education

When we was Phab!

Link theprimaryhead1 Comment

It’s good to get away. Not just to get away from the hustle and bustle from your own environment but also to have an opportunity to meet other like-minded (or not) people from your profession. At a time in the academic of year where the promises of Autumn seem to be at their most fragile and you feel success is balanced on a knife’s edge, it’s good to get away and realise that…you are not alone.

It was the annual Phab (that’s Primary Heads Association of Bristol to you) conference in Chepstow. A day and a half of Heads and Deputies talking, laughing, eating, drinking, singing (partly due to the drinking) thinking, supporting each other, reflecting and looking forward.

Listening and talking to other Heads about their schools, achievements and struggles. Not only do you realise that there are situations that are way more challenging than yours but more importantly you find yourself able to offer support and advice. This in turn is reciprocated and suddenly you have an idea you can take back and a person you can go to after the conference to ask for help. I believe they call this ‘networking’. I prefer to call it ‘chatting with a purpose’ and is a good example of why I love being Phab.

Our highly esteemed Chair @overton66 had started the main proceedings on Friday with the statement: ‘I know we seem to say this every year but it really does feel like we are living in uncertain and exciting times in education’. He’s not wrong. The landscape of education is changing more rapidly than Phab’s resident in-house band’s set list. (Current name: ‘The 4Heads’ although I’m leaning towards ‘The Phab 4’.)

The big movers and shakers of Bristol LA have changed, there are many different school models across the city, and partnerships are popping up here there and everywhere; all this against a backdrop of a never endingly changing national picture of expectations from Whitehall. The goal posts are not so much as changing, as more disappearing leaving schools to put down their own jumpers for goalposts and hope for the best.

How awful!

But as Gus Hedges, the smooth talking Chief Executive of GlobeLink from ‘Drop The Dead Donkey’, always said: ‘’Problems are just the pregnant mothers of solutions.’’

Our new LA leaders were also there at the start and made it very clear to us that as the redefining of what it means to be a school in Bristol gets underway, it will be done with us not to us. If that’s not an incentive to get involved then I don’t know what is as I genuinely think they meant it.

Then, to get us inspired, we had the pleasure of working with Mick Waters. In just over an hour he had gone through:

  • What was important in a child’s experience of schooling.

  • The danger of PISA.

  • The damaging role politics has played in education.

  • The shifting sands of assessment data.

  • The false prophets behind Gove’s ‘freedoms’.

  • What the new national curriculum has left out.

  • The rich educational, cross curricular, mind expanding opportunities of a 6 minute video of a man dancing with people around the globe.

I think it is also safe to say that pretty much everyone in the room agreed with his every word. I did. This did occasionally lead me to think ‘Oh goodness, I have become conditioned by Ofsted? – Do I only care about data and things that can be measured? Am I ruining the lives of my children?’ (Luckily, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t, I don’t, and I’m not.) But I recognised that as a city we have a chance to address all those issues and build a stronger and richer experience for our children.

Then it all got terribly exciting. I mean we started thinking about where Bristol could go. How we, as an educational city, could write its own mandate for what we will give the children that grow up under our watch. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? I think we’ll do it, I genuinely do. But for it to work we are going to need an almost Herculean effort from the LA. Because after we’d all decided what it was we were going to put in place so our children could succeed and be fully prepared for a life of contributing to their world fuelled by a love of learning and life; we would have to have a guarantee that no one could come and dismantle it. It would be a bit like a fixed mortgage. We would need the LA to buffer any national changes or additional crazy expectations that came from Whitehall in order to win votes or to be seen to be addressing society’s ills in the eyes of the media/public – they would have to stand up to national government and say: ‘No, we can’t do that at the moment, we’re busy.’

Imagine that?

Imagine working in a world where you were in control of the goalposts. Imagine a whole city working together to give the same experiences and entitlements for every single child. Imagine raising standards in every single area of the widest curriculum? Imagine being able to do this and know you were making a difference? Imagine that the best ideas, the ones that the professionals deemed to be important, were valued and respected and given the time and freedom to succeed.

That is what it should mean to be in education.

Having the chance to instigate it?

That is what it means to be Phab.

How the mighty have fallen

theprimaryhead8 Comments

It happens to the best of us I suppose. You reach a point where if you allow yourself to stop, take a breath and reflect on the situation you’re in, you immediately feel like climbing under a table, breathing into a brown paper bag and perhaps, should the urge take you, quietly vomiting into a shoe. This is why you shouldn’t stop of course. Just keep on going. Just relentlessly chug away like a demented robot who has overridden its self-destruct button happily busying itself unaware of course that it’s about to burn out.

But, because I am not a robot and neither are you, we all occasionally stop and that can often seem like a huge mistake.

Today, I read a reference someone had written for me, about me, for when I applied for my current job. Now, before you start to worry, I don’t make it a habit of reading my own references. I don’t take them home on a Friday, pour myself a glass of wine and regale myself with how great I am. (That would be madness and besides, I have a blog for that.) No, I had in fact been asked to provide a reference for an old colleague and I thought before I start, I should read a successful one (well I got the job didn’t I?) to look at the basic structure of the thing and steal some sentence openers otherwise I was in danger of starting every line with the words ‘And another thing they do well…’

As I read my own reference two feelings began to emerge. One was that I appeared to be the most amazing Deputy the world has ever seen and the second was that I sort of remembered who this person was but felt it certainly wasn’t the current ‘me’.

Again, don’t worry: I know I wasn’t the most amazing Deputy in the world. But I was pretty good. And reading back this distillation of my four year stint I kept thinking: ‘Wow, I did a lot and I did it well.’ Then, thinking about my current job and everything that I’m in the middle of doing I couldn’t help but think: ‘What the hell happened to me?’

How did this cool, calm and collected leader who went from one success to another turn into this husk who seems to be staggering to life raft to life raft narrowly missing open mouthed sharks, sea snakes and floating pieces of excrement?

I do not know.

Then I read my reference again. And as a little treat, I read it again. Then it began to dawn on me. Reading back all of my achievements I began thinking back to those times and how I felt when I was actually there doing it. In retrospect, it all went so smoothly; at the time though, well that’s a different tale.

I remembered all the frustrations and challenges that were part and parcel of success. I remembered the feelings of self doubt on the journeys home, the conversations with the Head saying: ‘What the hell are we doing? Nothing’s working, I mean nothing we are doing is bloody working!’ Because when you’re in the thick of it the dream you had that started the ball rolling, always seems far, far away. Like when you dream you’re running a race and the closer you get to the finishing line the further away it gets. (I’ve never actually had that dream, but I’m sure more sporty people have and the metaphor sort of fits so I’ll ‘run’ with it.)

When you look back though, the success that you achieved for your school tower over the stress and torment it took to get there. So, I realised I hadn’t changed, I hadn’t gone from hero to zero: I’m just doing what everyone else is doing: fighting on. And sometimes it is a fight and sometimes it feels like you’re losing. But we all know it’s going to be worth it – whatever it is you’re personally fighting for, whatever it is that is keeping you from sleeping, you know that your hard work, determination and belief will win in the end. And when the next person writes your reference they’ll focus on everything you achieved and the way in which you refused to be ground down when it got tough.  Hopefully they’ll miss out the bit where they found you underneath the table being sick into a shoe and jabbering on about sea snakes otherwise you’re really stuffed.

So keep going and when you do stop and it feels like it’s all too much, just remember: this ain’t the first time and if you keep doing your job, it won’t be the last.

 

Judge Me!

theprimaryhead6 Comments

Lesson judgements: how valuable are they? A different question to how ‘valued’ are they? (Which if you believe what you read on Twitter the answer is um, well, what’s the least valued thing you own? Well smash it to pieces with a hammer and chuck it in the sea and you kind of get the idea.) I do however find them valuable. I don’t consider a lesson judgement to be the sealed fate of a teacher but they can help support an evolving picture of teaching and learning in someone’s classroom. They can also be the springboard for a quality discussion about a lesson that can lead into deeper discussions about pedagogy and teaching styles which for me is a welcome break from talking about pay policy, universal free school meals and whatever changes have been made to the new renewed just published finalised next draft of the Ofsted inspection framework.

On this particular matter of being pro-lesson judgements you are going to have to imagine that when I discuss the judgement with the teacher it is done nicely, appropriately and fairly. I appreciate that is a pretty big ask but just run with it.

Putting it bluntly (and this is not meant to represent the manner in which I offer my feedback and judgement) I think it is good for teachers to know:

a) How that individual lesson stood up against whatever observation criteria you are using in order to provide some kind of ‘benchmark’.

b) How that lesson contributes to the other evidence used to make a judgement of quality of teaching over time.

c) That I know what I’m talking about.

Anyone who has had to give a less than ‘good’ judgement during feedback will know that it is at those times that reason c) seems the most important. It’s one thing for a teacher to feel rubbish (because we all do when we’re told any part of our practice is not good) but at least they can be told by someone they trust. And again, you’re going to have to take my word for it that I know a thing or two about teaching…seriously just go with me here.

I think in reality, it is reason b) which has become vitally important to get across very, very loudly and clearly when feeding back and sharing a judgement. Not only because I feel that the most important judgement is that of quality of teaching over time rather than quality of teaching within an hour but also because it is the one reason that teachers tend not to hear no matter how clearly you try to make it. (Talk about a positive sandwich; teachers tend to need an extra side order of happy chips with an extra thick affirmative milkshake with a cherry on top – even then they’ll still focus on the hair that was found in the middle of the first bite)

So in case I haven’t made my thoughts clear: I like judging lessons.

But…

          But…

                       But…

Something happened recently that made me adapt my opinion. I haven’t changed my mind – I still think dissecting a lesson in order to make a judgement is still a perfectly sound and effective way of developing teaching BUT I’m wondering if it is more effective to share this with teachers when it isn’t about their teaching.

Let me explain: during a recent set of interviews, a teacher joined me in the lesson observations section. Throughout the lessons we were able to discuss what was happening and I was able to challenge the teacher into considering why a lesson had ‘tipped’ into RI or had become inadequate. Afterwards, the teacher reflected and said how they had found it interesting to see the process of judging lessons ‘from the other side’ and how by being detached from the teaching they were able to see more clearly the points at which during an individual lesson, judgements begin to get formed.

What followed was a short discussion about how these individual lessons could impact upon pupil achievement if the quality of the teaching remained at that level for a sustained period of time. Suddenly it became clear why an RI lesson needs to be analysed and issues addressed so that key pupils make progress rather than get left behind. The teacher said it was a genuinely interesting and valuable experience and possibly more so than their own observations.

So I began to wonder if it would be beneficial for all teachers to see all ranges of lessons done by other teachers. There would be no emotional attachment that can cloud key messages, opportunities to consider the impact of repeated exposure of unsuccessful lessons on pupil progress and the chance to compare particular lesson traits with your own. It’s a safe way to make strong judgements that can really support teachers improve and develop their own teaching.

It sounds ideal; there’s just one problem. How can I make sure teachers see unsuccessful lessons? Well I could constantly interview and select the worst candidates: not sure HR would approve. I could set up peer observations across the school and hope that most of the lessons are appalling – not sure that’s a particularly healthy way to run a school. Or I could teach. I could deliberately teach poor lessons and invite teachers to observe me and together we could identify why my lesson was not good. Although I am an outstanding teacher and like to think my staff agree and consider me to my a wise and knowledgeable  professional who knows how to successfully move every child on: I probably could force myself to teach inadequately time and time again. (Now, call me paranoid but I sense you are all finding that bit quite easy to believe!)