understand the history of the world it is necessary to understand the history of your own hearth. First, where we came from; then, how we fit into other stories. In this way, an encyclopaedia of narratives are stitched together into a broader tapestry that itself reaches out, far beyond our grasp. It would be foolish to lay the first brick of a wall in mid air; bridges are built from your feet, outwards.

Part 2 to follow tomorrow, wherein Mr Bennett considers the matter of Romans, Vikings, Spacemen and Pirates

The other Dark Meat: Does it matter where ideas come from?

2013-02-17T07:58:00.001-08:00

There are claims in the press today and every day that the government doesn’t listen to what the profession is saying, and that reforms have been driven by prejudice and partiality. These ideas have come from the wrong source. But does it matter?

Horse meat puns might have jumped the shark within about 15 minutes, but a real issue remains: where something come from often matters. It matters because provenance is more than just a place in France, it's also an integral part in establishing quality. The fact that budget, microwave ready-meals aren't actually made from hand-massaged Kobe beef should surprise no one, and if it does you then I have some magic beans I’d like to sell you. If you want cheap meat, don't be surprised if you end up with a stew of slurry, lips and assholes.

Charlie Brooker's controversial remake of National Velvet

Provenance too matters in education. Take grade inflation- and I hope by now we can accept as an axiom that grade inflation was a real thing. Either that, or for the last twenty five years, children have been getting smarter, teachers better, in gradual, regular increments. Sure I can’t interest you in those beans? Or maybe exams became steadily easier. The Front Benches, even OFQUAL itself admits it, yet there are still some flat-earthers who deny it. Exam boards, driven by mercantile passions, competed and pimped with each other, turning out tricks, offering syllabuses that were steadily drained of content, drip by drip, until they were nearly bloodless carcasses. In public, they stuck signs in it that read ‘beef’. In reality, Shergar.

To avoid this, exam boards must feel free from the need to compete with one another. It's one of those areas of public life for which the state was invented- where public interest must outweigh private benefit. Otherwise, like Thénardier, you mix it in the mincer and pretend its beef. Ironically, with all the twists and turns of education policy this week, it was the reversal of government intention in this area that most teachers disagreed with. Having one exam board, it seems, was the most popular thing that Gove couldn't do.

Oddly enough, many teachers surveyed by the DfE were still against the removal of most coursework as part of school assessments, despite the widespread acknowledgement that coursework is the most corrupt of all exam practices: subject to teacher 'over-intervention', parental direction, and the very worst excesses of privilege.

One significant complaint I have heard is that the current regime doesn't listen to teachers enough. What people usually mean by this is they don't listen to them. Opinions in education will always be divided, because so much of educational theory is a matter of values. It's like the accusation of being 'ideologically driven' that is often thrown at Gove, as if only the wicked have a set of values. Twigg, Rosen, and all the other horsemen of the Progressive Apocalypse are just as driven by dogma and relativity as any other.

This is one area where provenance doesn't matter. Who cares where a belief comes from, if it is sound? I couldn't care less if the reforms are driven by Gove's nannies, dice, or the entrails of a goat. There isn't one ‘voice of teachers’, because teachers are a nation of millions; worse, an asteroid belt. Unions, though important (sometimes) represent the interest of their members, and are not dispassionate arbiters of educational wisdom. When education was puréed in the nineties and noughties by well meaning people who believed literacy meant reading IKEA manuals and not spelling and grammar, from the unions there was not a peep.

No, the best people to decide pedagogy are teachers, and teachers who can actually evidence their successes, either in context or absolutely. I don't listen to behaviour advice from someone who has never taught a difficult class successfully; I ignore anyone who tells me how to teach literacy unless they can show they've taken kids from A to Z, and all letters in between.

That's the only provenance that matters. Educational research is a valuable tool, as long as it is as strict with itself as any chemist would be expected to behave. Much of educational debate is simply partisan, as Roundheads and Cavaliers lob agreeable pseudo-research that backs them up at one another. This has to end. Science cannot be pimped out every time someone wants to justify a prejudice. For any reform to be valid, it must be shown to have valid empirical evidence to support it, or have a plausible mechanism with components that can themselves be plausibly inferred from experience.

Anything else is dark meat.

When everyone’s special, no one is: how inclusion went sour.

2013-02-11T15:50:00.000-08:00

Not shown here: 'no suitable modifications offered.'

What do we mean when someone has special needs? And why do we get it so spectacularly wrong?

Interesting article in this week’s TES about SEN provision:

‘Pupils with statements of special educational needs are being routinely segregated from their teachers and classmates, prompting fears that many of the most vulnerable children are receiving a poor education.’

Part of me can't see the controversy. Given that many statemented needs revolve around behaviour, it's not surprising that many SEN pupils spend time outside of the classroom. That isn't an indication of failure itself, but simply a recognition that removing a challenging student to a less crowded space is often the most sensible strategy. It's also not surprising that students with learning difficulties are removed to nurture groups. In fact, in my experience it's not removal that's the problem, but not removing.

Inclusion; that’s the pivot around which this all revolves. When I started teaching in 2003, I was amazed that classrooms often contained students so badly behaved, or with learning needs so pronounced, that I knew I could never provide for them adequately. What should I do, I wondered, with a student who doesn’t speak English, but has no interpreter in the class? With a pupil who frequently assaulted or insulted teachers? With a student in a GCSE class with a reading age of seven? More, why were such pupils packed into the same classroom as everyone else? Inclusion, I was told.

Inclusion was treated very seriously. I received several lectures and tutorials on it when training. Every lesson plan I made had to include awareness of inclusion issues. Differentiation was supposed to be the catalyst to this magic process; if I planned the right lesson, it seemed, everyone would be caught in the gravity of the lesson. This was a complete lie.

Plato spoke about Noble Lies- untruths that were useful, like the belief in Gods, which he claimed kept people moral. Inclusion was and is an attempt to generate a contemporary Noble Lie, only instead of conjuring goodness through the threat of divine retribution, we imagine that wishing for inclusiveness creates it.

But it doesn’t. Instead, inclusion, handled in the most knuckle-headed manner, has created a vale of tears where everyone loses: children with special needs don’t get the support they need- instead having to cope in classrooms for which many are not ready- and the mainstream class has to suffer and starve due to the disproportionate focus that challenging or very needy students require. And somewhere under this enormous pyramid of toil and chaos, is the teacher, unable to meet the needs of his class, harrowed by failure.

Get Out of Jail Free

'OFSTED, muthaf***er. DO YOU SPEAK IT?'

A second issue is the designation of statements themselves. Many children are statemented for reasons that, decades ago, would hardly have been seen as a special need at all. We have all worked with children who are statemented for behaviour, yet who are perfectly capable of behaving well for a certain teacher, or their parents. This makes a mockery of the whole system- Old Andrew calls it the SEN racket- as it shows that we have medicalised many perfectly normal parts of the behaviour spectrum and redesignated them as pathologies. This reductivist approach to human nature leads to a joyless form of determinism, where the human being is lost and replaced with a series of triggers and causes and cues. How depressing.

There are some children with clear difficulties- like Tourette’s- where they have little control over themselves. But the surly teenager who is persistently rude to teachers because she can’t be bothered, isn’t helped by a label of ODD; in fact, it infantilises them, and gives them a reason not to amend their behaviours. And this isn’t a fringe issue; this is at the heart of the SEN liturgy. I have read many well-meant Individual Education Plans for statemented pupils that go along the lines of ‘Let them run around the room punching people in the Charlies if they want’ or similar. Try and run a room like that for five minutes and see how much learning gets done.

Redefining Inclusion

1. Inclusion doesn’t mean ‘in the class with everyone else.’ This is inclusion at its most witless and barbaric. It is also the default definition in many, many mainstream schools: you’re included if you’re geographically present. You might as well say that the waiters at Buckingham Palace are guests at the garden party.

2. But all this does is to create pressure-cooker classrooms where the few drain the attention of the one, to the detriment of the many. The teacher is spread thin as marmalade and lessons are carpet bombed. Learning over.

3. Inclusion like any value, cannot be intrinsically good. It must be balanced with other values, such as the rights of the class, the teacher, and the good of the child.

4. For some children that can be achieved in the mainstream classroom; modifications that can be done with relative ease: task that differentiate for different abilities; seating plans that accommodate children with hearing issues etc

5. For some children, inclusion needs to mean special provision. Overwhelmingly, this means smaller groups, separate classrooms and specially trained staff. That way they can get the attention they require without dominating the classroom. When did we forget that mainstream kids have needs too?

6. Staff trained in a meaningful way. I feel sorry for TAs. Often they are the least trained, the worst paid and the least valued members of staff, and yet the demands on them are Herculean. ‘Work a miracle with this pupil’ they are told, without being told how. Their salaries are shocking. Children with special needs don’t just need a warm body nagging them, or writing out their answers; they need teachers, trained in specific areas: EAL; Autism; reading strategies; extreme spectrum behaviour. And they need subject knowledge too, to teach meaningful content. I know many TAs who do a fantastic job. But there are some TAs who, through little fault of their own, are little more than tall buddies for their charges.

7. For inclusion to be meaningful, it has to exclude meaningfully. Good internal inclusion units are a joy: a school within a school, a Russian Doll of focus and care. Others are holding pens; three goes on the Rollercoaster and the pupils are dropped back into the circus.

Inclusion, as it stands is worse than useless in many schools. It is actively harmful. It serves no purpose other than to meet its own criteria. We’re bad at identifying special needs, and we’re terrible at meeting those needs. If we crack this, the value and efficiency of what we already do will sky rocket, I guarantee it. But we spend all our cows on magic beans.

Now that is special.

Cartoon Character: why we can never teach virtues directly

2013-02-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

Charles Atlas, in the old comic-book adverts for body-building, promised to turn omega-males into Heroes of the Beach, if the applicant would only gamble a stamp. Now I see that attention turns- as it often does- not to the physical instruction of children, but to moral development, and the interior space of children's character. A Character and Resilience summit to be held on the 6th of February,will ask the question, 'Can we assist social mobility through the use of teaching children to have better character?':

'We believe Britain needs a 'national conversation' on the role that focusing on character and resilience could play in narrowing the attainment gap. In February, we are hosting a 'summit' on this subject, which we hope can help stimulate discussion among key practitioners, commentators and opinion formers. Our ultimate aim is to help stimulate new practical solutions or highlight and help the spread of proven existing ones.'

Things like this happen all the time. Right now, somewhere, an educational conference is taking place; Powerpoints are being dutifully read from like homilies, and delegates are, Googling Dignitas. This conference is different: hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility, it plans to discuss the role of character in obtaining this (I presume they mean upward mobility; these things never really specify. Can everyone go up? Does anyone have to come down? Presumably we'll deal with that when and if we ever get there).

My experience of summits and conferences is that they are rarely discussions; they infrequently start with open minds and end up with coherent answers. The tone and direction is chosen by the guest list, and their topics, which are chosen by the event organisers. Still.

This might not be the right Tony. Actually...

This Telegraph story on the summit tickled a few epiglottises this morning, possibly because it led with a Guardian-baiting picture of Eton College's Big Cheese, Tony Little, and the fact that he would be addressing the summit. Mention Eton to some people in education and it's like you've just said their post-hypnotic kill-trigger.

There is a germ of validity to some of the responses: it isn't unreasonable to argue that, while qualities such a resilience and leadership are fine things to possess, they are potentially more easily obtained in social circumstances that aren't predicated on want and economic despair. I've worked with children of the homeless, as well as kids whose family pets were Black Swans, and the biggest difference I've noticed is in the assumptions they make about themselves and the world. The comfortable see themselves as having every right to succeed, whereas Les Miserables see themselves as outsiders at a locked gate.

Children possessed of fortitude and ambition can succeed in almost any circumstances. It is one of the greatest miracles and marvels of the human story. But character is impossible to evaluate without context. The same depth of endurance in two children from opposite poles of want can lead to a charmed life for one and perdition for the other. Some children's lives require only a pinch of perspicacity to master; others need the whole sack. Failure is more easily learned from in circumstances where it doesn't spell the water being cut off, or the food running out. Which isn't to deride the achievements of children who had the bad manners to be born from parents in the upper tax bracket. Snobbery and prejudice, I have noticed, flows both ways in this debate, and it's a nasty sight from any angle.

'Don't make me Force-Choke you.' 'YES LORD VADER.'

But really, this story isn't 'Masters of the Universe lecture Hoi Polloi on how to take an endless deluge of shit'. It's about the role of developing character in schools, as a means of promoting social mobility. It sounds reasonable, but it's an enormous red herring.

1. Character cannot be taught directly. It cannot be distilled in a predictable and regular way. This is because the intended recipients of its instruction are what I like to call 'human beings'. We resist reduction.

2. It can be taught indirectly, but this is still a roulette wheel of uncertainty. Treat a child cruelly and you might expect cruelty to propagate in their soul. But you might obtain a coward; a hero; a saint. We're as much ghost as gyroscope, whether you favour the flavour of incense or solder.

3. Which character should be taught? What virtues should be chosen? Aristotle and Plato had a few things to say about this, so I direct the good members of the summit to their latest podcasts. I will only say that the virtues of Sparta are not the virtues of Athens, or indeed, Rugby.

4. Do teachers have good character? Can we be relied upon to be the paragons of character that children should emulate? Let's think carefully before we answer that...

5. How do you assess it? How do you know if the program's going well?

6. How do we train teachers to teach good character?

This boat has many holes. The only way I even remotely attempt character formation in my classes is by attempting to modify their behaviour; I inculcate (or attempt to) good habits of work. I encourage, and expect hard work. I succour them when they stumble. I encourage them to fail, then try again. I show them I value their work if they have tried hard. I reassure. I remind. I often challenge and criticise, especially if they have done anything less than their best. I praise, praise, praise. And I do this simultaneous to the teaching of my subject, and let the content be the medium.

But I never know if it will take inside them in any way. I'm a teacher. We have enough with which to contend without being tasked with the scaffolding of their souls. I barely have enough time to phone parents and mark books. Clubs, games, social activities....these are all excellent things for schools to promote, and I'm sure, aid in the development of children. But to aim at this goal as if it were something tangible, is an invitation to waste money and time in schools that could be more profitably used teaching children.

If you care about social mobility- and I am- the best levers we can give children are the best education we can possibly manage, and the methods by which such an education is obtained. Everything else, we can only hope for. Everything else belongs to them.

Gamble someone else's stamp.

The Intellectual Abyss in education: Suzanne Moore, and why everyone's an expert

2013-01-31T04:33:00.000-08:00

Is this what you want? IS IT?

There is an intellectual abyss in the educational debate so deep you could lose a school bus down it. I’m reminded of this every time someone writes about evidence-based research in education, and clearly doesn’t know what that means. Worse, they invoke it like a totem, when all they seek to do is justify their own superstition.

This feature by Suzanne Moore, for instance. I’m sure she is wise and admirable, but it’s a joyless donkey ride across the greatest hits of armchair fantasy edu- football. It’s what I imagine Michael Rosen’s rosary sounds like. Perhaps cautious after the recent harrowing experience of being defended by Julie Burchill, she’s having a go at a safer, softer Aunt Sally, accusing the beastly Gove of ideological dilettantism.

There is a painful contradiction beneath this claim: Gove, the amateur, the journalist who knows nothing about education, put in his place by Moore, the amateur, the journalist, who apparently knows so much more than he. Someone, somewhere, is putting pennies in the eyes of irony. This isn’t simply rhetorical Battleships; this is exactly the abyss to which I referred. Everyone, because they participated in education, believes they are qualified to descend from Sinai with tablets. And if you sent kids to school, well, it can only be a matter of time before a grateful nation will beg you for guidance.

So what about research? The rational outside observer might think that this was a safe harbour against whim and fancy. But, tragically, it isn’t. The relationship between educational research and real schools, real children, is an unhappy, fractious one.

Part of the reason is the nature of social science itself. I could write a book (and have) about the way scientists attempted to turn the miraculously efficient methods of the natural sciences to the inner world of the human mind, and found that discerning the boiling point of sodium was a very different goal than working out ‘What is learning? ‘, or ‘How deep your love?’. Difficulties with establishing methodologies that distinguish causes from effects, effects from each other, causal density, reliability, cognitive bias, the Hawthorne effect….if it’s a problem with clean methodology in the natural sciences, it’s a problem cubed in the social sphere.

The second reason is that social science research is often twisted and stretched into chimera by rolling media, and eager lobbyists looking for evidence to substantiate their bias. Of course, this is an issue in medicine for example, but it’s worse- much worse- in education, where the very things you’re trying to assess are nebulous abstracts like ‘learning’ and ‘engagement’ that defy clarification and revel in obfuscation. In Teacher Proof, out next June, I wrote about this, frustrated by the way that evidence in educational research points both ways, like Dorothy’s scarecrow.

Almost every criticism Moore makes about Gove’s strategy makes the same mistakes of which she accuses the Laird of Surrey Heath. Ad Hominem attacks on his motivations (which, unless she’s also Professor X or Derren Brown) should be beneath a serious commentator. References to utterly discredited, cotton-wool fluff like Emotional Intelligence or ‘the crossing over of art and science’ (what?) as valid educational goals, simply display a lack of familiarity with contemporary research that torpedoes such concepts as having any reliable empirical validity.

‘Design, for instance, is an exercise in problem-solving that involves lateral thinking….. music engages the same parts of the brain as maths and poetry.’

Does it? And so what if it does? What evidence is there that this relates to any argument at all? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. I can afford to be upset by these kinds of claims, because their near-universal adoption in state education has been utterly to the detriment of children (research base: ten years teaching).

‘The academies chuck out their disruptive kids by the second term. Disruption can mean anything from very disturbed behaviour to crimes against uniform to socialising in groups of more than three.’

What evidence is there that this is an issue on anything other than individual cases? Universalising from case studies is a process more commonly associated with Shamanism than science, and research. But research is commonly only quoted when it agrees with us, and frequently fails to be invoked when we make claims about issues we know nothing about. I know this is true, because there’s been a lot of research done into cognitive bias. Claims that the academies are middle-class Madrassas are an odd claim when so many schools are now academies. Claims that schools won’t value creative endeavours are pure scaremongering, based on faith, not fact. Which schools are planning to ditch art from the curriculum? Parents want their children to do art and music, and so do schools. Show me the masses of schools abandoning the recorder and I might believe it; until then, this Thomas is doubting.

I have nothing against a good vent; I’m a blogger, I have a black belt in such things. But this confusion about what does and doesn’t constitute good evidence in education is part of the reason education is such a broken arrow in the UK. Everyone thinks they’re right, but often few people seem to know what proving it might look like. Worse, they self-parody by accusing others of subjectivity or worse, the non-criticism of ‘being ideological’. An ideology is simply a bundle of beliefs unified by a coherent system of relationships. Everyone has one, or attempts to. Teachers have been shackled by the well-meant but essentially indemonstrable claims of progressive educationalist for decades, which have become the new dogma. Group work, personalised learning, learning styles etc- these are all the catechisms of the new Church of Learning.

But they are empty prophecies. They are an infinite series of turtles, resting on each other , values justified by values, opinions relying on opinions.

What do we want in educational research? Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.

Would you like a tissue for that? Why teachers make terrible therapists

2013-01-28T14:46:00.001-08:00

From the second I stepped into classes, I started to drown in the issues that running a room with multiple students entails. Children who come into school with clothes unwashed between weeks; hungry kids; latchkey kids; kids enduring abuse, domestic humiliation, poverty and anxieties of every conceivable shade. Unless you are very fortunate, or very callous, you cannot have failed to notice this. Even in the most fragrant arbours, where every physical need is met there are camouflaged pockets of deprivation in other areas: neglect, abandonment, cruelty.

And it struck me, equally instantly, that classrooms are terrible places in which to do anything about this. Yet we are tacitly expected to. One of the problems of philosophical models of humanity is that it often assumes that people are perfectly rational, when they are clearly not; similarly, many school structures are constructed on the understanding that children are neutral recipients in the classroom experience, when they are reagents. Children are like Jacob Marley, dragging the chains of their entire lives with them.

It is essential for the teacher to lay clear boundaries, to police those boundaries, and to reward and sanction as consequence demands. These foundations are the womb of structure, creating a safe space where everyone is valued equally, where children know where they stand, and where they know what they have to do next. Without structure, law and consequence there can be no justice, no education. That's absolutely fundamental to the efficient execution of learning in an institution.

But what about the ones who have problems that cannot be amended by clear boundaries and consequences? There are children tortured by anxieties and social dilemmas so enormous that it is almost impossible for them to comply in a meaningful way. This can range from autism to Tourette's, to the knowledge that their father will be ready with a belt when they get home, because it's payday and he's drunk. What then?

And this is where the dislocation occurs. Every school has children that need extra help. But the place where this is often expected to occur is within the classroom. Take a humanities teacher in the average secondary school. He might stand in front of 300 different faces every week, many of whom might be seen once only. There will certainly be about 25 children in every room. Even if he divided up his time equally between them, they would be lucky to have two minutes apiece, and that would mean no teaching at all.

Who can stop the Juggernaut?

And teaching has to be done. It's our primary role. It's how we're held accountable. The juggernaut of our jobs doesn’t slow down because one passenger has taken ill; try to do that too often, let the bus go under 50, and the bomb goes off. So children, whom with support could be turned around, are instead crushed under the wheels of the truck.

'Of COURSE I have time. Nothing but.'

And I'm not criticising the truck. I’m driving the damn truck. Teachers don't have the ability, the time or the resources to run personal mentoring sessions with every child. If we did, we would never leave school, and neither would they. Unfortunately, the very best thing, the most efficient thing that can be done in instances of, for example, bad behaviour, is the administration of clear boundaries and the consequences attached to them. As a strategy, it has the benefit of utility for the majority of children, whose behaviour is amenable to direction, and who have the inner resources to respond to the prod and the goad of punishment and reward. But the minority: the very broken, the fractured, the abused, the vicious, the totally lost, frequently fail to respond. The process must continue, otherwise we ruin the structure that keeps most of us healthy and whole, but the imperfection is obvious.

The problem is partly resources. A child who is paralysed with anxiety about looking stupid in lessons might curl up like a hedgehog in the classroom. A good teacher will be able to spot the difference between shades of refusal, but apart from a few carefully chosen words in or after the lesson, and a short chat with home, that's as much time as we have before we need to deal with a hundred other issues. To help that pupil through their non-compliance is the work of several weeks of coaching, coaxing, probing and mentoring.

Or the problem might be worse, and it's a kid with ten years of mucking about under their belt because of a million other reasons; yet we have to tend to them too, and hope that we can unpick the million stitches of their lives and accrued character and somehow teach them about German verbs or trigonometry. Sisyphus would pity us.

A Dangerous Method

The point of well-run behaviour management isn't just to identify those who should be praised and punished; it's also to identify behaviour problems and then refer them to ways in which these behaviours can be amended. And that's when the system breaks down, because we simply don't- in the majority of cases- have the time. Nor the training. Do you know how to deal with an anorexic pupil? A pupil shuttled between homes all her life? A pupil who believes she's evil and worthless?

We were asked and trained to teach. We were hired for our subject expertise and perhaps a classroom skill. But we are required to be therapists, and we simply aren't. The classroom is the very worst place for that sort of help. Good mentoring and coaching is done in small groups, probably one-to-one. The adults who are good at this usually aren't teachers. And teachers are often very poor mentors, not through deficit of will, but of opportunity.

I spoke at a conference about mental health this week; the audience were mostly therapists, child psychologists and the like. And I was fascinated by the abyss that existed between their role and mine. My job is to run a room and teach my subject. Theirs is to mentor and heal. If you've ever been given an Ed Psych report on 'teaching styles suitable for pupil x' and looked at it with scorn, you'll know what I mean. It's easy to say 'child x should be allowed to run around the room when he is anxious' or 'let him leave the room whenever he wants' but it is the very devil to run a room that way, when the other children, quite rightly, wonder why they can't enjoy the privileges of the statements party.

And I can understand a child therapist rubbing their brow in despair when I talk about the need for fairly rigid classroom structures, where pupils have to be taught that their actions will have consequences, pleasant or not. My tactics are blunt, and designed to appeal to the majority. But I work with a best-fit model. the therapist usually doesn't teach classes, and his little idea how one-to-one relationships become scaled up to the level of a class.

Schools on the Couch

The schools best at this are ones that make mentoring a backbone of their strategy; where the internal exclusion unit is run by trained professionals who have experience in both child behavioural issues as well as subject knowledge. Where children who deserve punishments are discerned from children who need assistance. Where exclusion from the classroom is as much about a genuine effort to identify and deal with problems rather than simply a short spell in the cooler. If teacher's timetables were reduced, this would be a huge step, because then they would have time, not merely to plan and assess, but also to consider these issues. Or perhaps better still, the role of the tutor, or Head of House could be made muscular, and given the time and training they need to focus on these matters.

As it stands, the two groups need to understand each other more. Teachers aren't therapists. Therapists aren't teachers. When we pretend they are, everyone’s a loser.

Everybody be cool. Why the EBC is nothing to be scared of.

2013-01-19T09:15:00.001-08:00

'We feel the Ebc is both a good and a bad thing.'

I have noticed that whenever things change, my pupils often resent it: a new teacher; a different room; a new pupil in the class. Then people get used to it and everyone calms down until things change again, and then we all get upset and pine for the good old days. It's like when they change the layout of Facebook.

In a different league, now we have EBCs. Man, people are lining up like Swap Shop presenters in mufti at the ticket counter of Heathrow to have a pop. It's the most fashionable piñata in town. Anything that unites the NUT, Ofqual, Graham Stuart, Michael Rosen and Tory backbench unspectaculars has to be something special. But behind the light of the unhappiness, is there any heat? I'm not so sure there's anything to fret over.

1. Having one exam board might destabilise the industry. Frankly, I'm not too bothered that Ofqual worries about this, because I'm left wondering why examining students needs to be an industry, rather than an enterprise for the common good.This is one of those areas where you don't want competition, where you don't want a Darwinian race of survival based on self promotion. The gory sight of exam boards pimping out their syllabuses for the love of money should have turned your stomach by now on this matter. Oddly enough, I hear many left wing commentators worrying about this absence of competition.

2. Some have complained that the EBC will kill creativity. This seems an odd proposition, given that English, one of the core subjects, is an incredibly creative, critical, analytical subject, and that creativity can be learned through any subject. Are we saying that maths can't be creative? Plus, when schools actually stop teaching art and PE and Drama, instead having timetables full of nothing EBC subjects, I'll believe the claim that schools will drop them. People are naturally creative. You can hardly stop people being creative. It's in everything, everywhere.

Oh, and forgive me for not really giving a monkeys what Stella McCartney or David Puttnam have to say about education.People often complain about non-educators sticking their oar in, but become suspiciously supportive of it when it's a sleb with whom they share an opinion.

Is this what you want? IS IT?

3. This is a return to the 1950s. Give. Me Strength. For a start this isn't an argument, and I'm still perplexed as to what people actually mean when they say this. But then it isn't an argument; it's a sound bite, and people should be ashamed of making it. Empty of content, it sounds like it might have something plausible underneath it, but it doesn't. It's rhetoric, sophistry.There is a good deal in education since the 60s that needs a long walk from a short plank: Brain Gym; Thinking Hats and so on. Because education isn't a science, improvements are neither incrementally guaranteed not linear. These reforms aren't a return to the 50s, and even if they were, I have no problem with men wearing hats again, or films by Alfred Hitchcock. Modernity isn't the womb of quality, nor is innovation a guarantee of improvement. See: onesies for details.

4. Others have problems with linear exams, with fewer options of retakes. I've always seen modules and resits as the snooze alarms of assessment. 'Five more minutes' the students say. 'Then I'll properly start revising.' If everyone gets the same opportunity, then everyone has the same chance at the outcome. Allowing successive bites of the cherry simply skews the benefit towards other groups, for example 'People who don't fancy coming into their lessons on Monday morning.'

But the best argument of all is to look at the state of GCSEs. They are, as they stand the walking wounded. 30 years of grade inflation. Years of lunatic BTEC equivalence. Successive, incremental, Darwinian dilution of content in favour of vapid, vague skills that rely on content to exist but ironically are starved of it. Reform or replace, the outcome is the same. The system needs to change. The venom directed at certificate reform is what we could expect of any change in the system.

You wait. If it gets a chance to bed in, give it fifteen years and people will be out on the streets with placards campaigning for its preservation if anyone dares to meddle with it.The EBC might be fantastic. It might be the Ragnarok of civilisation. But the arguments levelled against it don't convince.

Plus ça change. Everybody, be cool.

The Laugh of Khan: if this is the future, then classrooms really are fl*pped.

2013-01-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

You're going to make me, aren't you?

This week's TES leads with a story on the rise of the Khan Academy. This is a not-for-profit on-line project that seeks to provide free access to short videos on a variety of subjects to anyone who wants to look at them. And there's nothing wrong with that. I've seen a few of them, and they're perfectly serviceable little shorts talking about primary/ secondary level maths, computing, a little history and so on. 3,600 videos in all. As far as that goes, I clasp them to my bosom. Personally I find them as entertaining as watching Miranda, but then I suppose I'm not the target audience for either.

The problem is- and it is a problem- that I frequently hear it hailed as the future of education/ the saviour of education/ the model for the 21st century century and so on. And I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

The Khan Academy. Motto: 'It is our mission to accelerate learning for students of all ages,' which is the most boring thing I have ever read outside of the Radio Times. The website is unbearably groovy, giving me the impression that everyone at HQ wears Thinking Crocs and calls each other by their favourite emotion. Don't believe me? One of the staff members is Toby, the Director of Wellness. Toby, I'll point out, is a dog.

The videos themselves are astonishingly pedestrian. Having been ordered several times by enthusiasts to watch a few, I was expecting something game-changing. What I got was a short chalk 'n' talk video that reminded me of watching someone's interactive whiteboard without the pen moving. It was fine, and clear, but no more than that. And the humour was funereal. What, I wondered, was the fuss? It certainly wasn't the tutorials themselves.

Give me a huge bag of money and a lobotomy, and I'll tell you.

Some perspective: total revenue is $150,000 in donations from Titans like Bill Gates, Google, and private donors. That, plus $2,000 a month it made in advertising (now discontinued) meant that it had a revenue in the ballpark of $175,000 PA, which....which is pretty small beer actually. I ran a Soho nightclub for a few years that took around £2,000,000 PA, and people paid to get in (and sometimes out again). With 36 staff on the payroll, what we have here is what I like to call 'something on the internet'. Yes, yes, half the population of the world have clicked on one of his videos, and there are certainly some big numbers there (202 million clicks). But do you know how many people watched 'Charlie bit my finger!'? (If you're not familiar with it, it's a video of a wee boy whose brother bites his finger and I am not f*cking with you here). I'll tell you: 500 million. You heard me. Do you hear about anyone hailing the 'Charlie Bit my Finger' movement? No you bloody well do not. Because the only party for whom hits are intrinsically important, are advertisers. Piers Morgan has more Twitter followers (3.1 million) than the population of Lithuania (2.9 million), but no one's particularly worried about him invading anywhere soon (I know this is perfectly redundant, but isn't he awful? His latest Twitter pic is 'Me and the Obamas,' Christ have mercy).

Controversial saviour of 21st Century Learning

But Honey Bear don't care, not with Bill Gates blowing thousand dollar bills up his ass. And that's part of the problem. Sal Khan, the Messiah of educational modernity seems to be a perfectly committed, intelligent young man with little other than a desire to share free lessons. But he's never been a teacher. Nor have his principal donors. Never run a school. Never had to design, execute and assess a curriculum for a cohort of students that had to display evidence of accumulated learning. What he does is impressive, in a dilettantish way. But it isn't education. It's a cartoon.

The main USP of Khan is that his academy offers an unusual and fluid level of access to potential audiences. But that isn't enough to get kids learning. You see, in a real school, we have to teach children who don't want to learn, sometimes. Who couldn't give a shit about the Tudors, or trigonometry. In a real school we also offer easy access to learning, and expertise. But that doesn't mean they want it. His assertion that 'almost every four or five year old takes ownership of their learning,' is touching, but laughable. It's the view of a man who knows nothing about scaled-up education (for example, an ex-Hedge Fund analyst) or someone drowned in Rousseau or Montessori. I have many children who are starving to learn, and practically bite my hand off when I offer them a lesson. I have far more who would rather be texting unimaginative insults to their friends or playing on their X Box. Because they're kids.

James Kirk's most feared adversary

The main problem with the Khan revolution is that it assumes that children will, with bare direction, blossom into beautiful learning butterflies. They won't. Most will do as they please, because they are humans, often frail, and because they are children, often unwise, often a little lazy, a little selfish, a little short sighted. Just like us. It angers and frightens me a little that enthusiastic amateurs propelled by the capital of equally enthusiastic and terrifyingly wealthy amateurs can fancy they could reinvent education. But then we get into the territory of the Cult of 21st Century Learning, and the Cult of IT, and the big beasts who smell an emergent market in education, and it suddenly starts to make sense as to why it's happening.

Do the Khan videos serve any purpose? Sure. They're better than nothing. I wish him luck, because if a child has the choice between no teacher in their remote village, and seeing one of his videos about spelling or maths, then let it be the latter. But that's the strategy of disaster relief, not world class education, which requires experts with whom you can interact, peers with who you can discuss, and people there to encourage and push you when you feel like giving up or succumbing to misunderstanding.

In other words, a real school. With real teachers. I know, it's radical, isn't it? Perhaps Bill Gates will give me a box of money to start one up.

Original TES article:http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6313486 http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6313486
Meet Toby. h ttps://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team Then have a weep.

I think, therefore I learn: Why Thinking Skills are a pointless waste of time

2012-12-31T09:41:00.001-08:00


Black Belt in Bloom's. Can't spell 'Taxonomy'.

Here's my James Randi challenge to educators: Thinking Skills don't exist, at least, not in the way we are led to believe. Despite the fact that many schools like to flush precious resources on Thinking Skills days, they only serve to give teachers the illusion of what is often, terrifyingly called 'deep learning' (God save us). They are the phantom limbs of learning. They are a quite perfect waste of time, which is bad enough in the schools of the middle classes, but disastrous for any child who already starts with an economic disadvantage. The con is on.

Now a proposition of that magnitude is going to take some propping up, so before anyone pops a vein, I'll issue the caveats. I don't mean that thinking doesn't exist. Descartes did a tidy job of showing us that it was perhaps the only truth that we could reasonably claim as being intuitively demonstrable. My man, who farted? buzzer sounds for the relatively modern claim that there are a specific set of skills that can be taught independently of the factual content of a topic, and that they can be taught in a meaningful way.

The first problem is that there is no consensus about what such a set of skills might even resemble. I get into a lot of arguments with indignant Thinking Skill fundamentalists who are perfectly happy to give me their definition of Thinking Skills, but who are then unable to show me why their taxonomy is superior (or even different) to alternatives. Before I discuss TS with anyone, I have to say, 'Wait, what do you mean, first of all?' So there's that.

Worse than that wobbly leg is that there isn't a table at all. What evidence is there to suggest that thinking skills exist as a discrete discipline of their own? I'm happy to advise at this point: none. It's an ontological invention. There is neither empirical evidence of their existence, nor are they demonstrably true by appealing to reason alone. As the Torquemada of Humanism, Richard Dawkins is tirelessly fond of pointing out, the burden of justification lies with those who assert the existence of the entity.

So that's a pretty big strike against them. But because I don't like to leave a job half done, I'm going to kick the non-existent skills when they're down: they assume that children need to be taught how to think. Which is completely absurd. Children don't need to be taught how to think. No one does. We think constantly. It's a pre requisite of consciousness, of cognition, of awareness. The very experience of experiencing, is thinking. It's the one thing I don't have to ask my kids to do. It's like teaching them to have a pulse.

What do people even mean when they say we have to teach thinking skills? Usually they mean 'to think in a certain way', or more commonly, 'to agree with what I think,' but that has often been the ambition of educational reform: not to teach children to be more intelligent than their tutors, but to conform to their specifications. Ironically, many people determined to inspire a generation of free-thinkers do so in a way that attempts to commit them to conformity.

Kill me.

As with most abstract, abstruse objectives of well-meant but essentially misguided reformers, demonstrating this in the concrete is the way to dispel smoke and shatter mirrors. Let's pick a skill. Say you want a child to become more discerning in understanding the veracity of historical sources. You start them off by teaching them...well, some history, just to be controversial. Then you offer them a variety of sources. The next bit's guaranteed to blow a few gaskets: then you tell them which source is better, and why. You heard me. Teach them. Don't fanny about getting them to thought shower it in discovery clusters; tell them. Then work through more examples at the same time as you teach them the most accurate stories you can impart. Start asking them which sources are most attractive, and get them to justify their answers.

Eventually they develop the abilities you are looking for, but none of it happens without the dissemination of facts: facts about what happened, facts about which sources support the narrative; facts about which source is virtuous, and which vicious. Knowledge is best learned in context. Context is a web of knowledge placed in an appropriate order. Children need to be told this stuff, otherwise you condemn them to perpetually repeat the efforts of the past. Which is fine, if you want culture and science to freeze at exactly the point at which you started this pointless, precious project.

These skills can't be taught, separately from content. They certainly can't be assessed on it. We don't even know what they are. They can't be meaningfully demonstrated without the possession of knowledge. Let's stop wasting time teaching something as tangible as Tinkerbell, and invest the time our children so desperately need on things they need to know. Let them deal with the thinking. They're fine on their own with that bit.

The Importance of Being Santa: A Christmas Carol

2012-12-22T09:03:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, because I am both Grinch and Gandalf, I taught a year 7 class about Santa Claus instead of the traditional first 45 minutes of Big Momma's House and Quality Street clusterbomb. As the rest were answering questions on Father Frost and Sinterklaas, one little girl put up a hand asked me in her secret voice, 'Do you think Santa Claus is real?' Her brow spoke of the cares of youth; her question suggested she was on the trembling verge of adulthood. Nothing was more important than this.

The Search for Santa

Who is Santa Claus? Most people know the jolly late 20th Century incarnation, broad of belt and prodigious of present, blitzing around the world in a single night of magic. But like Madonna or Doctor Who, this is only the latest in a series of regenerations. The 4th century St Nicholas of Myra, in Turkey, is the primary source. His parents died young, and the inherited fortune allowed him to embark on a life of philanthropy, like a Turkish Bruce Wayne: his first act of kindness involved saving three children from prostitution and slavery by providing their dowries (dropped down into socks, drying by the fireplace, giving us oranges in stockings). Already, we see St Nick as a patron and protector of children against the predations of adult expediency.

Then it gets crowded. Many European countries already had mid-Winter festivals, as an act of defiance and hope against the darkest, deepest time of cold, dark and death. In England it was called Yule, and lasted days as communities feasted with what they could save. Later, Christianity rescheduled it to coincide with the celebration of Christmas. This Germanic festival celebrated Odin, and his Wild Hunt across the skies. And many countries developed a remarkable number of mythical figures who represented this time of Solstice. In 17th century England, for example, it was Father Christmas, a merry man who is probably most familiar to modern minds as one of Scrooge's cautionary spirits in Dickens's classic A Muppet Christmas Carol.

These figures started to merge as the world grew smaller, until the Santa Claus meme ate the planet entire. Some countries still hang onto their Father Frosts, but it seems that any nation with 3G now views St Nick, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas and Sinterklaas as the same guy who brings Coca Cola to our TV screens in the first week of December, giving everyone an ironic thrill on Twitter, and giving the shareholders of Coca Cola even more of a thrill. (Incidentally, it's a myth that Coke had anything to do with the modern portrayal of our jolly benefactor, although their marketing dollar undoubtedly had an effect on popularising the already existent image. Santa's had a red suit all the way back to St Nick.) A lot of the mythology arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the form of poems and songs. Santa Claus is Coming to Town gave us naughty and nice lists (and you thought they came from the Renaissance, didn't you?), and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer gave us...well, you know.

So what? Well, it gave me pause. Santa's been around, with different passports for centuries. Ideas don't last like that unless they have meaning and value for people. And it isn't just to sell Barbies and Smart Phones, although it undoubtedly also does that. Santa was always about helping people who needed it, not choking spoiled children with Transformers and chocolate. He went where he was needed. He represents a great spirit of pure benevolence; of love and life, no matter where or for whom. Notice his sleigh crosses the world in a night, invisible to radar and satellite. Every child anywhere who needs him is his charge, in war or peace. This is why he endures in the hearts of children and the scarred, scared hearts of adults who no longer dare to dream. Because he represents, past the adverts and the cynicism, the antidote to hopelessness and despair.

Most of us no longer believe in the man, because we were disappointed by the world, and its inadequacies, by its squalor and its suffering; by the lack of any evident cosmic justiciar; by the relentless way it crushes the kind and the gentle. This is rarely more clear than in the year of Savile, when modern protectors of children have been revealed to be the very worst of their enemies, when children are exposed to escalated sexualisation daily through advertising aimed directly at them.

There is a reason why he is immortal; because, like the Olympic Gods, he embodies something within us that, thankfully, always endures: the spirit of hope and love. As teachers, we need to remember this Pole Star. We are small but important links in the chains of their lives, with a professional part to play. Teach to the best of our ability; act as role models as much as possible, and and treat everyone we encounter with compassion and altruism (even if they don't understand or appreciate it at the time). As tears fall throughout the year, Santa Claus is working away to make toys for the desperate. And every time one of us commits an act of charity and benevolence, you can hear the hammers of elves and the tinkle of bells. At times it seems that humanity's factory settings are cruelty and selfishness. And at times, it does not, and for a night, we can imagine that something better is possible.

So I answered her as honestly as I could. 'There's no proof he exists,' I said. 'But maybe he's real in a way if you believe in him.'

And that seemed to satisfy her.

Merry Christmas

Tom

It's a Wonderful Job: A Christmas Story of Teaching

2012-12-16T06:26:00.001-08:00

It's a wonderful job: a Christmas Story

Note: this is an edited version of a blog I wrote for a previous Christmas. I thought it was still appropriate, though.

Finally watched Frank Capra's 'It's a wonderful life' last night, and if you are one of the two or three dozen that haven't yet met this charming American filmic myth, then let me be the latest in a long line of people to say, somewhat redundantly, that it's a masterpiece. (In other news: fire is hot). It's a tale of the little guy who makes a difference in his community, being rescued from the brink of despair by a poignant, Christmas Carol meme of 'what if?' Lionel Barrymore, I'm afraid to say, is as wooden as Patsy Kensit as the Guardian Angel. But Jimmy Stewart can play likeable everyman characters in a way that makes Tom Hanks appear edgy and controversial.

(I must add that, for the majority of my adult life, I was under the illusion that It's a Wonderful Life was directed by Franz Kafka. I always suspected it was a bit fishy, but I didn't want to say anything openly. I look forward to seeing Jimmy Cagney in The Metamorphosis.)
The central theme that rang a tuning fork in my hard heart: we barely notice the differences we make in other peoples' lives, and unlike George Bailey, we rarely meet a divine messenger to point out how things might have been. Coincidentally, yesterday two things happened that figuratively speaking, showed me the ghosts of Christmas past and future.

The first one was a simple card from an ex-pupil, one who had left several years previously. Because I'm not entirely a whore, I'll spare you the details, but in summary it was a kind, thoughtful thank you for helping him get through his A-levels, and for contributing in some small way to his present position at University. I suspect that in years to come I'll be greeted by boxes of flaming avian offal pushed through my letter box once students appreciate the debt they now enjoy thanks to my goading.

The card was nice; it came at the end of a day when I had to deal with some difficult behaviour that, while entirely routine, required the proportionate routine responses, paperwork, and colleague-bothering that we know and love when it comes to working the system. All resolved, lots of good outcomes and conversations, but tiring and time consuming. The sort of thing that eats away any spare time you might have jealously accumulated in the noble hope that you might actually be able to achieve something you want done, as opposed to meeting the endless requirements of working in any heirarchal institution.

The second thing was beautiful; a really kind reply from a correspondent on the TES Behaviour Forums to whom I had offered some of my unworthy advice several days back. Normally I don't expect replies, because, well because everyone's busy and frankly I (and many other regulars) do it both because we enjoy it, and perhaps because we should. I shouldn't be amazed- but I still am- how frequently behaviour in an internet context can degenerate so quickly into oddball aggression and nastiness.

Every week or so, amongst the grown-ups and the professionals, you get one of these, and they can make you think, 'Why do I bother? I don't have to take this sh*t,' especially if you've spent twenty minutes of your valuable, non-reclaimable existence crafting a response to their questions. But once in a while you get a response like the one I got yesterday, when someone tells you that you were in some way instrumental to their perseverance.

I'm under no illusions about the depth or the quality of the advice I give on the forum; I'm just another teacher, like many others, plugging away and hoping that what we do is the right thing. I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, nor do I imagine that my opinions are either definitive or final. The same with my teaching; I work my ass off, care my ass off, and try my best to make sure that I'm doing exactly what I'm paid to do at least, and then some if there's time. Why? Because there's nothing more important than what happens to the kids in our care; that's our duty, and it's a sacred one. This isn't a job, that you walk into, and punch out at five o'clock; this is a vocation, like the priesthood or cabaret. You have to love your subject, love working with kids, and love teaching them. If you don't, you won't ever be truly happy doing it. But if you do, then you'll see that it's one of the best, most important roles you can ever have, outside of parenthood (I imagine).

Many new teachers enter the profession wanting- demanding- to change the world, to transform the lives of children like Samuel Jackson in Coach Carter; and good for them that they want to. But then they find their passion and enthusiasm are cold currency in a climate that requires tenacity, dedication and rigour before they can often even reach the ones they want to help. Many give up because their illusions are shattered. Many more persevere, but smoulder with resentment and disappointment that things weren't fair, that things weren't the way that they expected them to be; they stay on, they teach, they end up hating it. I have nothing but sympathy and professional camaraderie for both groups.

But teachers should realise that they will never change the entire world by themselves, no more than you could push the earth out of its orbit by putting your shoulder to a cliff side. That's not what we do; that's not what anyone does. The way you change the world is one square metre at a time; look in front of you and say, 'What needs fixing? How can I help?' Then you do what you are capable of, no more, no less; and you go home and sleep at night, not kept awake by guilt demons that whisper at you, 'You failed, nothing has changed, nothing is better. Give up.'

That's what we do; we plug away and we try to make the world a better place. You might never 'transform' a child's life; but that's not the benchmark of good teaching. You do your best, and you give them the best damn education you can. You provide them with safe, supportive environments characterised by discipline and tough love. You do your best. And mark this: your best will not, sometimes, be enough, and you will fail, and children will pass through your care and fall off the map, seemingly no better for having encountered you. But we must- we must- keep going, because many of them will be helped, and some of them will be helped a lot. We play the odds, we play a long game.

We are small, but significant links in other peoples' lives, in a chain that goes on forever in both directions. As supporting characters in the melodramas of the lives of others, we are required to ask one simple question: do we want to help, or harm? Everything else follows from that. It is an honour to be able to assist a student into adulthood; it is an honour to be able to offer advice to a fellow professional when they need some TLC, because I remember the times when I have needed support and assistance. Like George Bailey after his illumination, I am grateful every day for the chance to play the smallest part in the lives of other humans. That, dear friends, is why after moments like yesterday I felt like running down the High Street of Anytown, America, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and laughing in the face of Mr Potter.

It's a wonderful job. Merry Christmas.

This engine runs on hope: why schools need to defy the destiny of data

2012-11-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

Chris Cook has written an excellent sidebar to Fraser Nelson's enthusiastic love letter to the Swedish model (and if that doesn't make you wave a pretend cigar and wag your eyebrows like Groucho, then there is no hope for you). It's a cautionary note to the symphony of success that the Swedish Free School system, running parallel to the state sector, seems to exemplify. In summary, he advises that its benefits, while statistically significant, aren't exactly enormous. At the heart of this, and in other good pieces he's written, he describes how a huge part of a child's success is down to where they're from, not where they're at.

Its a topic I often think about: what does it matter what we do? As Christopher rightly says, aren't the historical and economic narratives of the children's background the real levers of destiny? And in many senses they are, of course. But to be a teacher, it's vital that we....almost ignore this. I wrote about it here:

'In life, we often get what we expect, not what we deserve. We create cages within our own minds, and say that the horizon is as high as we lift our eyes. How many children sit in a school where the targets on their books say G, F or E? How many schools are judged by the damnable, damned engines of purported certainty that the Hellish FFT data suggests? How many teachers look at a kid and expects nothing from them? How many parents? How many schools? I set all my pupils two targets: one given them by the desiccated, blasted data that precedes them, and one of my own, which is far more important. And I let them know it.

Rarely do I set anything other than an A. Why? Because I bloody well expect it. I don’t care how poor a kid is, and I certainly don’t give a damn what some hypothetical bell curve says a kid is capable of. If they have a sound mind in the most general sense, I tell them where they’re aiming- an A. I know how to do it. I know how they can do it. If we don’t get there, then I don’t waste a tear on it if everyone tried their best, including me. Especially me, sometimes.

I despair of our contemporary insistence that children submit to market models of tagets, when they are human beings; that teachers kneel before the tyrant of the perfectly elastic, infinitely expanding mad universe of the stockbroker. I’m not a middle manager in a branch of Comet. I’m a Teacher.

Until we have a system that demands- and expects- all students to try their best and do well, rather than concedes that they can’t, and so the bars must be set lower and lower until they bury themselves in the ground, then we will get exactly the children we deserve. You want social mobility? You want an end to generational narratives of endless, empty poverty?

Expect more.'

And I returned to it, like a nervous murderer, in this blog, and I quote:

'So when the FFT says that a given child is estimated a B at GCSE, based on prior attainment data, once social and circumstantial factors have been accounted for, what does it mean?

Almost nothing. Almost nothing.

What it means is that many children with similar socio-economic and attainment levels achieved that grade. So what? Most children in Mozart's street didn't grow up to write The Magic Flute, but he did. Most children from Omaha, Nebraska didn't grow up to lead a black consciousness movement, but Malcolm X did. I taught a kid who scraped a C in bottom set RS, who scored a U in AS, and then an A at A2. The human spirit is a genie; it is absurd, noetic, a screaming eagle of ambition and indeterminacy. It is a ghost, a comet, a nuclear furnace of optimism and ambition and impossibility. It is also a disappointment; the anti-life, failure snatched from the jaws of victory. House prices can go up as well as down. That is what makes being alive so glorious and terrifying.

I have a knowledge of my children's predicted grades that approaches telepathy, because I know my subject and I know my kids. But every year I am knocked sideways by kids who exceed my expectations and those who ridicule them. Nobody can predict the future. Guesses are fine, but let's admit that's what they are.

Guesses.

Let's stop pulverising children with our bureaucratic assumptions about their potential. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be told by your teacher that your prediction is a D?

F*ck. That.

You know what my expectation of my children is? An A. For everyone. That's the target I set myself, and if I don't get it, well, I try again next year. I don't cry into my coffee, I just try again.

Here's a thing: what does it even mean to 'aim for a C, or a B'? Have you ever seen a kid revise, and try to get a B? It's nonsense. Kids try as hard as they can/ can be bothered, to get the best grade they can. If you set a child to run 100 metres, and they really bash their guts out on it, can you imagine asking them, 'What speed were you going for?' No. They just run. They just run. Target setting has become the fetish of 21st century teaching. It is another ravenous, ridiculous imported imaginary animal from the paradigm of the market place, where ambitions are plucked from the air- and they are- and called 'predictions', when they should be called 'hopes'.'

I can't fix the world. I can't smash the time barrier with my bare hands and save Abraham Lincoln. But I'll cease to exist before I stop trying to show every child in my room that they can rewrite the book of their own lives.

London Festival Of Education Part 2: Teacher Training, Flirtgate, and The Pale Rider

2012-11-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

'Ah! The laughter of children!'

From the rural womb of Wellington, a post-modernist cement baby is born. If the Summer Edfest is James Blunt, the London Festival is Tuliza. Even the banners and livery of the event were spraypainted, Banksy style, on tarpaulins reminiscent of a CND march. If it had been any more metropolitan it would have had a roundabout.

After Gove, I bolted to see Charlie Taylor take part in a panel discussion about the future of teacher training. The former behaviour czar has been reincarnated, like the Doctor, as the head of the Teacher Agency in charge of the stuff, so I imagine this panel wasn't too taxing. 'Yeah,' he could say. 'It's like that. Touch me.' Taylor's a rare thing: a man up to his armpits in the education business who actually knows which way up a child goes. Everything he did and said as behaviour advisor was intuitively and demonstrably sensible, and I expect he'll be no slouch in training reform either.

He talked about School Direct, the school-based qualification system that emphasises practical experience. This has been criticised by some as dislocating teachers from the wealth of educational history and theory that underpins the profession. I'd respond by arguing that 99% of that theory is utterly useless until you have a bit of teaching under your belt. Sometimes even then. The consequence is complete greenhorns walking into school worrying if they're meeting the 45 basic competencies, or satisfying the fifteenth spoke of the learning bicycle or something. Teaching is a profoundly practical activity. There is no tension between whether it's an art or a craft or a profession or a blancmange; it has elements of the first three, at different times, in different proportions. It's an acquired habit; it's a character set; it's a body of learned content; sometimes it's even an interaction between all three. Sometimes it's like shaving a chin or planing a door; at other times it's as conscious and planned an activity as having sex on a ladder.

The Institute had never looked lovelier

Charlie's top tip for new teachers was to lie in a dark room for a few hours every week and think about what you've done, like a chastened boy in a corridor. Dennis Hayes, his co-panelist, suggested going to the pub, but I suspect most teachers won't take a great deal of prodding. Hayes, who spoke a terrifying level of sense about the intellectual poverty of much educational research, added that he thought every teacher needed to have read three core texts to consider themselves fit: Plato's Republic, Rousseau's Emile, and Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum. I have. The films were better.

Flirtgate

Then it was my turn. After a clandestine coffee with OldAndrew I was contestant number three in a Gardener's Time Q&A on behaviour: me, Paul Dix and Professor Susan Hallam. Michael Shaw, the assistant editor of the TES, hosted: a man who presumably keeps a painting of a wizened old man in his attic. He's the Benjamin Button of the teaching press, and every time I meet him I want to buy moisturiser and maybe lay off the smokes.

Q&A; minimum preparation, and you have to sing for your supper there and then: produce the goods or get out, much like a classroom. I did my usual schtick of saying 'Get them into trouble when they're naughty and reward them when they're good' in as many variations as I could. It's also the title of my next book.

Most questions were perfectly sensible; nobody wept. We picked over their entrails and poked around their chamber pots and divined and diagnosed. The standout moment came, however, when a lady in the front row asked us what should be done if students display, misogynistic and sexually aggressive behaviour. Professor Hallam, who is undoubtedly a woman of repute, intelligence and craft, gave an answer I can only describe as surprising. 'Flirt with them,' she said.

No.

Uproar in the court. Mind. Blown. I could see a hundred eyeballs practically detach from their retinas and pop out onto the carpet, mine included. I have no idea what possessed a woman to say such a thing, and perhaps it's unfair to expect a non-classroom practitioner to answer such a question, but I fear that this exemplifies a very serious point: the best people to advise on how to run a a classroom are those who actually do such a thing. Research is often a million miles away from practice, and boy, was it ever here. Flirting with kids who want to treat you as a sexual object will only do one thing: encourage further predatory behaviour. It demeans and insults the teacher, and provokes the aggressor to further heights of inappropriacy. The way you deal with sexual intimidation in classrooms is by shutting it down; by standing up to it; by crushing the merest flicker of it as it emerges. God help the child on my watch who tries to trash-talk a female teacher because of her gender.

The Good, the Bad and the Unsatisfactory

Finally to the Pale Rider himself, the outlaw Michael Wilshaw. I've written before that I rate the Bishop of Mossborne highly. Unlike most of his detractors, he has actually pulled off the Holy Grail of education: turning lead to gold, or low-achievers into high. He attracts ire like lightning to a copper weather-vane, seemingly for having had the temerity of giving thousands of kids a chance of social mobility where little seemed to exist before. I know, burn the witch, right? He also doesn;t give a f*ck about what people think of him or his methods, which practically has me screen-printing T-shirts.

Are you still using VAK?

If other rooms were packed, this was a gangbang in a coffin. He read from notes, perhaps mindful of the press tendency to surgically dissect the most controversial words in any of his speeches and randomise them into headlines like 'Wilshaw calls all teachers bastards' or similar. Everything I've ever heard him say was tough but practical. Criticisng the status quo doesn't imply blanket condemnation; merely that things can improve. In a room full of teachers, he spoke of how good schools came from good leadership, and I saw an entire room full of people nod at once. He's no fool. He seemed to go out of his way to congratulate teachers for being the catalyst of change in London, and foreshadowed the format of his annual report: more regonalism, more emphasis on the people who sit in the big chairs. A room full of people with little chairs lapped it up.

Then he launched into his new hit single: Oftseds with less box-ticking and more lesson observations. Inspectors trained not to look for specific teaching styles, gimmicks and legerdemaine. By this point the crowd were waving their hands in the air with lighters aflame. If he'd chosen to stand on the table, turn around and fallen backwards like Peter Gabriel, he could have crowd-surfed to Russell Square. He should do this kind of thing more often.Maybe he'll do another tour.

Marchgate

Taking questions, he explained how he was often taken out of context; that the Dirty Harry comments were just a throwaway remark, although the chuckling press corps next to me conveyed their suspicion that The Man With No Shame rather enjoyed the Judge Dredd caricature. They might be right: he comedy-checked himself as he said, 'I was marching- sorry, walking down a school corridor.' Riffing on his own stereotype? And he got the laugh he was looking for. By this point in his own session, the Sorceror of Sanctuary House was dogfighting with the Red Army. The Unforgiver, by contrast, was dropping LOLZ like Dean Martin at a roast.

Time will tell if he also has enough medicine to drive his army of inspectors before him, or if they'll continue to harrow schools with witless prescription, mono-dimensional metrics and snake-oil dogma. But he doesn't deserve the rep that a hostile press has brewed for him: I haven't seen a man more suited to the despotic reform that inspection needs, and schools should support his project in order to support themselves. They should expect inspectors to explain their judgements; they should expect them to be supportive and suggestive of ways to improve. An Ofsted Inspection should be seen as a chance to shine and improve, not an opportunity to pimp your data and get the FSM kids singing songs from Oliver, wearing flat caps with target levels painted on them.

Every Which Way But Home

The Wellington College party arrived with little fuss

If you live in an edububble it's important to escape at times and speak to normal people, so I left, although before I did to my joy I saw Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington Towers being carried down the stairs in a sedan chair by monks in white samite*, just in time for his final address. The country mouse was visiting the town mouse. I wonder what he thought?

The Festival was a splendid thing. They should do it every year. It worked for Christmas.

*This may not have actually happened.

PS Thanks to Chris Husbands, Michael Wilshaw, Gerard Kelly, TES and the IoE for hosting the event, and for letting me come and caper.

The London Festival of Education: Good, with Outstanding Features. Part 1

2012-11-18T03:03:00.000-08:00

London's first Festival of Education roared into Russell Square this weekend, hosting the capital's yoorban answer to Wellington College's fragrant mother ship. The Institute of Education, which hosted the event, is a great college inside a building that makes the elephant house at London Zoo look like the tea rooms at Kew Gardens. Stalin would have taken one look at it and said, 'Blimey, that's a bit brutal.'

I'd been invited to do my monkey dance in a Q&A on behaviour which gave me the double pleasure of participating and observing. Apart from comedy support acts like me, the organisers had pulled their fingers out and hustled up the biggest names in education- Sir Michael Wilshaw, Adonis, Charlie Taylor, Hattie- and even the Lord of Sanctuary House himself, Gaffer Gove. The headline act opened the show, in an inversion of normal rock gig chronological taxonomy. Logan Hall was packed to the rafters in a manner that normally only happens when PGCE students turn up for their annual lecture on behaviour management, if memory of my own PGCE serves. This was a Saturday morning, remember. It was the edu-equivalent of One Direction signing arses in Bluewater.

As Marx once said, 'You have nothing to lose but tiers of local bureaucracy.'

The mood of the crowd was...well, let's be honest, crowd moods are usually variegated, aren't they? It was the world's biggest staffroom: a few angry Trots wearing Michael Rosen masks*; a sprinkling of old-timers, part-timers, time-servers and first-timers. Some stalwarts decided to spend their Saturday morning outside the IoE handing out pamphlets and wearily waving a fairly piss-poor effigy of someone. You knew was meant to be Michael Gove because there was a note pinned to its straw chest that said so, in the manner of a satirical cartoon in Punch.

Gove is famously personable and charming, and so it proved. He was interviewed by David Aaronovitch who promised to be a spiky and intelligent host. Aaronovitch's father, Sam, was a prominent Communist. As a member of the 1975 Manchester Uni team on University Challenge, he answered every question from Bamber Gascoigne with 'Trotsky', 'Lenin,' and so on, in protest against Oxbridge colleges being allowed to enter the competition separately. Nowadays people just get pissy about voting protocol when the X-Factor judges go to deadlock, but back then, game show protests were cold war arenas for class struggle, it seems.

Aaronovitch offered a polite but firm rebuke to the Secretary of State's vision of the educated student, homing in on the predictable, but important saws of access, privilege, entitlement and offer. But the Grand Wizard of Surrey Heath did not, it is fair to say, fall off the back of a turnip truck, and he cracked every ball back efficiently enough. He was even wearing a tie as red as the spilled blood of revolutionary martyrs. But his master stroke was pulling out a book on British Communism from the fifties and quoting appreciatively about the sacred shrine of books that every home should have. For a moment I thought he would extend a black-gloved hand out to a weeping Aaronovitch and say, 'David....I AM YOUR FATHER.'

Every time Aaronovitch said something like 'Isn't it true that you plan to boil G-grade students to make soup stock?' Gove would nod appreciatively and say, 'Yes, you're absolutely right, I agree,' before then launching into his calm and careful refutation. It had the effect of making the discussion seem enormously consensual, and gave Gove the air of a man who was absorbing the interviewer into his own argument. All you have to do is leave out the word 'but.'

Poland! The New Educational Drinking Game

There was a bit of Poland, which appears to be the new Finland (take a shot!); a bit of vocational banter (Gove, quoting Blair: 'If you ever want to declare war on Iran, do so in a speech about vocational education.'); a bit of 'Why do you hate teachers?' and so on. One blade asked why Academies terms and conditions were so bad, and was sent scampering with the reply, 'Teachers in academies earn more,' which if true, is a Trump Card. He said 'Once you go to an academy, I've never seen anyone go back.'

Of course, a dialogue is less scripted than a speech, and a Q&A less still. There were, of course, the usual sad sacks who somehow imagine that 'asking a question' means 'tell us your life story and put a question mark at the end.' It was also an opportunity for a bit of tub thumping. In his answers we saw more shooting from the hip. Some answers possessed his usual precision, others pressed the predictable buttons on a few in the audience who were wriggling for a fight and a sound bite they could hate properly.

He gave them it when he said, 'You can't have education without assessment', and some of the crowd visibly quickened, taking their safety catches off. So far, so reasonable: what country would invest 5% of its GDP on something without a means of regulation and evaluation? Then, the House of Commons pugilist came out as he added, almost an afterthought, 'Without assessment, it just becomes play. We need to know.' Cue: Oktober Revolution. 'What an idiot!' hissed an unhappy woman behind me. 'A fucking idiot.' A great deal of rhubarb, rhubarb followed.

Gove was unbowed; instead of retreating he advanced. Answering the challenge that focussing on the Ebacc would kill off the arts, he replied that he hadn't seen a single academically excellent school that didn't; also promote outstanding arts and sports - which is probably true, although when asked if that was true in Singapore, his reply that they had lots of after school clubs prompted snorts of derision from a lot of people who, apparently, knew the Singaporean school system intimately. There was a question from a woman who rocked our worlds by saying, 'Bonjour Monsieur Gove,' and everyone clutched their partners and thought, 'My God we're somehow in France'. She wanted to know if Gove valued 'Community Languages,' and he scored points by explaining to Aaronovitch what that meant. He just emphasised how important languages were in general, sidestepping the whole 'Why don't you teach Urdu?' argument quickly. Mainly because there isn;t anything you can say about the topic without alienating someone.

He explained why RS wasn't in the Ebacc by referring to its existent state of being a statutory subject in all schools, out with of the National Curriculum, and he didn't want to unpick too many stitches otherwise the whole tapestry would fall apart. Aaronovitch made a funny face and pointed out that Gove didn't normally seem too bothered by tugging on the odd thread with all his might. But no politician wants to either drop RE completely, and lose the entire religious vote, nor defend it too openly, alienating the secular demographic. Leaving things alone and not talking about stuff is the safest bet for a man who answers to a ballot every five years.

Full Pelt

Somebody wanted to know why he insisted on demoralising schools by using critical language about some schools, and there were nods from a few; he responded by saying, 'There are schools that aren't good enough and my job is to point out that some schools are inadequate.' Which seems fair enough. I scratch my pointy head at people who get upset when someone in charge of something criticises the status quo. What's the alternative? Say that everything is great? Clearly it isn't so, and if the Boss of Schools said it was, I'd think he was a bit simple.

By the end, he probably hadn't won over any hard liners, but he probably didn't make too many enemies either, and possibly showed a few that he, just like them, wanted the best for children and schools. Aaronovitch's earlier point that he wanted to simply replicate his own school experience could be answered by saying, 'Well, good: I wish everyone got the chance for such an education,'. The educational debate polarises so easily in this country that it practically shatters into two suspicious satellites, revolving around each other in perpetual enmity. The truth is that both camps have more in common than they think; there are no enemies of children in this discussion, simply two tribes, going to war.

Later on, I congratulated Chris Husbands on the Festival, and he replied, 'It was 'a hairy ride, but worth it.'

At least I hope he was talking about the Festival.

IN PART 2: Charlie Taylor; My session; Flirtgate; Pale Rider, Michael Wilshaw; summing up

*not strictly true. Or even loosely

The Empire Strikes Back: Ofqual, and the omnishambles of assessment

2012-11-02T01:44:00.002-07:00

The edu-interwebs were crackling with fury this morning. Glenys Stacey, Head of Ofqual, has published her report into this season's controversial GCSE results, where accusations of dumbing down and political expediency have been volleyed back and forth across the net. Ofqual's response has been the equivalent of two neighbours arguing about each others' dogs, and one of them goes, 'Ah, but you've been burying postmen under your patio!' Ladies and gentlemen, this hoe-down just got interesting again. The claim, in summary, is this: some teachers in some schools have been routinely over-marking coursework in an effort to obtain higher grades. My poor iPhone nearly melted through Earth's crust when I turned it on; the most common response was that of 'teacher bashing.'

Let's take a closer look at that. What did she actually say?

"Children have been let down. That won't do. It's clear that children are increasingly spending too much time jumping through hoops rather than learning the real skills they need in life," said Stacey. "Teachers feel under enormous pressure in English, more than in any other subject, and we have seen that too often, this is pushing them to the limit."

This is clearly the kind of retaliation Sean Connery would have advocated in the Untouchables- 'One of them pulls a knife, you pull a gun; they put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue.' This is a damn-your-eyes, balls-out, attack-as-defence come back, make no mistake. But to be fair, it isn't naked teacher bashing; in fact, it sounded more like an attack on the system inside which teachers operate than a direct claim that teachers are shifty.

And let's be clear: the system has been shifty; it was designed, if anyone can't see it, to facilitate and encourage systematic grade manipulation, for the following reasons- if you create a high stakes school assessment facility, where the metric of 5 A*-C becomes the sole difference between damnation and salvation AND you simultaneously provide the participants of that system with the means by which they can avoid the former by fair means or foul, then, as any economist will tell you, you have created a fertile plain upon which manipulation can occur.

I have heard some people describe this as 'not cheating', because it is within the regulations; that because it is permitted by guidelines, it is therefore just. I can think of few things more depressing than people doing something they know to be wrong and calling it right because the law permits it: see adultery for details. It is cheating. To give a pupil a higher grade in the school-entered component of a GCSE in order for that student to obtain the magic C, is cheating.

I'll tell you what else has been immoral- targeting borderline C/D students. In what world, other than one obsessed with 5 A*-C, would schools target only students who will obtain a benefit to the school? I'll tell you who I target- ALL my kids, because they all deserve an education, and to do the best for themselves, not because my grades look groovy. The message anything else sends is: are you stupid? Then we don't care about you- you're a lost cause. Are you bright? Good luck, we don't give a damn about you either, thanks for the C. It's educational apartheid, and children become instrumental to the school's interests. I didn't come into the profession to make schools look good.

Course work is a rotten system of assessment for academic subjects- even if only a few schools practice the dark arts, through a process of Darwinian competition, pressure rises on other schools to do the same. To quote Hobbes, 'It only takes one thief for all men to bar their windows.' Or to inflate. Such is the damning legacy of a one-dimensional metric like league tables.

I have heard people bluster, 'Oh, how can you say teachers would do that- we're better than that.' That is unbearably naive. In a system designed to reward only the winners, it is inevitable that the rot of inflation sets in. And let's not forget that grade inflation is a fact accepted by all parties, and by Ofqual itself. Unless you believe that teachers are made of finer moral material than the majority of people- and I don't; we are human- then you cannot imagine that teachers are not just as subject to the vices of the human condition as much as the virtues. Even if you did believe such a thing, competition to achieve would drive many to sin.

So quite apart from the separate issue of the fairness or otherwise of the June boundaries, what Stacey is saying is correct: coursework and 'controlled' assessments (aye, there's an oxymoron) are some of the worst ways to obtain a fair result in examination. The alternatives are imperfect, but less than these. Having work marked by class teachers also results in one of the worst possible detriments to the principle of fairness: partiality. The subconscious temptation to mark according to what you already think of a student, is well documented by research- which raises all sorts of discriminatory issues.

One final point; while I agree broadly with Stacey on this point, isn't it odd that, back in May of last year, she was complaining about the term 'Grade Inflation'? I blogged about it here, when she said:

"I don't find 'grade inflation' to be a very helpful expression," she says. 'Inflation' has a negative import whereas in fact we may be seeing young people being taught well and working hard."

Has she been converted, like Malcolm X in his cell? It seems like she now concedes there might well have been inflation, 'unhelpful' or not. But we need to keep these two issues separate- the GCSE results controversy, and coursework/ CA manipulation, and not pretend that the moral ambiguity of one cancels out the other. If we as a profession cannot condemn bad practice when we see it, then we will never learn, and improve. It behooves those of us who disagree with a system that encourages cheating, and the cheating itself, to say so.

What do we want? More rigour! How do we want it? We don't know! Leaky cauldrons, draughty doors and the English Curriculum

2012-11-01T03:16:00.003-07:00

'I want them doing bare Homer an' Ovid an' that.'

There's a draft English curriculum floating around, in advance of actual proposals in the next few months. How do these things escape from the laboratory? They should frisk everyone leaving Sanctuary House. Or just stop telling people, which ever's easier. If there's a draft, shut the door.

As usual with such things, a bunfight has emerged. Dame Gove has been castigated by Stephen 'Equaliser' Twigg for, among other things, an apparent lack of rigour. It is, La Twigg claims:

'..preparing to introduce a narrow and out of date curriculum that will take us backwards.'

What definition of narrow he's using, I'm not sure; the curriculum is, if anything, becoming more fluid and open to interpretation and personalisation. It's becoming less prescribed. If that's narrow, then I wouldn't like to see him reverse a Transit Van backwards into a parking space. And 'out of date'? Please, God, don't let this be another allusion to the apparently essential 21st century skills that so many have unwittingly adopted as dogma. Alas, it probably is, as the cult of the 21st century (or now, as I like to call it) appears to count the Labour spokeman as a celebrity member, like Scientology, but without the evidence base.

'Incredibly there is no mention of the importance of spelling...'

That takes balls, I tell you. Marks for spelling, as a government source mentions (check his pockets, by the way, there's draft documents just walking out here) were removed by the previous opposition's predecessors. So that's a funny thing to get all cocky about.

'There's no mention of creativity and being able to think critically or understanding opposing points of view in any of these sources.'

Now that's odd: to criticise something for being too narrow (and previously, too prescriptive, too didactic) but then to try to finger it for being lacking in substance, is a tricky piece of legerdemain, and I salute the attempt. But it doesn't make sense. The proposed curriculum (and of course, it might look nothing like the finished article) looks set to be far less set in stone, and far more open to teacher and school customisation. It's Gradgrind in reverse.

The complaint continues: the draft 'makes no mention of the importance of taking part in structured group discussion or listening skills to judge and interpret what a speaker has said.'

That might be because the teacher should decide how best to teach their own students, and not be subject to the donkey-headed assumption that group work is the only or best way to learn anything. It's a strategy, nothing more, and not always a particularly effective one. It seems to me that the only ones talking from the hip today are the opposition benches, and carelessly at that. And the only ones who seem to be suggesting that the government issue Mosaic tablets of what kids should and shouldn't learn, and how, are Labour.

Every ministry, everywhere wrestles with this demon: do we allow individuals to have power, or do we centralise? The temptation to inhale all autonomy into the centre is understandable- why go into politics if you intend to give power away?- but history teaches us that this is the struggle between tyranny and the barbarism of the state of nature. Teachers have trudged like yoked cape buffalo for decades in a curriculum that seeks to obtain almost daily direction, in a witless attempt to generate precise, mathematically calculated results. The recent moves to loosen these chains has the potential to transform teachers from galley slaves to, at the very least, the bloke with the tom-toms and the broom handle, if not actual captains.

That's something to be desired, not feared. Of course, for many of us, it will be an uneasy transition. We're so used to be being told exactly what to teach that having the cage door opened will terrify. I saw an experiment once; monkeys, bred in captivity are offered an open door for the first time. As you might expect, it takes a while for any to dare to poke their noses outside, even when tempted by bananas. Some of the stalwarts who do so pad around nervously in their brave new world before....going back into the cage. And then closing the door behind them.

If the door is being opened for us, even a crack, we need to be bold enough to cry freedom and tear through, pushing it hard with out shoulders to allow others to follow. I mean, have you seen the bananas out there?

Quotes from article here