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What can education learn from aviation?

2015-10-05T19:34:44+01:00October 5th, 2015|leadership|

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we’re so fond of it. - George Eliot Flying is a dangerous business. All sorts of things can go wrong and any one of them could result in disaster. That said, it's become a cliché that flying is the safest way to travel. No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation. According to research into flight safety, over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million. [...]

Intelligent Accountability

2016-10-05T20:44:27+01:00October 4th, 2015|Featured, leadership|

The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law. - Emma Goldman So many teachers I speak to are afraid to make nuanced professional judgements. When I make suggestions on how they could manage workload, organise classroom, speak to students, select curriculum content or plan lessons very often I'm confronted with,"That sounds like a great idea but I wouldn't be allowed to do it." Too many school systems have become blunt instruments used to [...]

Why sacrificing chickens will not help us evaluate teachers’ performance

2019-11-20T21:27:34+00:00September 16th, 2015|leadership|

Intellectually, philosophically, morally, the argument over whether teachers' performance should be evaluated by grading their teaching by means of a lesson observation has been won. Ofsted have accepted the crushing weight of evidence that, despite what some people may choose to believe, there is no validity or reliability to such a grade. Unsurprisingly, there are many benighted souls who choose wilful ignorance over enlightenment and insist on continuing a practice which has less accuracy than a coin toss. Last week the TES published an article from just such an individual arguing that grades were still a good idea in the Further [...]

Should we learn to love our shackles?

2015-09-12T10:48:33+01:00September 12th, 2015|leadership|

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." Albert Camus There's already been some pretty scathing reactions to the master plan to introduce a common curriculum and assessment system into UK schools Dame Sally Coates lays out in Schools Week. Carl Hendrick describes her ideas as a dystopian nightmare and Pedro De Bruyckere sees it as a surefire way to turn education into the caricature that Ken Robinson paints it. But is there any merit in her ideas? Some gold we can pan for? Well, maybe. Coates says she wants to liberate teachers  "from the pressures of curriculum planning" so they "could focus [...]

How do we know if a teacher’s any good?

2020-07-23T15:07:13+01:00May 9th, 2015|leadership|

Obviously enough, not all teachers are equal. But how do we know which ones are any cop? Well, we just do, don't we? Everyone in a school community tends to know who's doing a decent job. But how do we know? Rightly, most school leaders feel it important to evaluate the effectiveness of their staff, but how can they go about this in a way that's fair, valid and reliable? Over the past year or so I've spent a fair bit of time explaining why lesson observation cannot be used to evaluate effective teaching. Mostly, the message has been received and understood. [...]

Two stars and a bloody wish!

2019-11-06T19:39:23+00:00May 3rd, 2015|leadership|

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them. Jean de La Bruyère We are held hostage by our superstitious belief in the mystical power of marking to cure all educational ills. It won't. A teacher inscribing marks in students' exercise books is every bit as mundane as it sounds; in my 15 years in the classroom it rarely resulted in much. But that's not really why we mark. We mark because it's the right thing to do. Because not marking is worse than marking. This is the marking fetish. [...]

Trust, accountability and why we need them both

2015-05-10T14:46:48+01:00April 29th, 2015|leadership|

I've been thinking a lot about trust in recent months - particularly because it seems a commodity in such short supply. If, my optimistic thinking went, teachers were trusted to do a good job, then they probably would. But, of course, there's always that nagging concern that some wouldn't. This got me thinking about why people - and specifically teachers - are trustworthy or not. Is it down to an inherent goodness? Are some people just naturally more dedicated and professional, or could it be that we're good because of the consequences of not being good? The conclusion I've arrived at is [...]

A few thoughts about character education

2015-05-10T14:42:51+01:00April 27th, 2015|leadership|

The idea that schools should be educating students' character has been gathering momentum in recent years. But the once distant drums have become increasingly urgent; politicians and professors, hucksters and headteachers, all kinds of apparatchiks - even the occasional edu-blogger - have all waded into the debate. Unusually for me, I've mainly stood back, listened and pondered. Last year I visited Kings Leadership Academy in Warrington and although I was hugely impressed by much of what I saw, philosophically I tend towards the belief that teaching character isn't really what I think education is about. But until now, I haven't really been [...]

The best case fallacy or, why we balls things up

2015-10-03T10:48:34+01:00April 16th, 2015|leadership|

OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white. A pessimist applied to God for relief. "Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness," said God. "No," replied the petitioner, "I wish you to create something that would justify them." "The world is all created," said God, "but you have overlooked something -- the mortality of the optimist." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary In The Uses of Pessimism & the Danger of False Hope, philosopher and fox-hunting enthusiast, Roger Scruton argues against unbridled or, as he puts it, 'unscrupulous optimism', piling many - or most - of the [...]

What to do about workload?

2015-03-11T09:33:00+00:00February 7th, 2015|leadership|

Work is not a curse, but drudgery is! Henry Ward Beecher To much fanfare in the press, the DfE has released the findings of its Workload Challenge survey. The idea is straightforward: to prevent teachers from getting "bogged down with unnecessary tasks" so that they can instead devote their time to "prepar[ing] young people for life in modern Britain". Apparently, the survey generated more than 44,000 returns. The chief culprits for the waste of teachers' time are Ofsted, government and "hours spent recording data, marking and lesson-planning." No surprises there then. Here's the government's solution: As well as continuing its commitment [...]

The problem with lesson planning

2015-05-18T16:23:06+01:00February 1st, 2015|leadership, learning|

Time brings all things to pass. Aeschylus Because the curriculum is divided up into units - terms and lessons - our thinking about how to teach is constrained. The school year is sectioned into six more-or-less equal terms and so it's become law that each year be split into six self-contained units. Similarly, the school day is divided into units of delivery - lessons - and for the entirety of my years in classrooms the lesson has been viewed as a self-contained unit of learning; the lesson has been the ultimate expression of teaching quality. My resistance to the lesson as the apogee [...]

Undermining teachers is easy

2019-01-25T15:28:37+00:00January 29th, 2015|leadership|

Your views are out of date, David and don't work, just expecting pupils to behave. Paul Garvey, Education consultant There are two schools in every school: the school of the high-status staff member, with the luxury of time and authority to cushion them from the worst classes; and the school of the supply teacher and NQT, who possess neither. Tom Bennett, Two schools bad, one school good: Ideas for improving school behaviour Everyone involved in teaching wants teachers to teach well. We spend a lot of time disputing what 'teaching well' looks like, and that's fair enough; there are plenty of effective [...]

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