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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Ask me Another

1/12/2022

2 Comments

 
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Despite an omnicompetent staff I try to remain personally useful at school. I’m getting too old to charge about, so I regularly position myself at lesson change on the middle landing of the block 4 stairs. Just after half term a small girl said to me ‘Don’t you get bored, standing there all day, Miss?’

Another day I was dispensing current affairs stuff for my year 13s to analyse when one of them spotted that document was recent. From last week, in fact. In a moment of head-clutching revelation he demanded ‘Do you read up-to-date stuff?’. As a theologian there’s always the risk that I won’t have truck with anything after Augustine of Hippo, but actually, yes, I do. And what’s more, matey, next lesson I’ve got something hot off the press from the Bishop of Sheffield (whose daughters I taught) which opens up the established church to good sense and justice on sexuality. We can all question how that might go.

I last wrote about questions in about 2014, I think. I was remarking on the tendency of posh people to interrogate one so that they can find common ground to pin you down upon. I’ve assumed this was so they can run a mile if you prove to be an unsuitable companion. This can’t have been the reasoning behind the palace questioning – so why do it? What kind of good manners pursues a question your guest has already answered, as if it wasn’t true?

We had ourselves a training session on questioning this week. It’s a basic teacherly skill, which, like so many, developed a sheen of rust over lockdown and needs buffing up. We looked at open questions ‘What do you think is the biggest factor in the climate emergency?’, closed questions ‘What is Hamlet doing in Act 4?’, hinge questions ‘So what were the advantages of the Black Death?’, multiple choice questions checking for misconceptions ‘Hands up for a, b, c or d.’ and cold-calling questions ‘Derek, what is the area of this irregular polygon?’. We practised them on each other and undertook to do it better.

I love that stuff. Give me a roomful of people and questions from the floor and there’s no reason why I should ever stop talking, but I’m not so loquacious when the clipboarders shin up the rope ladders. Those are questions to be answered precisely and economically with a pleasant smile and fingers crossed for no devious follow-up. 

That’s because questions usually have a power dimension, where the searcher after knowledge and the broker of knowledge have a different roles. Refusing to answer a question can be awkward. Teachers might do it if the they’re faced with a vexatious interlocutor who just wants to avoid tackling the paragraph or is keen to amuse the hordes with impertinence. Anyone might do it if they don’t know the answer: ‘I’ll find out. Leave it with me’ is also part of the teacher’s armoury. But what happens if the questioner just goes on? What happens when you feel uncomfortable, got-at and doubt their motives?

Nick Cave answers questions in The Red Hand Files from time to time. This month he talked about good faith conversations.
A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.
This is worth knowing. Inquisitiveness is good, one of our Tallis Habits. We want our young people to wonder, explore, investigate and challenge. We want them to ask, speculate and examine. We want them to do it to understand the world and change it for the better, and we want them to do it kindly, and respectfully.  
A good faith conversation understands fundamentally that we are all flawed and prone to the occasional lamentable idea. It understands and sympathises with the common struggle to articulate our place in the world, to make sense of it, and to breathe meaning into it. It can be illuminating, rewarding and of great value - a good faith conversation begins with curiosity, gropes toward awakening and retires in mercy.
In the right mood I love a bit of a fight and there’ve been occasions when I’ve taken no prisoners to win an argument. But I was brought up a household where keeping the peace was sometimes important too, and lots of our children are either traumatised by argument or don’t know any other way to talk. To them, questioning is just the start of another attack.    

The world changes and we all need to learn new ways of being. It behoves us to scrutinise the way we talk to make sure that we can live up to our better selves. I love the idea of groping towards awakening and retiring with mercy. It’ll be a good thing to practise over Christmas.
 
CR
1.12.22  
2 Comments

Go to the window

23/11/2019

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I often tell you that I’m looking out of the window. I wouldn’t want you to think that’s all I did, but my window – as is befitting – is a particularly interesting one with much to see. It’s sometimes so interesting that I have to intervene. On Wednesday I looked up and saw a small person sitting on a bench at A Time Not Authorised for Sitting Outside. Fortunately a teacher much more experienced with the older sort skidded to a halt and parked himself. I watched their deep conversation during which it transpired that she’d taken being ‘sent out’ literally.  Children in the northeast used always to describe being sent out as being ‘flung out’, conjuring an image of centrifugal force, but even that didn’t extend to leaving the building. 

You never know what they don’t know. We discovered some 16-year-olds yesterday who’d never played a board game, had no idea of the conventions, didn’t know any card games. They were offered this chance as part of the Tallis Choices Community Day. Younger year groups had time on sustainability, relationships, violence, drugs and careers, but year 11 get a bit of support in how to make the right choices in a year full of exams. This included what to do to relax, on the grounds that many of them are a bit anxious, and mocks start in a fortnight. Yoga, team games, board games, relaxation, meditation and a bit of optional crochet. 

But you never know how they see themselves. One chap who’d opted for the crochet fetched up in XFN Study Hall (expectations, effort, engagement) with it later and calmly sat down to while away an hour with the wool. XFN isn’t optional and it’s only for those who’re strangers to the flashcard. You don’t have time to crochet quotations from An Inspector Calls even in 1 hour 45 exam, so that little bit of creativity had to be suppressed.  Kindly. There are places to relax and there are places to work.

And places where sitting zipped into your puffa with your bag on your back ready to spring is a little unnerving.  Year 12 were debating all day and I muscled in to judge the final. The chair was inexperienced and keen to learn, but didn’t look very relaxed and also had to be warned about applauding one side more than the other. Be more Bercow, I advised. On the way in I followed some people so tall I couldn’t see their heads, boys whom the gutter press would characterise as arrogant yobboes, clinging to one another in case they have to articulate an unprepared thought. ‘I’m going to sit next to you. I can’t speak out loud even if I’m asked’. Mind, off-the cuff may make more sense than another who confidently told me ‘you can catch death from meningitis’.

Either of which were preferable to year 11 on healthy eating. How was it? ‘It’s all about the poo, Miss. You’ve got to get it just right.’  Thank you, indeed it is. Oh look, there’s someone I can talk to about the weather.

Or politics! Which brings me neatly to heads’ priorities for school funding which I’d like to share with you in the necessary purdah-imperative spirit of impartiality, having taken my puffa off.
  • An adequately-funded National Funding Formula for all schools
  • Proper funding for SEND and High Needs provision which is in crisis
  • Adequate post-16 per pupil funding rising from £4000 to £4760, not £4188 as planned
  • Funding for social care, policing, counselling, behaviour support and all the other unfunded extras now expected and required of schools
  • A published 10 Year funding plan as recommended by the Education Select Committee
  • Clarity about future costs and future revenue streams
  • Salary increases fully funded by new money.
  • An independently verified benchmarking tool for school funding
  • Independent statistical analysis so the system doesn’t have to rely on the IFS and EPI for accurate and unvarnished funding analysis. (On this last, government have referred to a headline investment of £14 billion into schools and the UK Statistics Agency riposted  “There is, however, a risk that the figures could mislead: for example, people who read no further might expect that the headline figure of £14 billion refers to an annual increase.  We therefore encourage the Department and Ministers to continue to provide appropriate context when making statements on school funding.” 
 
Does this sound unreasonable? I don’t think so. If we really cared about children we’d have 10-year funding plans which couldn’t be unpicked by governments. Children’s futures are too important to leave to politicians.
 
I discovered a brilliant poem two weeks ago, Anne Carson on Troy.  It ends
Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour.  You go to the window.
My window shows me a community training and arming its young for honourable, truthful and kind citizenship in a sustainable democracy. When I go to that window I’m full of hope: when I look the other way out into the world the clatter is there, but the armour is all wrong.
 
CR
22.11.19   
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Do I know you?

27/1/2017

1 Comment

 
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Posh people do it a lot. They talk about people they know and then seem surprised if you don’t know them, though why you would is baffling. They follow with a disappointed ‘oh’, as in ‘Oh, I thought you were one of us, but obviously if you don’t know Hugh Collapsible and the Hyphenated-Deckchairs you can’t be, shame.’ The idea that everyone who’s anyone knows everyone you know is how elites perpetuate themselves, making you desperate to be in the know too.

I’ve been involved in a twitterstorm of late. When I say involved, I mean that someone tweeted dismissively about a group of people which included me. In order for me to be involved, someone had to email the tweet to me, but it eventually hit the spot and annoyed. Anyway, I was dismissed as one of ‘a bunch of officials who no-one’s ever heard of’ meaning, I assume, that our opinions were worthless because they hadn’t been pre-approved by celebrity despite being democratically elected to do a difficult deed. Harumph.

I recalled a conversation I had back in 2013 when I was preparing to come to Greenwich. A friendly colleague (outside Tallis) said ‘of course, no-one’s ever heard of you, but we looked you up and you seem to be doing a good job.’ I was mildly outraged as well as amused. Durham to London is another world but I wasn’t unknown among educators there. And what does it matter? Who said knowing you validated my existence? I only met you a month ago.

We struggle a bit in school with this. Social media for some of our young is like being trapped in a cocktail party where all the posh people know each other. If you’re peripheral, you need resilience. Loneliness and social exclusion are ever-present fears among teenagers and now there’s no escape from the yattering of the crowd that you’re not part of. Playgrounds have always had elites, but now they’re validated in cyberspace, in pictures and home movies, in conversation shouted across the ether. It’s hard for them all, hard when they fall out, hard to keep up the pretence of knowing everyone as a way of proving you exist, especially hard when adults are obsessed with it too.

That’s not to say that some teenagers aren’t almost magically contented away from the crowd. Yesterday, first lunch, after ejecting a large group of loud girls I wandered off to survey other diners. The readers with their novels, absently picking at their sandwiches, and the card-swappers leaning right over the tables. A group of small boys trying on each other’s glasses and chortling. The mixed bunch gathered round the motherly sixth former, and the ones who choose the pundit stools ready like meerkats to engage teachers in chat. An illicit homework catcher-upper lurking behind a pillar, and my current favourites, a tidy pair of year 8 boys, had their habitual quiet chat over lunch before zipping up their topcoats and taking a dignified turn around the yard before the whistle.

There’s strength in quiet industry and decent human endeavour and it doesn’t need to be demonstrated publicly. An old head chum of mine, Australian Barry, possums, had a quiet way with words. We’d been talked at by one of Tony Blair’s deliverers who had segued from the officious to the patronising. Barry’s opening remark was ‘Son, I’d taught on three continents before you were born’. Later, in a tetchy session reflecting on another colleague’s self-promoting BBC appearance he just said ‘For shame. You give us all a bad name.’ Barry’s career passed in obscure diligence leading a good school in a dull town. No-one had ever heard of him, except the generations of families he served. His slap of the young pup was only partly exasperation. He was saying, eloquently to my junior ears, that you may be in the papers and heading for a knighthood, matey, but I’ve done my best for 40 years, don’t assume I’m not worth listening to, give me a break.

Success in anything shouldn’t be determined by whether we’re known or unknown, but on the quality of our service. We should teach our children that it is quality friendship that matters, not quantity. We should celebrate the quiet life well lived and the hidden goodness of the everyday. We should all understand that human worth is utterly unquantifiable. We should think hard about the example we set as we grasp at fleeting notoriety, and the damage we do to the quiet people around us.

So I tip my fake-fur titfer to the great unknown, as MacNeice said:
​
                  To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not even notice when we die,
 
Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

​ 
CR
26.1.17
1 Comment

Boxers and Lawyers

15/3/2015

0 Comments

 
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Nigel Henderson, Photograph of children playing outside, 1949–1954

You’re never more than 6 feet from a lawyer in London. I had a great email last term from one who’d had the commuter’s nightmare of being at a bus stop with a load of schoolchildren. Despite this, she wrote to offer work experience to the sixth former whom she’d heard expostulating so eloquently and accurately on Donoghue v Stevenson (about negligence, I had to look it up). ‘She formulated a perfect argument and wouldn’t let it go’ she wrote. ‘She’ll be perfect in court’. 

Last week I stood in a queue for the Palace of Westminster, how I do gad about, earwigging on the conversations behind me. A brace of English lawyers were explaining life to a Polish third. They talked about the public school to which one had sent his children and the other was about to (no, I shan’t tell you which one). The Polish person asked if it was good: chuckling in a knowing way, one said ‘well, the sixth form’s pretty good for studying, playing poker and smoking’. I mused on this while ostensibly reading a report on teacher supply. First: I suppose if children are sent off to board then they have to do these things among strangers. Second: say that about Gasworks Comprehensive and it’ll bring the inspectors running across the fields in their long black coats. How the other half (7%) live. 
Finding out what parents think is a holy grail for secondary schools and we try to bridge the obstacles of adolescence, scale and distance in different ways. I’m terrifically grateful to the parents of Tallis PTA and I’m indebted to the 84% who turned out for year 8 Parents’ Evening. I do like seeing parents with their youths. Spotting family relationships is interesting for the nosey, and seeing resemblances is fascinating. Year 8 are particularly funny. They’re way too old to sit on Mum’s knee so they usually lean in a sort-of chummy manner, while things are going well.  When they’re not they can be as huffy and flouncy as a year 12, or resort to comically guilty despondent expressions, like a Boxer dog with a mouthful of Christmas cake.

We’re pretty pleased with our new reports this term so year 8 were experimented on. That happens a lot to year 8, just as well no-one’s stuck there permanently. Parents could see at a glance where offspring were doing well by the jolly shades of green: yellow and red not such happy news. Wily parents grasped this instantaneously and couldn’t be thrown off course by flimsy excuses. ‘Very useful’ one grimaced at me as she dragged the Boxer off to account for himself in Science.

He’ll recover. I stood on the bridge today and watched Break. Children swarm and mooch, muttering and shouting. I watched a new starter rush to hug her new friend (she’s got that Tallis habit quickly) and some older boys trying to eat crisps and chase each other at the same time. A laughing year 10 was having her hair re-done. Footballs were being simultaneously confiscated and encouraged depending on the zone. At the end we did our outrageous whistling, clapping, shooing and shouting routine to hassle the hordes back into class. I explained for the fiftieth time why we’ve put part of the bridge out of bounds and thought for the sixtieth time about whether there’s a better way of doing it.  

We’ve invited consultants amongst us recently to give a couple of areas the onceover. They’ve been worth every penny, encouraging us to think in a slightly different way about the future. How do you get the Boxer dog to a state where he can’t stop himself explaining tort law at the bus stop? How do you get the reluctant 12 year old scientist onto a space shuttle?

We start with the end in mind while seizing the present reality of a child. It’s quite a balancing act: we value the person she is now while we hope to help her become someone we won’t know and may not even recognise. We do it in partnership with parents and the people at the bus stop. We let them be children while we form then into adults that might make a better go of changing the world. And the richness of our community gives them something extra so they can hope to breach the fortresses of privileges. They have to smoke and play poker in their own time.

CR

10.3.15

 

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What's the point?

1/2/2015

0 Comments

 
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Arne Olav, The Dorse, 2013. You can see more of his animal hybrids here.
What’s the outcome of a pointless conversation? Civilising year 9 is a recurrent theme and the Novelty Double Act had another go this week. Chat to each other, we said. Talk about the weather. Practice your small talk, it’ll take you anywhere. Sitting at my computer in the gloaming there’s a sturdy rap on the door and three youths materialise politely with a whiff of conspiracy and no punctuation: ‘Sorry miss but we were going down the back stairs admittedly we shouldn’t have been there but then we heard something in the assembly hall and when we went in some big people year 11 or something yelled at us to get out they might be intruders we think’. I was able to reassure them that year 13 drama students preparing for tonight’s assessed performance probably didn’t need their critical insights so they pottered off.  Time will tell if this conversation has any outcome. 

Twenty-six years ago I sat in a seminar in Durham called Designing Learning Outcomes. Mike the linguist and I scratched our heads, but he’d just told me that cars moved forwards because of the exhaust coming out of the back, so I didn’t know how reliable his understanding would be. How can you design an outcome?
Don’t you design a curriculum, differentiate it as best you can and then the outcome takes care of itself? For most of the intervening years designing learning outcomes has meant Getting Kids To Grade C, but the times, they are a-changin’. 

We’re tussling with curriculum and assessment at Tallis and trying as ever to peel the onion of learning. What are the basic building blocks of the curriculum? What should children know? How can we make them independent and able to manipulate powerful knowledge to understand the world (and change it for the better)? How do you get them from not knowing very much about anything to being able to get a useful qualification with currency for the adult world? We’re digging into our key stage three curriculum and building it up from first principles, designing proper learning outcomes from the very start, progress outcomes. Not just the nine terminal exams of GCSE triple science but the assessed practicals of the arts, with or without uninvited proto-critics. Progress in learning and effort, proved in examination and assessments. Progress from each child’s starting point.

The best teachers do this brilliantly well and we’re reviewing the usefulness of grading lesson observations so that we can recognise it better. Observations with cliff-edge gradings are not only flawed (and hugely stressful to teachers) but probably useless now that schools understand what we’re doing a bit better. Proof of the pudding et cetera: would you rather have a dull-ish teacher with a solid curriculum and good progress outcomes at all levels or an exciting teacher with equally mercurial results? Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or ten duck-sized horses? (Forgive me – it’s a question we’ve been asking at Tallis. We have our reasons).

I’m convinced by typicality. To me, a consistently good teacher is outstanding because of the extra reliability. You can‘t judge that in one or three classroom visits a year. You can judge it by looking in regularly, examining children’s books and behaviour, assessing test results and progress outcomes. You can add really valuable understanding by asking the children: ‘Is it always like this?’ Most children like teachers they’ve got used to, especially the cheerful and effective ones. Reliable teaching with flashes of inspiration, sky-high expectations, good discipline, good humour and good progress. They’ll tell you the truth and then go back to thinking about food.

So we’re designing learning outcomes by writing curricula that build up knowledge and skills, assess effort and progress accurately and aren’t driven by cliff-edge scores. I’m full of hope in what we’re doing. It’s taking us a bit of time, but the conversations are models of professional dialogue and not in the least pointless.

Small talk is shaping up nicely not just in year 9 and, despite appearances, is far from pointless. We’ve got a community learning outcome about confident talk with adults so that the quiet ones who never have a conversation with an adult in school have more confidence to contribute in class and articulate their knowledge. The horse-duck scenario was last week’s school-wide conversation topic. For the record, I’d prefer the horse-sized duck, as I told my class. Ten duck-sized horses would be really annoying, and how dangerous is a duck likely to be?  But they said: ducks are birds which are really dinosaurs so a horse-sized one could do you some damage. Had you thought of that? Let me tell you, it haunts my dreams.

CR 29.1.15

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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115    E: [email protected]
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