Let's Move On From Here...

I was interested to read an article by David Didau: Reframing The Debate . In it, he proposes different continuums on which teachers' practice might be placed. I have already said quite plainly that I find the polarisation of teachers as either Traditional or Progressive unhelpful. I tend to take a Pragmatic view - if it works, I do it and I'm really not concerned with someone else's labels. Didau offered a new perpsective however, by proposing a continuum that focuses not so much on WHAT teachers do, but WHY they do it. That seems much more helpful. This is a continuum that interests me greatly. For most of my career I have taught in a school (I call it Hogwarts) where the academic ideology prevailed. Certainly the aim of the school is to make children cleverer (at passing exams anyway) and which absolutely prioritises academic knowledge. I am still cogitating on whether I think that we are primarly concerned with the impersonal and the abstract, but I will pr

Before I start, this is not a blog in which I bash the exam boards. In all the dealings I have had with them I have found them to be staffed by people who really want to get it right. Care is taken in designing specs and examinations, good support is offered and questions are answered to the best of their ability. They do not always get things right, but I have never encountered anything that looked like anything other than good intent. However, there is no getting away from the fact that when exam boards DO get it wrong, it can have the most apalling results for some candidates. Some supposed errors by exam boards are nothing of the kind of course, but in the mind of the average Daily Mail reader they point to "falling standards". This year's example was the AQA Biology exam which included a question about Darwin which asked candidates to explain why he was depicted as an ape. "This is not science!" screamed the media. Maybe, maybe not. But it WAS on the sy

There are a lot of kids on Twitter this morning having a bit of a last minute panic about the English Literature exam tomorrow morning. I expect that the number of page reads on my GCSE blog will rise sharply over the next week. There's a lot of kvetching about how hard it is and how many poems students have to memorise now that the exams are closed book. There is similar concern about the English Langauge exams - that they are too demanding. Call me crazy, but I for one welcome the new tests. Firstly, for what they do NOT contain - controlled assessment. I absolutely hated spending 5 or 6 lessons watching my students write and being unable to help or guide them. And then when I read the inevitable dross some of them produced, having to reteach the topic and try again with a different title. All this was done in a climate of suspicion about what other teachers were doing in other schools - how rules were being bent or broken. And then there was the last minute scramble to

pragmatic praɡˈmatɪk/ adjective dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations. There's a lot of chatter (again) on Twitter at the moment about whether traditional or progressive approaches work best in the classroom. It is an interesting and important discussion to have had - but really, it should be over by now. Not least because some of the comments out there - that progressives "make shit up" for example - are pretty nasty. Colleagues engaging is that sort of discourse are at risk of bringing the profession into disrepute. History teacher Richard Kennet summed it up nicely: “In fact I have a suspicion that both [A: Traditional] and [B: Progressive] are the very loud but extreme minority of teachers. If you just teach like A or B, I would also suggest that you don’t do a very good job. Teaching needs a bit of both A and B … My fear is that new teachers join social media a

Dear Parents and Guardians So here we are at last: it's GCSE time and your child is about to take the exams that they have been working towards for the past 5 years. It doesn't seem possible, does it? It seems as is it were just last week that you were bringing that little bundle of joy home from the hospital, or signing the adoption papers. You have hopes and dreams for your kids. You love them and want the best for them. If you are a short term foster parent or a carer in a children's home, then your situation is a little different, but I know how invested you get in the kids in your care. And for them, the stakes are really high - that next step is often make or break time for them. Your child's teachers are also highly invested in their success. We have worked very hard to ensure that we understand the requirements of the exams and that our students have the knowledge and skills that they need to do their best. Now we have reached the stage where there is

Sometimes teaching feels like a right old slog - thank God for the funny things that make us laugh. Years ago a colleague related the tale of teaching a class what we would now call Y10 students. They were not the brightest buttons at the best of times, so getting through Romeo and Juliet was a bit of a mission. Anyway, she had asked the class to choose some imagery from the play to illustrate as a way of engaging them with the power and beauty of the bard's language. One student was diligently drawing a very lovely picture of two horses lying on the floor. My colleague was puzzled, but was willing to go with it - after all, kids sometimes respond very creatively. Why, she enquired the horses? Were they perhaps a subtle metaphor? No, replied the girl, looking at my colleague as if she were completely stupid. They're the horses. You know - the dead ones.  Ummmm - I don't remember any dead horses... says my colleague. Yeah - that Mercution says it: "A