Standards: a blessing or a curse?

Imagine the welcome meeting for our new teacher trainees. Over a hundred bright enthusiastic young graduates. Relatively fewer mature students this year.

[I heard that the Teacher Development Agency was recruiting outside Canary Wharf last week then the global banks were collapsing. Watch for a rise in economics trainee teachers next year!]

The team are very experienced and accomplished. Early on they ask the students what their fears were. 'Keeping order in the classroom' and 'Being organised' 'Liking horrible children' were the three front runners. The sense or relief in the room was almost tangible as these 'demons' were named.

Yes, it is OK to feel like that.

My own demon is trying to keep one's sense of humour and perspective when working seventy-five hour weeks for months on end, but no one said that one.

We then went on to consider our 'favourite teacher'. Eccentric, strong personalities who were passionate about their subjects and who cared about the welfare of their students.

Fantastic. Break for coffee.

After coffee into subject groups to hand out the paperwork. Endless forms and copies of the QTS 'standards': objectives against which their teaching will be measured for the first ten years of their careers.

I can see the students collapse under the bureaucracy.

Later, I find myself reflecting on the apparent paradox. No one ever says 'my favourite teacher was one who was spot on with the QTS standards and all his paperwork was always in order.' Yet, you can bet your last dollar that a failure to comply with the standards and the paperwork will guarantee a swift exit from the profession.

The characteristics that defined our good teacher are rather intangible and hard to measure. The QTS standards and the paperwork trail are objective and measurable. We live in the latter world, but aspire to the former.

Think of it like learning to drive. To learn to drive you have to pass a series of objective and measureable procedures. Without that you are not safe to be left alone on the road.

With the skills in place, you can drive to any exotic location you choose.

Teachers who can fulfil all of the QTS standards, but never drive their children to exciting places are rather bland and non-descript. They are definitely the forgettable ones. Safe, but dull.

So, what do we do? We aim to teach our students to drive their classes safely to interesting places. That is the best that we can do.

The background music to today's blog is quite sad and reflective. It is Hejira by Joni Mitchell.

Reflections: do it and move on........

This the last of the sequence on reflections for the time being.

A student came to me having failed in a very minor thing. It was not her fault, she was let down by others, but she was worried and upset by it.

We talked about how to avoid this happening again and the solution seemed feasible and so it was the end of the matter. The thing is, she then went to her friend and repeated the anguished tale all over again and I expect she was still fretting about it when she went to bed that night.

Anxiety and guilt-feelings are sticky. They are hard to shake off and I know this as well as anyone. The problem is that their long-term effects are quite corrosive.

The best thing to do is to analyse the problem, find a solution and then move on... Continuously picking at the same old wound will do nobody any good.

As I write these words, the imaginary editor that sits on my shoulder is saying, 'well, why don't you do that, then?'

Sometimes good advice is hard to put into practice!

The background music playing when I wrote this blog is 'Indiscipline' by King Crimson. A noisy bash, but quite good fun.

Reflections: 'How to dismantle an atomic bomb'

That's a strange title for a U2 album. Apparently it refers to the band's attempts to get the volatile singer Bono to reflect on how his performances on the album were progressing. It shows that we can become so emotionally attached to our plans and our thinking that it is hard to explore alternative avenues.

The same can be true of our teaching, and this is where colleagues and collaborators can be so helpful. I have found that the people who collaborate best with me as a writer have rather subtle approaches to telling me that things could be improved. Any 'full-frontal' approach can often get my defences up and I will reject it out of hand. This is, of course, my problem, and I am grateful to have had people around me who care enough to be subtle.

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to recruit and nurture a group of exceptional young physics teachers. Trained in the need for reflection they were always sitting and observing each other's lessons, making gentle but firm criticisms. And these criticisms were always accepted and acted upon. The department was close, caring and cohesive. This supportive atmosphere was shared with the children and interest in physics was strengthened within the school for boys and girls. Indeed, boys and girls chose to come to the school to study physics. The group were also active on physics teacher internet forums sharing best practice, listening and receiving.

It could not last forever, of course. If you train outstanding people, then you must expect them to move on and quickly. The group is now dispersed all over the world, but I hope they are still taking their reflective practices with them.

I learned a lot from them. For some of my generation, collaborative reflection is a new idea. When we were teaching, often our classrooms were closed 'fortresses' in which no one entered. There are still some of us who prefer it that way. I think we may be the poorer for that.

The background music for today's blog is from U2's atomic bomb album. 'You don't have to make it on your own' is a rather cheesy choice for this blog entry. But it is a great song and I loved this live acoustic version.

Reflections: 'Optimistic: if you try the best you can, then the best you can is good enough'

I want to rummage through a teacher's kitbag to see what tools she uses every day. Today I will examine the compass (or alethiometer for Philip Pullman fans). Used properly it can keep us safely moving on the right track. But it is quite fragile and delicate, fiddly to set up and use. Its practice is often neglected in favour of more robust relaxation pursuits (like going for a drink with your mates to slag off the deputy head), or adding even more flashy techniques to your lessons (like interactive whiteboards).

What am I going on about? REFLECTION.

Reflection means 'gently' looking at what we did and said and the effects we had upon the children. In 'teacher-speak' we 'consider critically the learning outcomes'.

Fair enough. But critical does not mean 'harsh' or 'cruel' or 'vindictive'. To tell a teacher who has just finished teaching that the lesson you observed was 'less than perfect' is a hard thing to do. Akin to telling a lover that his technique is flawed whilst you are both still in the throes of passion. Better to wait for an hour or two before opening up that can of worms.

Even then, reflection is not a stick to beat a teacher with. It is not meant to wound or cause pain. It is meant to guide and steer. Like a compass.

We can work ourselves into a frazzle planning and preparing the 'perfect' lesson and pour all of our energy into delivering it only to find that it was 'boring' or 'average'. In some ways this is worse than lessons which fall apart and cause the 'children to climb up the walls'.

Even the 'best' lessons where the children are eating (metaphorical) snowflakes from our hands are probably not as good as they feel.

Reflection should be at the heart of our professional practices. It allows us to distance ourselves from our words and our actions to consider what was good about what we did and said in the heat of the moment. It allows us to discover what could be improved next time.

And yes, there is a next time. Remember that when you watch a slick performer 'in action': all jokes and patter with an uncanny ability to see what is going on in all parts of the room at all times. Remember that Ms UltraCool has probably taught that lesson ten times already in the last three years and has modified and honed it into into the sleek racehorse that gallops so successfully to the finishing posts. Because she has internalised the content and the methods, all her energy is focused 'in the moment', watching the reactions of the children, matching her words and actions to the learning going on.

Teaching and learning are not the same thing. This is a thread that will run through all of these blogs. There have been lots of lessons where my teaching has been 'good' in the sense of active and lively with stimulation but the children have been too 'passive' to learn much. There have also been lessons when I have been too tired to do the 'Elvis plays Las Vegas' routine and yet the learning has been excellent because I have given the children space to learn and been attentive to their needs.

It is reflection that allows such constructive observations to arise from our classroom practices, and which allows us to think about and develop new ways to storm the castle walls.

Today's background music to the blog is Optimistic by Radiohead on Kid A. It is a cheery upbeat way of looking at reflections.