Written by Regular readers may be aware that there has been a break in my blogging for several months. I can only blame a lethal cocktail of busy times whilst working, a period of very welcome annual leave in the summer, and an absence of inspiration for new blog content. However, I placed upon my “to do” list for this week to “start blogging again”, so here we are.
This month, I am sharing two seemingly unrelated experiences in the last fortnight.
The first experience is a meeting within our SCITT (initial teacher training) strategic board, in which we were advised that some of the schools, and trusts, where trainees had traditionally been placed were becoming increasingly prescriptive of the “required” learning resources for lessons and series of lessons, and the “authorised” pedagogical approaches to delivery via the teacher. All this under a mantle of “best practice”.
This can be problematic for two reasons:
First, the trainee will need to understand how to build the learner experience in their classroom through planning, resource creation and curation, and then nuancing, adapting and yes, at times, fundamentally changing what they have prepared and delivered previously. Without such a process, of “safe” trial and error within the confines set by a watchful mentor and in a supportive school, we run the risk of teachers who may not be proficient in all the required standards (both with a small and a capital “S”) we need from them for a lifetime of impact on children and young people. As with the use of artificial intelligence, we should allow others (including machines) to undertake tasks essential to our work only when we ourselves can perform those tasks. When we do this, they save us time and effort we can devote to other things. In the reverse, where the prescribed lesson plan or AI product produces something that we cannot, we become deskilled and disconnected. We no longer “own” – in a proprietorial or accountability sense – what we are working with.
Second, there is an assumption with “best practice” that we have reached the summit of the mountain. Those of us who have worked in the sector for a considerable period of time will recall what “best practice” looked like, and how it manifested in classrooms, twenty years ago. Our world revolved around “differentiation” (by task and by outcome), “preferred learning styles” (remember “visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners” listed in school registers and planners?), water bottles on every table for constant sipping, and group tasks being undertaken within a thematic, blended, skills-rich curriculum. Some may wince reading all that, whist others may giggle. Are we so sure that our own “best practice” will be immune from such derision twenty years from now? If not, we should hesitate before we congratulate ourselves upon, and then prescribe robustly, the “best practice” of today. To do so is the worst form of presentism.
The second experience was how profoundly a video “short” on YouTube impacted upon me. In this piece, easily sourced, the Hollywood actor Tom Hanks recounts a tale of his early theatre days in repertory as an unpaid, intern, understudy in Cleveland, Ohio. In this story, the cast of “Hamlet”, on the back of a successful opening night (and consequent late party) rocked up to rehearsals the next day so hung over that they could not get it together. In a fit of rage, the director yelled “I can’t do this for you. You have to show up on time, know the text and have an idea! Now, let’s take ten and then go again!” Hanks reflected that, as a twenty year-old, he could do those things: arrive on time (or, even better, a little early), know what he was there to do, and have a sense of being able to bring something that others could not bring to the work “and move it a little bit further on down the line”.
For our teachers, trainee and more experienced, I believe it to be essential that they “show up on time” certainly, “know the script” – in terms of the subject content, the way it will be assessed, and the children or young people who need to learn it – and “have an idea” in the way that they can create, develop, nuance and adapt their work to own it, and take pride in it. Without the idea, there is no ownership, and without ownership there can be no pride in accomplishment.
To conclude, there are clear benefits to aligning the “what” (i.e. content) of the curriculum – and we continue to do so across our subjects and across our schools. We can work together in a spirit of collegiality to build and adapt resources, we can discuss transitions and progression meaningfully and assess against common standards, comparing the impact of our work within and across schools. But when the “what” transcends too much into the “how” (delivery), we begin to risk the creativity of teaching and erode professional accountability.
We cannot celebrate an individual’s accomplishments, or hold them to account, for decisions they have not made. The best colleagues always demand an element of agency in their work – and we should tread very cautiously before removing it.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Mike.
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