Category: Design

Teaching to the test

22/10/2018

You may know that Ofsted have been thinking, which is good. It’s even better that they’ve been thinking about ‘What is the real substance of education?’ or as a normal person might put it ‘what are schools for?’

HMCI commentary: curriculum and the new education inspection framework

The clipboard brigade make several points, all of which deserve a big tick. I thought you might like a digest, shamelessly condensed and filtered through my own prejudices. They say:

Education is the vast, accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation. A ‘curriculum gives a school purpose’. Hurrah!
That curriculum is the heart of education. It requires the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding of subjects.
In too many schools, the curriculum is just a combination of the exam board specification, the timetable and the exam results. Not enough schools really think about what they want children to learn. This leads to a narrow range of subjects being taught and too much ‘teaching to the test’.
Inspections have placed too much weight on exam results.
The 2019 inspection framework will emphasise ‘the curriculum as the substance of education’. Inspectors will look at a school’s ‘curriculum intent’.
They’d like to see schools focusing on subjects and subject vocabulary.
They’d like to be sure that ‘disadvantaged pupils are not put onto a stripped-back curriculum’.
They observed that expert teachers in the schools they visited ‘lived and breathed their curriculum’ and that good subject teachers are likely to stay in schools where subjects are valued.
A well-constructed, well-taught curriculum will lead to good results because those results will be a reflection of what pupils have learned.
Parents need to know the substance of what their children are learning throughout their time spent in school.

So far so good. Tallis approves Ofsted’s new thoughts, which will doubtless be a relief to them. But hold on! What’s this? They don’t like three-year key stage fours, like we have. Why?

Three-year key stage fours originated at a time of intense exam pressure. Lots of schools did it to give more time to GCSEs and therefore improve results. This is part of the reason for the current panic about schools just focusing on English, maths, science, history, geography and languages, because that’s what’s been valued in national education talk in recent years. Therefore, lots of schools just do a quick rotation of arts subjects in year 7 and 8 and then don’t offer them much at KS4 so they can tick the ‘EBacc’ box of the subjects above.

Tallis doesn’t do that. We have a very broad curriculum at key stage three with six hours a week of dance, drama, music, art and DT and a very large range of options in KS4. Choosing options early means that our children – who do one more option than many other schools, in any case – have the chance over three years to get into deep subject content, absorb it and make it their own. When I arrived at Tallis six years ago, I was very sceptical about choosing options in year 8 but was quickly converted. That’s not to say that we couldn’t improve the way we do it, of course. So, when the moment comes and we have to defend ourselves, we’ll have a few thoughts to offer inspectors about the what and the why, and how our choices enable us to keep a broad curriculum for everyone. Hurrah again!

It’s good news for everyone that Ofsted have made this commitment to the curriculum. I’m not just saying that because it’s Ofsted, but because it’s right. Schools are where society looks after its young, and the curriculum is what society thinks they should know. A broad, common curriculum which enables young people to think and reflect also means that the democracy speaks a common language. It builds up our communal life. That’s why good comprehensive schools with a wide curriculum are every bit as important to the health of the nation as the NHS. A nation educated together across the whole range of human experience should be well-equipped to understand and change the world for the better. Hold on a minute, that sounds familiar…..

Speaking of which: Black History Month. We’ve had dancing, eating, talking, films and workshops. We’ve had two mini carnivals with mass dancing and Caribbean Come Dine with Me. It’s been a joy. During the lower school carnival I was having our performance review with our Local Authority School Improvement Partner. I had to keep making excuses to sneak looks out of the window to see the children dancing to Sir’s music. They sent me up a plateful of outrageously good food but it didn’t make up for not being outside in the sun. A new colleague said ‘some schools would worry about losing control’ but we don’t. Our systems are good, our community strong and we love to dance, sing, cook and make things. We’re confident to do it because we value it, we do it all the time, and when we go back to class we know each other well enough to settle back down.

What are schools for? Being able to celebrate diversity and inclusivity with laughter and exuberance. That’s not a test you can teach to.

CR
18.10.18

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What's the point?

1/2/2015

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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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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Teaching to the test

What's the point?

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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