This much I know about…bridging the independent-state school divide

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about bridging the independent-state school divide.

All our certainties seem to be crumbling away. In our complex, changing world hang on to your values and do what’s right for your students.

Headteachers like talking about themselves; what follows is relevant to my theme – promise! I played golf for Sussex against the Worthing Golf Club on 11 December 1982; on the way home, having changed from Farahs into drainpipes, my dad dropped me off outside the Brighton Centre. I touted a ticket and spent three glorious, sweaty hours in the mosh-pit at the Jam’s last ever concert. I have spent my life walking that line between vastly different cultures. They played Eton Rifles, of course…

         

The class divide is exemplified beautifully in golf. The Artisan Golf Association has 70 clubs on its membership list and is for working class golfers. Each Artisan club shares a golf course with the “parent” club; each one has a separate, modest changing room-cum-clubhouse, reduced fees and limited times to play at weekends. As a youth I was a member of the Artisan Triangle Golf Club based at Piltdown Golf Club in deepest Sussex. We got changed in a well-kitted out shed across the road from the spacious, rambling country house which is still the Piltdown Golf Club’s clubhouse:

The Artisan changing rooms are beyond the parked cars on the right

As a 12 year-old golf fanatic I was oblivious to the class apartheid of my golfing world. Only when I became good enough to play for Sussex did I realise what being an Artisan golfer meant; it meant I couldn’t play for Sussex. I couldn’t join the Piltdown parent club as I hadn’t been to private school (one of the main qualifying criteria for membership) so I joined Crowborough Golf Club, ten miles and a bus journey up the road. I went on to be the course record holder at Piltdown, to captain the Sussex U18s & U23s and play for the full Sussex team.

The true gentry amongst the Piltdown parent club in the late ’70s treated the Artisan members with the greatest courtesy. Captain Bartlett’s gin-filled eyes dripped with affection when he conversed with my dad; when dad died the parent club flew their club flag at half-mast. It was the bourgeois middle-class members who were snobby.

The impact of the class divide upon young people is indelible. Upon returning to Piltdown Golf Club fifteen years ago, as a 33 year-old Deputy Headteacher and father, I was still deeply reluctant to use the only available pay-phone – it was located just inside the front door of the parent clubhouse. And that experience crystallises for me the enormity of our students’ journey from the estate at the bottom of Huntington Road to a professional career.

You can’t aspire to something you don’t know about. Despite my three grade As at A level in the early ’80s, my comprehensive school teachers never once mentioned Oxbridge to me or my cleaner mother and postman father.

The difference between what you want to do and what you think you can do if you’re a working class kid is the key. We are all bound by our own self-imposed limits. The thing is, when I walked the hallowed corridors of the remarkable Whitgift School last Saturday I could imagine its students feeling that the world was theirs. Just look at the first team cricket pitch…

If the UK were more equal, we’d all be better off as a population. That’s the conclusion of Professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their seminal text on the socially corrosive effects of income inequality, The Spirit Level. If one of our boys I spoke to yesterday, who is talented, good-looking, charming, funny, but with a chaotic home life, is going to thrive in a socially immobile world we have to give boys like him personalised, aspirationally different experiences. Doing what we have always done is nowhere near enough any more.

The Independent-State School Partnership in York is thriving. Bootham, The Mount and St. Peter’s are great schools and I have not one single reservation about working with them in the York ISSP, because, as Wilkinson and Pickett make clear, we all benefit. Together we provide our students and staff with great experiences – educationally, culturally and socially – which break down any divisions that might exist between us. I reckon what we’re doing is pretty special – click our logo below and see the opportunities available to our youngsters.

Reach for the Michelin stars, not McSchools. Sir Ken Robinson’s piece in the TES  encapsulates the fundamental problem we have in state schools; his article in this morning’s Guardian is equally apposite. Our students’ futures depend upon us all being truly great teachers but the ridiculous sense that there is a formula to teaching we have to adhere to has crippled state school teaching for too long. Jonathan Taylor, Headteacher of Bootham School, said to me at Wednesday’s ISSP meeting that he spends his time encouraging his teachers to capture their students’ imaginations in whichever way they can, rejecting any notion that there is a standardised way to teach. Lesson objectives, smectives…

I wish my school, 35 years ago, had had HOAP. We have the Huntington Oxbridge Application Programme which encourages our Year 9s to begin thinking about which top university they would like to attend and supports them through to securing a place at their chosen HE institution. My only slight disappointment was being unable to find a name for the programme whose acronym is CERTAINTY.

Raising aspirations doesn’t cost anything. As the biggest school in York we used to receive £160,000 a year to maintain our premises; two years ago that was cut by 80% and £28,000 doesn’t go very far these days. Our students will never enjoy the quality of facilities their private school counterparts are used to, but they can have dreams. Working with our ISSP colleagues we have to do all we can to help keep our students’ dreams alive rather than let them be crippled by a sense of inferiority. That pay-phone still haunts me…

This much I know about…Performance-Related Pay for Teachers

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about performance-related pay for teachers.

Who brought politics into education? Last December I was asked by a BBC reporter whether I regretted bringing politics into education and my reply was, quite simply, that it was the politicians who brought politics into education, not me. Since then I have tried very hard to be a-political in these pages but I fear what follows might break my resolve.

We’re seeing the marketisation of education hidden in plain view. Whilst the rhetoric from Michael Gove is collaborate, collaborate, collaborate, DfE policy-making encourages competition at every level. Ask the bankers what happens when things are left to be determined by the market…

Teaching is a decently paid job. If you are a good classroom teacher and you reach the top of the Upper Pay Spine you will earn at least £36,756 p.a.. Finding a job with a similar salary without significant management responsibility is almost impossible nowadays. But…

…I didn’t go into education to make money and I don’t know any teacher who did. My profit is great examination results for our students. That’s what I’m required to provide and that is what motivates me, something the Coalition clearly does not understand.

Coalition policies seem to be ratified using a very simple Venn diagram:

Any new policy has to be cheap, if not cost-free; the new Teachers’ Pay Policy will allow schools to employ teachers more cheaply and supress pay progression. There has to be the political will to adopt the new policy; the public will be happy with the simple headline notion that only good teachers should receive pay increments. Any new policy has to be easy to implement; what could be easier than to let Headteachers and Governing Bodies make all the difficult decisions inherent in the implementation of the new Teachers’ Pay Policy? All three criteria met = POLICY!

Pay rises for all from an ever-decreasing pot is unsustainable and this policy allows Headteachers to find a way to survive during austerity by making relatively arbitrary decisions about pay progression so that schools remain solvent. This year I am expected to provide a better education for the same number of children as we had in our school in 2010 with £450,000 less funding - and so far we’ve been “ring-fenced”?

It is possible to pare my job down to one thing: to ensure that £6.5m a year is spent in a way which provides the best education possible for the students who attract the money in the first place. Consequently I cannot afford to reward poor teaching and never have done.

Highly effective Performance Management mechanisms negate the need for performance-related pay. If a teacher really isn’t performing well and all support mechanisms have been exhausted, they should be facing competency procedures in a fair and transparent way. Everyone else should be developing their practice and be at least good.

Our raw materials are not wood and steel. I was working with Dr Jonathan Sharples from the Institute of Effective Education and @HuntingEnglish yesterday shaping a research project into an element of pedagogy. What became clear from Jonathan is that it is almost impossible to isolate a single variable and eliminate all the other variables when conducting research in schools. Singling out teacher effectiveness as the variable solely responsible for student outcomes is a hugely complex business and way beyond the scope of even the best performance-related pay policy for teachers. The Sutton Trust’s Improving the impact of teachers on pupil achievement in the UK – interim findings, published in September 2011, states that overwhelming evidence [that] shows that there is almost no link between teachers’ prior education or experience and the achievement of their pupils. Steve Munby told the ASCL conference in 2012 that, if you are the longest serving Headteacher in the Hall you’re probably our best or our worst Headteacher. Like I said, judging teacher effectiveness is complex.

Attempts to make judgements about pay progression completely objective verge on the impossible. I’ve heard of one model where there are four elements which combine to provide a wholly objective numeric measure for making the pay progression decision: the grade for Lesson Observation 1; the grade for Lesson Observation 2; the quality of marking and assessment gleaned from a work scrutiny; student examination data. Each element constitutes 25% of the final figure which determines the decision and if the teacher gets 70% or above s/he progresses up the pay scale. An Outstanding observation grade gains a full 25%, a Good observation grade 17.5%…yes, it’s mad isn’t it? And it’s still based on a number of relatively subjective judgements!

Performance-related pay could induce competitiveness right down to teacher-to-teacher level: Why share my teaching resources with him if his students’ results improve and he will get a pay rise over me? Fullan and Hargreaves point out that, Trust and expertise work hand in hand to produce better results…social capital strategies are one of the cornerstones for transforming the profession. Behaviour is shaped by groups much more than by individuals…if you want positive change, then get the group to do the positive things that will achieve it.

Who will want to teach set 4 out of 5? The more you think about performance-related pay, the more the intricacies emerge. How will re-setting mid-year affect pay progression decisions? Timetabling difficulties mean you have to take on a Year 11 group in September – are you then held responsible for that group’s outcomes?

Job offers could be interesting…Headteacher: I would like to offer you the post. Candidate: Well, I have two more interviews later this week and they may well offer me M6 and you’re only offering M5 – I’ll let you know if I accept your offer on Friday evening. To use a Yorkshire term, we may see an epidemic of people giving backword…it will certainly make the whole package for new recuits to your school important: CPD opportunities; promotion opportunities; staff well-being strategies; general ethos, etc., etc..

As Fullan says, Never a tick box, always complexity. The reason the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) is a weighty tome is because how you pay people is a complex issue. The STPCD is the accumalation of years of experience and reflection by employment law experts; leaving Headteachers and Governing Bodies to construct individual pay policies may well result in them being embroiled in appeals against their pay progression decisions throughout November and December.

Headteachers have an opportunity to unite to reject the worst elements of the new Teachers’ Pay Policy proposals.  The more divided we are, the more divided our staff rooms will become. We have to live by our values like never before and crush the grain of truth at the root of this old joke: What’s the collective noun for school leaders? A lack of Principals.

The trouble is, Headteachers are a mixed ability group. I was at an ASCL meeting recently where a Headteacher shrieked with barely controlled joy when she realised she did not have to match new recruits’ existing pay grades, because she wanted to save a bit of money. On many levels it was a depressing moment.

Hold on to what matters. I am going to return to our three values – Respect; Honesty; Kindness – and use them as the anvil upon which we forge our new pay policy. We already have a Teachers’ Pay Policy Working Party, comprising teachers and governors, and we will use our features of Truly Great Teaching at Huntington School, drawn up collectively by our teaching staff last month, to define what we expect of teachers at our school. And we will use wisdom and judgement in spades…

This much I know about…”Progress in my classroom? How it is made and how I know it.”

#Blogsync post number 4. http://share.edutronic.net/

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about, “Progress in my classroom? How it is made and how I know it.”

This much I know. My blog on how I taught disengaged 15 year old boys to write http://wp.me/p2wufC-9X details quite nicely how Tom and his mates made progress, how I knew they made progress, the details of classroom action, my reflections and how we measured the impact. I have nothing better to offer this month’s Blogsync on Progress in my Classroom according to the rubric laid down by @Edutronic_net.

Students’ academic progress is a key concern when I interview teachers for posts at Huntington. I ask candidates to, Tell us about a student you have taught who made great progress. (How did you know they had made progress?). Every individual student candidates have referenced over the decade I have been asking that question has made progress because s/he has found a teacher who believes in her/him, connects with her/him, and has inspired her/him to break through the self-imposed glass ceiling of achievement.

You need a bit more than love, but without it you’ve little chance of your students making the progress they have the capacity to make. I ended my blog on teaching the boys with this, which I will always stand by: fundamentally students need to feel loved. It’s that simple and that complicated to convince colleagues of such a truth.

Sometimes you find nuggets of gold when panning the river of new recruits to teaching. This is the opening to a candidate’s letter of application which gleamed at me amongst the mud and gravel: I would not have studied ******** if it were not for the teachers that I had at school.  They were not amazingly cool or clever, but what really inspired me was how much they cared.  They cared about the subject, and they cared about their pupils.  They cared so much it was contagious, and we started caring too.  And now, there is nothing I would like more than to pass this on to the next generation. Did we appoint the author? What do you think…?

This much I know about…preparing for an OFSTED inspection

I have been a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about preparing from an OFSTED inspection.

In March 2012 I received a letter from OFSTED saying that the earliest we could be inspected was the summer term 2013, which begins tomorrow…

Don’t be naïve about OFSTED Inspections. A good report frees you for five years to develop your school; a bad report can, as Robbie Burns once wrote, Leave us nothing but grief and pain,/For promised joy!

A clear, intense and highly effective focus upon improving the quality of teaching is the only preparation for OFSTED that really matters, because the quality of teaching is the only thing that really matters in a school. You can have great data but if the teaching observed is ordinary you can be in trouble; you can have mediocre data but if the teaching observed is outstanding you can get a Good judgement; it’s true, I’ve read the reports. My Preparing for OFSTED training session for colleagues is, essentially, a focus on improving teaching and a whole load of common sense. A copy of the Preparing for OFSTED Teacher booklet and accompanying presentation is here:

Preparing for OFSTED booklet 2013

OFSTED Training Day 25-02-13

You and your SLT team get the school organised for the inspection.  You get as ready as possible whilst everyone else nails the day job and teaches their faces off, day in day out, OFSTED or no OFSTED. In the end, you need to be ready for inspection all the time.

Get to the point where an Inspection is a moment not an event. I would love to claim this aphorism as my own, but it comes from the ever brilliant Zoe Elder. She said, verbatim, in a recent Twitter conversation with me and @Gwenelope: Get to the point where you’re on the front foot: know your pupils and ensure this informs your learning design. All day, every day for all pupils. When it doesn’t work out, reflect, rethink, revisit and redesign. Designing learning is iterative. Planning lessons less flexible. Bit of a mindset thing I guess. Ask, What’s the story of the lesson? So that you can tell it as it happens to any visitor but importantly; students. Bit like advanced driving commentary. Values. Best (and only) compass I know in a land of uncertainty.

Have a preparation plan for your SLT. There’s so much you can do beforehand to help get the inspection right. Make sure you attend to everything under your control so that the only variable out of your control on the day is what happens in the classrooms. Our plan is here:

OFSTED Inspection Preparation Timeline 2013 Final blog version

Effective Governance is crucial. We had a full meeting dedicated to me briefing Governors on the story of the school for the past year. We focused on their role in setting the strategic direction of the school, our data story, the Performance Management process, the impact of our Pupil Premium spend, and the quality of teaching across the school and in departments.

Make the inspection as easy as possible for the inspectors. There is no point being anything other than fully cooperative. We have a page on our website for the Lead Inspector with hyperlinks to all the information we have to provide mandatorily on our website; it saves the Lead Inspector wasting time searching for it all. And set up a base room for the Inspection team with fresh cafetière coffee and fruit. I always think about the process from their point of view – it must be a pretty awful job at times.

The relationship with the Lead Inspector is crucial. We had a full inspection eight days into my first Headship; seventeen inspectors, all week. We had twelve weeks’ notice. The Lead Inspector was a really decent bloke. In his pre-inspection visit, eight weeks before the Inspection began, we gave him a guided tour of our vast catchment. During that car journey we worked out that from his days refereeing semi-professional football down in Sussex he knew Richard, my brother-in-law. In the following weeks leading up to the inspection he emailed me with reminiscences of his refereeing days for me to relay to Richard. On the Wednesday of the inspection after he had observed a shocking Music lesson he came to see me and said, I know you’re on top of what’s going on in Music, we won’t count that one. He agreed to every single amendment to the final draft of the report that I requested. Those were the days…

Listen to Michael Wilshaw and stop teachers performing tricks they have never used in lessons before. I have played my staff the video of Michael Wilshaw’s talk he gave to the RSA a year ago and given them the transcript.

Wilshaw final version

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After listening to the Chief Inspector’s words of wisdom, one of my colleagues remarked in front of all his peers, That’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with anything he’s said.

Know the Inspection documents inside out: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/schools/for-schools/inspecting-schools/inspecting-maintained-schools/main-inspection-documents-for-inspectors

Have a good look at the up-dates for Inspectors – they contain crucial gems of advice: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/advanced-resources-search/results/schools%20and%20inspection%20matters/2/all/any/202/any?solrsort=im_search_date_mktime%20desc

The Subject Inspection documents are useful too: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/generic-grade-descriptors-and-supplementary-subject-specific-guidance-for-inspectors-making-judgemen

Nail your SEF. I was aiming for four sides of A4 – I’ve got it down to ten and if you would like a copy just email me at j.tomsett@huntington-ed.org.uk.

Write your own Pre-Inspection Briefing. Since the Lead Inspector hasn’t the time to write a PIB any more, write your own based on your analysis of your RAISE. Mine begins: Having read our RAISEonline 2012 Summary Report, these are the questions I would ask about the school if I were the Lead Inspector… Keep it to one side of A4 and make sure you can answer every question the imaginary Lead Inspector will ask.

Determine why you are successful. Inspectors like success – it makes their job easier. And if you can provide them with really sharp evidence of your success which can fully support your judgements, your judgements will quickly become their judgements.

Counter the blunt Data Dashboard and know your data story in detail. The Data Dashboard is a shockingly crude tool whilst RAISE is much more nuanced. Looking at our Data Dashboard you wouldn’t guess for a moment that our RAISE ACPS and ATPS for GCSE only for FSM students was Sig+ and that our ACPS GCSE only figure of 279.7 for FSM is above the National ACPS GCSE only figure of 273.8 for all students, nor that in January 2013 we were named in the top 100 of all schools nationally for student progress from KS2 to GCSEs by David Laws, Schools Minister, calculated on the best 5 GCSEs including English and mathematics

Write to all your parents and invite them to complete the Parent View questionnaire. When I did I was pleasantly surprised by the responses, and it’s the only evidence of parental opinion available to inspectors.

Check your timetables. I know this sounds an odd piece of advice, but many teachers make room changes over the course of the year and don’t tell the MIS manager. The last thing you want is for an inspector to turn up to a room expecting to observe a lesson and there’s no-one there or a different class to the one s/he’s looking for is underway.

Focus upon getting the right teachers in front of the right students at the right time in the right rooms. Suspend ITT students teaching for the Inspection, and any other activity requiring cover which can be easily postponed; just be pragmatic and do everything you can to make every single lesson as good as it can possibly be.

Make sure everyone is following your school’s marking and feedback policy. And make sure every student knows how to improve in every subject. It’s a big ask, but it’s really crucial.

When the phone call comes write the details down; in the heightened pressure of the moment it is easy to get things wrong.

David Didau is great on how teachers can take control of the inspection lesson observation; his book, the Perfect OFSTED English lesson is superb! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfect-Ofsted-English-Lesson/dp/1781350523

If Day One goes badly dictate Day Two. Be assertive and present the inspectors with a revised programme which directs them towards all the really good stuff that’s going on in your school that they haven’t found yet.

Know your staff and have a convincing story about them, just in case one of your best teachers has a bad lesson. You need to be able to point to evidence of previous lesson observation records and student outcome data to prove to the inspector that the relatively poor one-off lesson s/he has just observed is not representative of that teacher’s performance generally. Tom Sherrington (@Headguruteacher) is excellent on knowing your staff. http://headguruteacher.com/2012/12/04/how-do-i-know-how-good-my-teachers-are/

Engender confidence in your colleagues wherever you can. To use Mike Hughes’ line, the SLT need to erect a sheet of polaroid across the school gate and stop the climate of fear entering school. There is no point whatsoever in creating panic amongst colleagues through spot-check unannounced observations and other such draconian practice. That’s not the way to improve teacher performance, that’s the road to madness. Our school values are Respect; Honesty and Kindness, and that’s for everyone in our school.

Headteachers need to trust their colleagues more than ever. Seneca said, “The first step towards making people trustworthy is to trust them.” In the climate of fear which this government has so brilliantly cultivated it is too easy to threaten staff in response to being threatened oneself. Headteachers have to do the opposite. At our school we deliver over 2,000 lessons each week; I cannot teach them all, so what I have to do is develop my colleagues in a safe school environment which allows them to thrive professionally and personally. It’s the only way to a decent OFSTED inspection. It’s the only way I will keep my job.

This much I know about…why the Easter holidays are great!

I have been teaching for 24 years now and, at the age of 48, this much I know about why the Easter holidays are great!

Easter is the best holiday of the whole year. It seems like a gift, somehow. And everything is starting afresh; whilst Chaucer went to Canterbury, our annual Pilgrimage is to the Scottish Highlands.

There’s a lot to be said for familiarity and tradition. We always spend some time with our friends during these holidays in Plockton; we have stayed in the same cottages there every Easter since the boys were small. We catch crabs, climb hills, fish, read, eat good food, drink great whisky, watch mindless TV and generally replenish ourselves. Each year we begin at the Plockton Hotel, the view from which is thus (I kid you not):

The harbour beach at Plockton is a place of wonder. The very first day we arrived in Plockton the tide was out and the March sunshine made it feel like June; this shot captured perfectly the anticipation of the boys as they peered over the harbour wall that warm morning.

Purely irresistible…

Every cloud, and all that. The cold spring means that the daffodils will bloom this year whilst we’re on holiday.

The best way to drink whisky is to keep it in your mouth a second for each year it’s been distilled. We regularly picnic on Talisker Bay. Talisker 57° North is a raw beast of a single malt; try the 18 seconds held in the mouth test. Go on…it’s the holidays!

 

This much I know about…having my lesson graded Good when I felt it was Outstanding!

I have been a teacher of Economics for six months, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about having my lesson graded Good when I felt it was Outstanding!

Above all else Headteachers have to be able to teach, really well. It was my Performance Development lesson observation yesterday. We call it Performance Development rather than Management, and certainly would never use Appraisal. If you spend an hour observing a colleague teach and then 30 minutes giving feedback it has to be a developmental experience or it doesn’t benefit the individual or the school.

SLT have to teach what’s required when the Curriculum and Staffing Plans are being drawn up, within reason. My CSE grade 1 German hardly qualifies me to teach MFL, but my Economics and Mathematics A levels are a solid foundation for me to teach Economics A level for the first time ever this year.

Economics is a sexy subject right now. There couldn’t be a better time to teach Economics – Greece, the Euro, austerity, the BBC team of Flanders, Peston and Mason, Cyprus, the Budget. It’s great!

If you teach Economics make sure you follow Geoff Riley @tutor2u_econ; he’s a god!

You cannot plan lessons more than a day or two ahead. How can you plan next week’s lessons before you know how this week’s lessons have panned out? The idea that you can have a scheme of learning on the VLE which gives you lesson by lesson plans is nonsensical. As Michael Wilshaw says, We need to celebrate diversity, ingenuity and imagination in the way that we teach. Surely this is common sense. When every child is different; every class is different, and every year group is different. One size rarely fits all. Using last year’s lesson when the students in front of you are different isn’t logical.

Being truly great in every lesson is the ultimate aspiration. David Didau @Learningspy says in one of his blogs that if every fourth lesson for every class is a corker, all will be well. http://learningspy.co.uk/2012/11/17/2-minute-lesson-plan/.  Similarly, one of my colleagues, Penny Hall, said to me recently that she spins plates with her classes; that means she spins the metaphorical plate for each class the lesson before they potentially become disengaged. So, I sat down to plan this lesson at 10.40 pm on Thursday night, just home from a Full Governors’ meeting, having observed two lessons in the morning, interviewed for an internal post with the Chair of Governors, given a talk at the Institute of Effective Education Conference at York University on evidence-based research with Dr Jonathan Sharples in the afternoon, and with Michael Gove on Question Time from York; essentially, my equivalent of a 5 period teaching day!

Don’t over-plan lessons! Here’s my Lesson Progress Map, which I wrote in 5 minutes when I got up yesterday:

The 30 minutes I spent actually planning on Thursday night weren’t about producing a Lesson Progress Map, they were spent thinking about what I was going to teach and developing the resources, which are here:

Budget 2013 at a glance

Budget comments

The Budget March 2013

Good observers see the things you don’t see or choose not to see. When I was questioning, I could feel myself guiding students to an answer on a subliminal level. As I asked Joe, If income tax is reduced, is that likely to increase or decrease consumer spending? I could feel my outstretched hand rise up! It was funny, but I couldn’t stop it! In my marginal anxiety for Joe and the rest of the group to give a good response my body language was providing them with the answers, rather than developing their thinking and their learning more effectively. And this is just what the two observers, Alison Fletcher our Assistant Headteacher who runs Performance Development and Terry Cartmail one of our Deputies, fedback to me.

Feedback from observations needs to be a positive learning experience. And I learnt I load about myself from the feedback to yesterday’s lesson. I thought I’d nailed the lesson; I reckon it was the best Economics lesson I’ve ever taught! I was really enjoying myself and so were the students. I managed to link the Budget to the forthcoming exam and they planned a cracking response to an 18 marker! So I listened, or half-listened, to the feedback, just waiting for the judgement; when they said it was Good I replied tersely, Well I don’t know what else I can do to make it outstanding. We chatted a bit more about the lesson and how I led students too much during questioning. The bell went for end of break, they left and I sat staring dumbly at the desk until my Operational SLT colleagues came in for the next meeting.

Take time to reflect. Alison and Terry were right, of course they were. But like I know, and wrote recently, What we must do is be open to the observation of our practice in order to develop it, and ensure we challenge the practice and not the individual teacher. We must recognise the difference between practice and personality. All Alison and Terry were doing was discussing elements of my practice, they weren’t being critical of me! And yet for a few minutes I felt irritated, resentful and wronged.

Handle the judgement of lessons carefully. The experience has helped me understand better what it feels like to be the observee rather than the observer. It also highlighted for me just how potentially damaging the grading of lessons can be for the development of teachers. There have to be formal judgements made about the quality of teaching; we have begun to weave our redesigned Performance Development process into our broader continuous professional development systems. But we are very clear that only the SLT grade lessons through the Performance Development process and that all other observations are ungraded and focus upon developing practice.

Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better. Dylan Wiliam is spot on and I will continue to strive to be a truly great teacher. What has encouraged me about the experience is that I was disappointed not to be graded Outstanding, which, I think, reflects the growing aspiration amongst my colleagues to be truly great teachers. In a school which promotes Dweck’s Growth Mind-set all I have done is learnt, I haven’t failed. And in Monday’s lesson, with the Year 12 Economics group, when I’m asking questions I’ll keep my hands in my pockets!

This much I know about…teaching disengaged 15 year old boys how to write

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years and this much I know about teaching disengaged 15 year old boys how to write.

NB! For what follows to make sense you really need to read this blog first, my most frequently visited offering! http://wp.me/p2wufC-2V

Teaching disengaged boys how to write with deliberate purpose seems to be one of our most important challenges in schools. My most popular blog touched upon this particular pedagogic challenge; when I was asked by Helene @hgaldingoshea to contribute to the recent #PedagooLondon event I decided to revisit that blog and explain in more detail how I teach boys to write. When I was preparing my presentation, I was surprised by how much more I learnt about the teaching and learning process; another reminder of the importance of reflection in improving our practice, perhaps?

It’s not just about doughnuts. Lots of the things I wrote about in that first blog were about generic relationship-developing strategies. The success of those boys wasn’t really down to eating tons of cake; the “cake” strategies helped create the right conditions for learning in my classroom and established our fruitful and mutually respectful relationship – the development of the boys’ writing skills was achieved through relentless hard gritty work.

It’s not about keeping disengaged boys entertained; success with disengaged boys comes from them realising they can be successful. My mantra is Fewer (activities) Deeper (learning) Better (student outcomes).

Teach the writing process very explicitly. My Powerpoint from #PedagooLondon is reasonably self-explanatory, Boys, Boxing and Polish Ties final version but I go into a little more detail below about the process I went through teaching the boys how to write creatively and then how to write criticism. The process is highly structured and I model writing for them; these boys needed to be trained how to write, but first they needed something more inspiring than the AQA Short Stories Anthology. Helen Dunmore’s My Polish Teacher’s Tie is a decent enough tale, but even when I provided pre-lesson piping hot Polish dumplings I couldn’t grab their attention for more than a few minutes, so we went back to a sultry night in Kinshasa on 30 October 1974…

Find a great stimulus material for inspiring writing. I chose Norman Mailer’s account of the Muhammed Ali vs George Foreman Heavyweight Championship fight called The Fight and Leon Gast’s film of the same event, When We Were Kings.

Ali vs Foreman

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Mailer

Give them a task which forces them to use their imaginations. I set them this: to write a detailed description of the fight from the point of view of ONE of the boxers. To help you, choose which boxer’s point of view you are going to write from then watch the fight again and think about what that boxer must have gone through. Think about it through our five senses. What does he hear? What does he smell? etc. You will be able to use Norman Mailer’s writing to help you write your version of the fight. To support them in making rough notes, I provided them with this proforma: Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman notes page pedagoo

Develop a leader of the group. If you can, identify a student who influences the climate for learning and who you know will be successful, and worry not about putting him on a pedestal! Tom is the boy I pedestalled. He was obsessed with Rugby League and played at a high standard; he’d had a difficult career at our school and our relationship with home was characterised by conflict. He grew into the leader of the class as he grew with the praise I heaped upon him, and the others grew with him. Through Tom I established the psychological conditions for growth in the classroom; my #PedagooLondon talk was largely based around a single line from his writing about the Ali-Foreman fight: I tried to hold up on Ali’s shorts but I went, just like a tree that had been chain-sawed.

Encourage them to write raw first drafts. If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know I used to be a good golfer when I was a youth. Jack Nicklaus, the best golfer to have ever lived, advised young golfers to hit the ball as far as they can when learning the game, and when they get older they can keep the length of their golf shots, but learn how to control them; it’s much harder to be controlled and then strive for length later. The same applies to the students’ writing – they should hit the ball as far as they can when they write their first drafts!

Word-process their drafts for them, verbatim. Two lessons spent with them ham-fistedly typing will kill the process; I promise you this is worth the time investment.

Teach them directly how writers choose words for impact! I don’t think there are many better examples of the impact of redrafting than the first sentence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

FIRST DRAFT: It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen.

SECOND DRAFT: It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Orwell removes the disyllabic blowy and early so that, except for April, the final version begins with monosyllabic bluntness; he could have chosen March instead, but remember, April is the cruellest month. A million clocks is a vague exaggeration; he then considers innumerable clocks which is struck out because it is horribly awkward and he finally chooses the monosyllabic, the clocks. The eventual simplicity of the opening twelve words of the first sentence ensures there is no distraction from the sentence’s unsettling climax of the clocks striking thirteen. With this beautifully crafted periodic sentence Orwell communicates to the reader that something is wrong with the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Show them how great they are at writing already! Once they know how Orwell chose words for effect, you can point out to them the passages in their own raw drafts which have great impact on the reader. They then equate themselves with one of the best writers of the last century, and the germ of self-belief begins to grow.

Teach the rigour of spelling, punctuation and grammar. Point out robustly that they have been taught SPAG since they were three years old, and that they know all the rules – they just cannot be bothered to abide by them!

Choosing words for impact and SPAG comprise the toolkit for redrafting. Once they have understood how word choice has impact and how to punctuate, they redraft their own work – which you have word processed verbatim – for impact and accuracy.

Support the students in analysing their own writing for word-choice impact; it’s so much more motivating for them than analysing Helen Dunmore’s short story.  The great thing is, however, that once they have learnt how to write about their own work, writing accurately and constructively about Helen Dunmore’s writing afterwards is SO much easier as the slides from my presentation show. A year later Tom was writing great original criticism of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry:

Celebrate! When they had finished their final pieces of writing they chose a picture to accompany their piece and I published their efforts in a single volume, sending a copy home with a covering letter to all their parents. Tom’s final contribution is on page 11.

Ali vs Foreman Boys Writing Collection

By the way, what would you save if your house was burning down? My copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile would be amongst my preservation priorities, despite how heavy it is!

You can find more Orwellian resources here: http://georgeorwellnovels.com/books/images-from-george-orwell-1984-manuscript-1/

Grit or flow or resilience or whatever? The peerless David Didau is so insightful on this key issue in his blog, gloriously entitled Grand Unified Theory of Mastery http://learningspy.co.uk/2013/03/10/the-grand-unified-theory-of-mastery/. In the end I reckon students need grit, and sometimes they’ll achieve flow. I think that if you teach them well they will approach writing grittily; then they will find they can write, when before they thought they couldn’t, and you’ll get flow, manifested in the occasional remark, Is that the end of the lesson already?

It’s about relationships, stupid! By coincidence my son Joe was friended by Tom on Facebook this week and his opening gambit to Joe was, Now pal, how’s your old man? Tell him I was asking after him. I miss him a bit.

So what is it that all students need for them to engage? When I wrote my original blog about teaching disengaged boys http://en.gravatar.com/mmiweb made this comment: In a sense why should we be surprised love (and I think that in its widest sense you are talking about loving the children) can conquer all. It’s something I shared with the inspirational Chris Waugh @Edutronic_net after I met him at #PedagooLondon and we agreed that fundamentally students need to feel loved. It’s that simple and that complicated to convince colleagues of such a truth.