Teacher Education Should Not Be Compromised

Western Decay

I can’t help but feel worried about teacher education. You know, university courses for learning our craft. Today I ran into some unfortunate stories of the experiences our aspiring teachers might come across. Who knows whether this is a universal, worldwide issue but I have long held concerns. They have niggled away in the back of my mind. After all this is such an important formative experience for people entering our profession.

  • How can you not have lesson intentions or success criteria for sessions about how we teach?
  • How can you not have technology rich experiences for our aspiring teachers?
  • How is “technology and me don’t mix” still a sentence people say?
  • How can you be so muddled about the student course and curriculum, you have no time to talk about learning?
  • How is a young teacher meant to learn when nothing of the contemporary classroom is modelled?
  • How come we are not thinking deeply about the student teacher experience?

So many questions and so much that needs to change. I know this may be in the minority here in Australia. Well I hope it is.

We are on the cusp of a project with an education team from a university here in Melbourne. I am excited about what we might create together in re-designing teacher education. It is one of a few pieces of our eco-system that is, well, broken. If over the next 5-10 years we can raise the quality of the aspiring teacher experience, it figures that everything might flow in a positive direction from there.

Pic Western Decay by sleepinyourhat

A new chapter down under

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There were two distinct moments when my mind was made up. The first was during a languid time spent walking along Manly beach in Sydney, looking down at my feet as the warm water rolled in and sucked out again. Watching my prints scrubbed free from the sand. I knew then.

Although in all truth I didn’t need much more convincing, I also remember being on the beach at Port Willunga just south of Adelaide. The sun seemed to be lingering on the Southern Ocean horizon, as it dipped and I watched the only surfer for miles, I clearly remember thinking that Australia was going to play a part in my future.

I have been lucky enough to travel back to Australia a handful of times over the last few years with Ewan for our NoTosh work. The trips have always been a great deal of fun and filled with laughter. We have worked in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Great memories.

And yet I still always remember those moments on the beaches of Sydney and Adelaide – all in all it is an easy decision.

On January 3rd we fly out of the UK to start a new chapter in our life in Melbourne. I would not be telling the truth if I didn’t say I was nervous and slightly anxious about it all. But I am also really excited, open minded and completely committed to what comes next for my family and for NoTosh.

No doubt we could have convinced ourselves it was not the right time, or that we will leave it a few years. But sometimes you just have to get on with it and step away from those who just say “wouldn’t it be nice if…”

I am looking forward to feeling the sand between my toes again.

Set Your Compass: Share Your Direction

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All too often we don’t co-construct our curriculum with the children in our class. What occurs is a complete lack of clarity about where, as a group of learners, we are heading. In fact the direction we are going in is all too often very much laid out for the learner – the route is set by the teacher and the outcomes are already known.

Curriculum planning in this vein doesn’t cater for the tangent or the divergent thinker- well it might entertain it briefly but will eventually settle back on the steady path to where we were always going.

Curricular of this ilk are not setup for serendipity. If I knew exactly the music that was going to be played on the radio all of the time, well in advance and had no control over it, I would miss out on those beautiful moments when you hear a wonderful track that hasn’t been played for ages and there you are in that completely unexpected moment savouring every note.

Much of this is to do with teacher control and the lack of willingness to let go of the reins and venture from the path a little. But it is also to do with a lack of ambition about what we plan, many models of curriculum, as well as units of work, are legacy systems:

A legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program that continues to be used, typically because it still functions for the users’ needs, even though newer technology or more efficient methods of performing a task are now available.

If the direction of a unit is already laid out, involving the learner in the direction is fruitless, for the learner at least, for no alteration can be made anyway.

In his book How Children Fail, John Holt reflected in 1958:

It has become clear over the year that these children see school almost entirely in terms of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that we impose on them. This is not at all the way the teacher thinks of it. The conscientious teacher thinks of himself as taking his students (at least part way) on a journey to some glorious destination, well worth the pains of the trip.

He continues to explain that he recognises a disconnect with what we as teachers perceive as a learning journey and how children truly see this. How many schools do you think could still be described in these terms?

At one of our partner schools in South London the pupils of Rosendale Primary School negotiate their learning. They have a clear direction and input into the course that is going to be set – not only that they have the ability to define how they get there. The pupil’s prior knowledge, skills, interests and passions are the starting point for much of the project learning that takes place.

With a vested interest the pupils at Rosendale have a much clearer understanding of the learning as a journey – they know what needs to be done and have made choices that help to define this and make it real and meaningful to them. It is not simply a set of tasks imposed on them by a legacy system.

Most of the time with these more open models we have to set our course into the unknown a little, we have to be willing to take the path less trodden.

When the teachers and Year 3 and 4 pupils of Thorney Close Primary School took on the challenge of running their own TEDx we didn’t know if we would be successful, there were a great deal of unknowns. At one point we didn’t have a venue because Take That were playing at the Stadium of Light!

With uncertainty often comes failure and we felt that for real and so did the children, but would they learn from it – absolutely!

Here are some reflections on the process by one of the teachers involved:

I learnt to trust the children and to let them go in the direction they want, trust that they’re going to make the right decisions with a little bit of guidance but not as much structure as we normally would give. So to sit back more and to listen more, and just ask the odd few questions – without waiting for that answer that the teacher wants to hear.

One of my favourite ways to describe this sense of a general direction, unclear and yet thoughtfully open, is the idea of a “fuzzy goal”. Taken from the opening to the wonderful book Gamestorming by Sunni Brown, David Gray and James Macanufo – a fuzzy goal can both describe our philosophical approach to change as well as the direction of a student led unit.

Like Columbus, in order to move toward an uncertain future, you need to set a course. But how do you set a course when the destination is unknown? This is where it becomes necessary to imagine a world; a future world that is diferent from our own. Somehow we need to imagine a world that we can’t really fully conceive yet—a world that we can see only dimly, as if through a fog.

Pic navigation (cc) by marfis75

Why I turned my back on teaching

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It has now been 6 months since I left the classroom as a Year 5/6 teacher and turned away from my role as Deputy Headteacher which I had only started a year before.

I have never really spent time writing about my decision on this blog and so thought it was about time, after all many of you helped in a small way to me actually getting the Deputy post in the first place and have been there to provide encouragement and support.

The last 6 months have flown by and I have enjoyed every minute!

I decided to leave teaching because of a variety of things, but the elephant in the room which was nagging me for months, was my desire to work with teachers and student beyond one school. Thankfully I rubbed my eyes and embraced the elephant, so to speak!

I chose to apply for a Deputy Head post not out of any deep desire to run my own school or be a headteacher, it was simply that I needed to change my circumstance and needed to feel I was contributing more to the running of a school.

I don’t regret my decision, but I think the specific challenges of the position and school went a long way to dampen my enthusiasm and zeal for school leadership. Sadly it led to some of the lowest times I have ever had in my teaching career.

It all seemed to come down to compromise. Due to my time being unnecessarily stretched compared to other Deputies I knew, I was making compromises with the quality of my teaching, the quality of my admin and the quality of my preparation. I had never really had to deal with such forced compromise in the past, on reflection that unsettled me deeply and is certainly something I never want to see again.

In my first week as a Deputy I wrote that, “No other 5 day stretch has ever examined and pressurised my professional facets as those just gone.” Well those 5 days continued on and the remainder of the year proved even more challenging than that tumultuous first week.

So what has changed?

The most notable things are a better quality of time with my family, variety through project work and being able to work with more schools and teachers.

I never really got to a stage that I was comfortably balancing work and life during my year as a deputy and so the quality of time with my family was hugely affected. There was always something nagging in my mind that hadn’t quite been completed or needed doing. I was never 100% focused on the here and now, and time was lost with the family.

This contributed to an unhealthy cumulative pressure I hadn’t experienced, both physically and emotionally – needless to say I am now glad to see the back of it.

The variety of work we have at NoTosh has been such a brilliant foil to the trudging monotony of the last few years. No week is the same – we will be wading in the deepest of intense research one week and design thinking with teachers the next. We are are also working with lots of schools and supporting teachers so I am never far from the classroom.

I have also enjoyed the ebb and flow of project work which allows you to see things to a natural completion in the relatively short term. At school the long term completion of a poject would feel most satisfying at the end of terms or the end of a year.

This “shipping” as Seth Godin would put it generates motivation and your energy levels rise as you move on to the next project. I am enjoying this way of working and although I have really felt I have had to adjust over the last few months, success and completeness is always in sight, something markedly lacking from my experience as a deputy headteacher.

One thing I realised, from those closest to me, was that things are not set in stone ad infinitum, even a job as all consuming as a deputy headteacher, and when things don’t work out you have to plan and actively choose to get yourself out of it. Linchpin by Seth Godin proved to be an important read for me in those difficult times and which underlined the importance of action.

All of that said I know that perhaps given a different set of circumstances I would have had a completely different experience as a new deputy and I have not discounted that maybe one day I will give it another go. But not right now 🙂

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Neil Hopkin, his kindness and generosity helped me steady the ship and find the elephant again in the darkened room. And also thanks to my good friend Ewan McIntosh for giving me hope and believing in me, even when I didn’t!

Thank you for your support over the last year and half, things took a wrong turn for a while back there but I am now doing a job I love (again), the future is bright.

Pic the winds of skagit. by heanster

I’m Leaving The Classroom – A New Chapter Begins

On the first day of this term, all the way back in early January, I handed my notice in. Next week, the final 4 days of term, will be my last at my current school and my last as a permanent classroom teacher.

From the beginning of May my new chapter will be working alongside Ewan McIntosh as part of Notosh – and hopefully having the chance to work with you!

For a very long time I have considered a change in career – I want to be in a position where I can help more schools and teachers, to have more of an influence on the “change” we all talk of. I want to see good ideas affecting more learners. I want more time to research ideas I have and explore their impact on learning. I want more time to write. I want more time to extend and develop different projects. I want more quality time with my family.

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For the last 5 years or so this blog and Twitter have been amazing at getting my ideas out to you – my fellow classroom practitioners and educators, but I want to work even more closely with you. And to do it full time without the myriad of pressures we face as teachers diluting my efforts.

Easter 2010 saw me begin my most recent chapter, working as a Deputy Head Teacher. I had some very low times, some of the lowest points in my teaching career. It has made me look at what I want from my working life and this change is exactly that!

I am thrilled to be joining Ewan who’s work and voice in the education community I have long admired. When I first began writing a blog, his was one of the first I explored – and unbeknownst to him, it quietly shaped the reflective and open process that blogging became for me.

Just to say in closing that I am so grateful for all of your support over the last few years, here and on Twitter, this is a major turning point for me. I hope you will continue to join me as I take those steps.

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Pic: next chapter!! by Ramon Boersbroek – Attribution-NonCommercial License