I know it’s pretty cheap to reblog a post which sings your praises (and to be fair, I don’t do it much) but this evaluation of a session on The Secret of Literacy I gave at Teach First’s Impact Conference last week by primary teacher Jon Brunskill struck a chord. In it he talks about the concept of ‘enlightened competence’ and very kindly suggests that my ideas about literacy had the effect of engendering this quality in the audience. Maybe so, but more importantly (for me) it made me notice my own practice and descend – or ascend – into some sort of mystical meta-conscious vortex…

Anyway, enough navel gazing, here’s the post:

Usually at education conferences, I find that there are two sorts of sessions.

The first kind is the really practical sort of session; you leave with some new skills and/or knowledge which you can put in place in your classroom to help make you a better, or more efficient, teacher.

The second kind (and these are usually the sort that attract me) are the paradigm-busters. These sessions take a thing that we believe, grab it by the scruff of its neck and give it a Jack Bauer level of interrogation.

I’ve long been a fan of David Didau’s website because I found his writing does the latter. I was most pleasantly surprised, however, after attending his session at Teach First’s Impact Conference, that what Didau teaches also does LOADS of the former. I attended two different sessions run by Didau, the first on literacy and the second on grading lessons and Ofsted. This post is about the first session.

Enlightened Competence

We were treated to a tour de force of Didau’s accumulated wisdom on how we can best help children to use English in a manner that will ensure them the opportunity to be academically successful. Didau’s slogan, “making the implicit, explicit” challenged audience members to examine exactly what they do when they engage in the written word.

This reminded me of Maslow’s model of competence, which begins with unconscious incompetence, followed by conscious incompetence (the uncomfortable stage that I found myself in for most of my first year of teaching), then conscious competence, before we finally get to a stage of unconscious competence.

Read more on Pedfed…