One Damn Thing

Last week I was accused of being a communist. I was quite surprised, firstly because this hasn’t happened to me for about 5 years (the last time was by a PGCE student of mine who now works for David Cameron, which probably explains it).    The other reason was that I am that most annoying of political animals – the moderate. My lawyer’s training means that I try to look for the merits in both sides of an argument, and the wannabe philosopher in me tries to help me see that life is an exercise in moving from holding weaker to stronger misconceptions.

So, as I age I try not to hold positions if they’re not working.  I shift.  I try to take on board evidence and argument. I am frequently wrong.  In fact I’m always wrong, I just try to be less wrong today than I was last week.  Life has taught me many lessons, Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, Catholicism, Socialism, Comprehensive Education, Mixed ability teaching, Constructivism, setting, vigorous exercise, formative feedback, Hattie, low-fat diets, high-fat diets, Behaviourism, Growth Mind-set, PGCE, CPD, ICT ,Post-Structuralism, Polly Toynbee, Historicism, Elton, Butterfield, Hobsbawm, Cannadine, Michael Gove, Owen Jones, Brian Simon, all of them curates’ eggs.

This leads me to seek out the good parts, and it makes it hard for me to explain what my position is when people ask me ‘what kind of teacher are you?’, or when I’m told I’m progressive or traditional.   I’m Pragmatic.  I try to find out what will work in the situation that I am in.  That doesn’t mean I’m a ‘what works’ teacher – I don’t think that you can say ‘what works’.   I tend to seek new ideas, but I like to know what they’re based on, and I think to myself ‘will that work, where were are now?’.

I went to a research Ed conference last year, and the one talk that really stuck out for me was Dylan Wiliam’s presentation on why Teaching will never be an evidence based profession.  I’m aware that in saying this, and yet being interested in Education Research (I got an MSc in Edu Research Methods) last year, I could be accused of wanting to have my cake and eat it.  Research findings and evidence have their role to play in Teaching, but to paraphrase Wiliam, education researchers need to abandon “physics envy”, and instead find ways of “Working with teachers to make their findings applicable in contexts other than the context of data collection”, whilst at the same time recognising that the job of collecting and interpreting evidence about education is never-ending and will never produce definitive guides to ‘what works’.

There are some right wallies online.  They’ll tell you outright that students don’t need to remember anything, that they can look up anything they need online.  They’ll tell you that dates and events and chronology are just stuff, that students get clogged up with.  These people are daft.  But they’re quite few in number.

A very small number of other people have made reputations or careers out of pointing out the daft people, so that we can all laugh at them and feel better about ourselves.   This is called twitter.

The much more numerous group are those who half remember stuff they learned on PGCE, or some course or other, or when that consultant came in and did INSET.  They hear a VAK idea, or see someone using coloured hats in a lesson and they think ‘this is cool’ or ‘hey, that looks fun’, and they give it a go. Sometimes this seems to ‘work’, in that the students seem to enjoy it, or it makes the teacher feel good about themselves, sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes these people then post their ideas on twitter, which is fortunate for the people who made careers out of pointing out daft ideas on twitter.  Otherwise they would run out of people to point and laugh at.

Then there are people who read books and articles and blogs about teaching their subject and others. They are sometimes caught up in ‘good ideas’ that they’ve seen.  Hey – it’s nice to be enthusiastic sometimes.  Often however, they see something about learning styles, or grading, or writing comments only in one colour, or APP or other things, and they say ‘I won’t be doing that in my classroom’.  Instead of saying ‘yeah, I have a growth mindset ethos in my classroom’ they will read Dweck and find out what that really means.  Those people sometimes agonise over lesson plans, or they see something that they want to do, and think about it for weeks before trying it.  Then they’ll think carefully about if they really can be sure that it worked.  Sometimes they don’t get round to trying it until they’ve been able to talk about it with a likeminded person that they trust.   Sometimes they find themselves doubting areas of their practice they have used for years.  Often they find that this is only possible when they have found a group of supportive likeminded people.  Sometimes they meet these likeminded people that they trust on twitter, once they have unfollowed the people who continuously point out the daft people.

These people, the people who read things, sometimes argue with other people about what they’re doing, but they do it with grace, and with good learning behind them.  They can do this because they read lots about their teaching, and this reading helps them to recognise ideas which might be worth investigating, and helps them to maintain healthy scepticism in the face of ‘the silver bullet’ that other people are looking for.   When they’re wrong (as they inevitably are), they can handle that, and change.