The values of our profession are fundamental to your survival

Change is threatening and those who survive it are those who can adapt.

I’ve been in teaching long enough to know that Darwin’s dictum is true. I’ve seen over the years that it wasn’t necessarily the best, most talented teachers who survived to make a successful career – I saw some brilliant inspirational teachers leave after only a couple of years.

The rapid pace of change simply defeated them.

Those who went on to thrive and succeed were those who could adapt to the new and often exacting demands of the environment – whether that was a change in government education policy, a change of head teacher, the unexpected outcome of an Ofsted inspection or the stresses and strains of teaching a new and challenging group of kids.

But for those teachers who did survive to make a difference, where and how did they get the faith and the belief to do it?

In my view, the teaching profession provides three fundamental sources that underpin the faith to manage change: our identity, our hope and our destination.

Our identity as a profession is to know who we are and why we are different from other jobs and professions. Get to know what it is that makes teachers different and special.

Our hope is that we have a moral purpose in what we do. We’re trying to make a difference and to do a moral good. Well, aren’t we?

And our destination is that place where the lives of those we teach are better and more fulfilled through education. That place is not reached by exam passes but as an end in itself. We’re trying to take others to a different, better place – even if we can only take them as far as glimpsing it.

Where we come from, where we’re going to and why. These are the fundamentals of a profession with a moral purpose – like teaching.

When we really know these things as a profession we will have more confidence to adapt to change and survive it.

How do I know that?

Because I’ve lived through ephemeral government policies, ambitious and bullying head teachers, arbitrary and superficial Ofsted inspections and transient classes of difficult kids.

But the fundamental values of a profession don’t change. They will sustain you through good times and bad.

For those of you thinking of leaving teaching this summer, I hope you’ll think again.

Alan Newland worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer and headteacher in London for over 20 years and then for a decade with the DfE and the GTC. He now lectures on teaching professionalism and runs the award-winning social media network newteacherstalk. You can follow him on Twitter at @newteacherstalk and book him for a talk. His book “Working in Teaching” (Crimson Publishing) was published in March 2014.

 

 

Schools meals are a ‘fundamental British value’

The Conservatives will do away with free school lunches for many primary school children in England (except for the poorest) and provide breakfasts instead, if (and when) they are re-elected.

I agree with Jamie Oliver about this –school lunches are often the main and sometimes the only nutritious and balanced meal of the day for some children. They also provide an opportunity for children to engage socially with their peers.

My issue about this is not a political one – it’s a professional one. In my view, teachers should be involved – they should sit and have lunch in the school dining room with the children and senior teachers should be involved in all aspects of how that service is delivered.

I know many teachers will say they haven’t got the time to do that (and they are right of course) or that they don’t want to eat school lunches (and why would they, when too many meals are so unappetizing and children can be noisy and sometimes ill-mannered).

But just let me tell you how it used to be…

First, when I was at school in the 1960s and 1970s (and don’t think that nothing worked in those days, school dinners certainly did) – I sat with five of my peers around a table – this is both at primary and secondary school) that had a space reserved for a teacher.

Every day we would beg teachers to come and sit on our table, we enjoyed their company so much. It wasn’t seen as anything other than a social pleasure.

Children laid the tables. They volunteered to do it, week by week, during playtimes. They were paid ‘pocket money’ by the kitchen staff. We all took turns and loved it, the pocket money was just a bonus.

In those days, it was always meat and two veg everyday (vegetarianism was still unknown, or at best slightly cranky) and plenty of pudding – everything made fresh on-site. There was never chips or pizza on the menu. I particularly remember the tender beef slices served up with huge roast potatoes, greens and lashings of rich, brown gravy. ‘Cheese pie” was another of my favourites – that came with fresh mashed potatoes and baked beans.

There was no choice of course – you got what you were given.

But not only were the tables laid by children, two children would go up to the serving hatches to bring trays of ceramic plates and bowls and steel knives, forks and spoons to the table – real dishes and cutlery, not plastic ones.

Then they’d go back for tureens of hot food and hot jugs of gravy or sauce. I remember the occasional dropped one – but I can’t remember any dramas – it was cleared up and replaced with no crisis about ‘health and safety’.

We passed the tureens of food from one to the other – learning not to take too much, learning not to eat too much, learning the manners of dining with others. We poured each other water into glass beakers. ‘Seconds’ were usually available to those who asked politely.

As we finished, those children who had brought the food to the table were relieved of their duties and two others took responsibility for tidying up the dishes and the table.

Of course, there are people reading this who remember school dinners as nothing but disgusting – offal, boiled spuds and lumpy custard. I can’t say that every school cook in the country was as good as the ones I had. But this was true in every primary and secondary school I went to.

But I realized when I became a teacher that this was not an issue of ‘council policy’ but about ‘school policy’ and a very much a professional one that teachers could do something about – if they wanted to.

When I first entered teaching in 1979, school meals services were still very much like I’d experienced in my school days. But by the late 1980s, things had begun to change.

The ‘free’ meal that teachers received for sitting with children during lunchtime had gone. Government cuts meant teachers now had to pay for the privilege. They usually chose not to.

Children were allowed to bring in packed lunches – which were of course ‘cold’ and usually not balanced or often even healthy – sandwiches, crisps, snack bars and sweet, fizzy drinks were the norm. Apart from the poor nutritional value, this fatally undermined the School Meals Service – fewer children buying school meals meant more cutbacks on staff and food quality.

‘Health and Safety’ meant all the things I’d described about sharing food that teach children fundamental social values had more or less gone. Food was served up on plastic trays with plastic knives and forks that looked like those you find in prisons.

I saw deteriorating behaviour and attitudes towards food generally and lunchtime in particular. I began to notice highly overweight and obese children for the first time in my life.

When I became a head teacher (twenty years ago), I did something to reverse the trend. I banned packed lunches. If you stayed in school for lunch, you ate a school dinner (now of course, with a range of vegetarian and multi-cultural choices). I banned fizzy drinks and re-introduced water at the tables and drinking fountains in the playground. The ‘dinner ladies’ wouldn’t let anyone out to play until they had eaten most of their meal. They certainly didn’t get seconds if they were discourteous, ill-mannered or wasted food. We were a faith school, so we said ‘Grace’ at every meal.

Just in that last paragraph alone, I’m describing the spiritual, moral, social and cultural education that every school and every teacher should be providing – not just as part of promoting so-called ‘British values’ – but in providing a proper education.

Good, nutritious, well-balanced schools meals eaten together – children and teachers together – is not an education or government policy issue, it’s not a political issue either (or shouldn’t be) – but it is a professional issue – and just as important as ‘what’ and ‘how’ we teach a ‘curriculum’ with ‘subjects’ in it.

Alan Newland worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer and headteacher in London for over 20 years and then for a decade with the DfE and the GTC. He now lectures on teaching professionalism and runs the award-winning social media network newteacherstalk. You can follow him on Twitter at @newteacherstalk and book him for a talk. His book “Working in Teaching” (Crimson Publishing) was published in March 2014.

 

What would you be prepared to resign over?

A head and deputy head teacher of a Hampshire primary school have resigned because of government education policy saying in their resignation letter to parents: “Recent developments in education have brought our position to a point of personal, professional and ethical crisis.”

They cite: “the narrow focus on… an increasingly bland and joyless educational diet… mental health issues resulting from pressure on children by testing… and cuts to school budgets resulting in redundancies…”

To be honest, and with respect to these two well-respected teachers, I’ve been hearing this kind of thing for the last twenty-five years.

Teaching has been a profession with an increasingly high churn rate both with newly and recently qualified teachers and with senior teachers too. Studies from Liverpool University, the NUT and Professor Alan Smithers over the last twenty years have revealed churn and drop-out rates of between 20% and 40% in some sections of the profession.

But what is interesting to me in this case is the use of the phrase: “personal, professional and ethical crisis.”

I think we can all imagine scenarios where ‘a personal crisis’ might result in resigning from our job – a bereavement of a close family member; a serious health breakdown; a divorce.

I think it’s also quite easy to think of resigning over a ‘professional’ issue – a ‘poor’ Ofsted report; the culture of a particular school or a department; a so-called ‘personality clash’ with the head teacher; missing out on a promotion.

But resigning for ‘ethical’ reasons is a lot less common and brings forth a moral dimension to the issue.

While the Romans taught us to distinguish between legal, moral and ethical issues, even they found an overlap between these categories – especially moral and ethical – and it is interesting to consider – and pause over – the ethical reasons they cite for their decision.

These two highly respected teachers have a combined experience of fifty years and lead an ‘outstanding’ school and while their resignation has been greeted with some dismay, there is also widespread sympathy from many parents, one of who was quoted as saying: “The education system in this country should not be without people of this caliber.”

What issues would you be prepared to resign over? Whether personal, professional or ethical?

What issues would you be prepared to resign over?

Alan Newland worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer and headteacher in London for over 20 years and then for a decade with the DfE and the GTC. He now lectures on teaching professionalism and runs the award-winning social media network newteacherstalk. You can follow him on Twitter at @newteacherstalk and book him for a talk. His book “Working in Teaching” (Crimson Publishing) was published in March 2014.

Read the full report from The Guardian:

http://bit.ly/2oTt8dw

Your values. British values.

A new government commissioned report on integration and ‘British’ values is out, making criticisms of public institutions as well as some ethnic groups in the UK.

But could you say whether your values as a teacher are British values?

You might find Ofsted asking that question one day.

It’s a contentious issue. Lots of people, even if they are able to articulate their own personal values struggle to articulate what ‘British values’ are. Some will challenge outright the notion of ‘British values’ at all, (though personally, I think it’s a distinctly British value that the British are uncomfortable even talking about British values. I don’t think you’d see Americans or even the French expressing such reticence).

Be that as it may, I was doing a training session with some trainee teachers on ‘fundamental British values’ a few weeks ago in the north of England. I was asking the trainees to reflect on how their own personal values cohere or contrast with the ‘fundamental British values’ as defined by the Department for Education as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs”.

One trainee, a young hijab-wearing Muslim woman training at a predominantly Muslim school in Bradford, said to me: “I was doing Romeo and Juliet with my Year 9s last week. I was really hammering on about the concept of individual liberty as understood in Shakespeare’s time and in modern times and how concepts around the individual liberty have changed. I wanted to get across to my students how it is their right and their individual liberty to choose their own marriage partner. We discussed dating sites, Tinder, arranged marriage, forced marriage, divorce, bigamy and related the relevant issues to the drama being played out by Romeo and Juliet and their warring families. I realise now that I was teaching my own values. I really wanted to get across to the students, the girls especially, what their individual liberties are. Now I think I was teaching British values as well.”

The following week I was in Bath with a similar group of trainees asking similar questions about how easy or hard it is to integrate personal, professional (and even political) values.

One student said that he wanted to be an art teacher because he truly believed that the pursuit of art could only be achieved when one understood that art was a fundamental expression of oneself to others. He said that true art could not be achieved without understanding the primacy of one’s individual right and liberty to express oneself in whatever way one chose, even if that caused offence and shock.

At first he didn’t think this had anything at all to do with so called ‘fundamental British values’. Indeed he thought at first, that his understanding of artistic expression ran counter to any idea of so-called ‘British values’.

But then he stopped and reflected, thought for a moment and concluded by saying that he realised that he wouldn’t have had the right to express his art or teach his students they had a right to artistic expression had he been a teacher in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, let alone the so-called Islamic State.

What are your values? Are they British values too?

Alan Newland worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer and headteacher in London for over 20 years and then for a decade with the DfE and the GTC. He now lectures on professionalism in teaching including ‘British’ values and the ‘Prevent’ strategy. He runs the award-winning social media network newteacherstalk. You can follow him on Twitter at @newteacherstalk and book him for a talk. His book “Working in Teaching” (Crimson Publishing) was published in March 2014.

Becoming a Writer

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know I usually write about ‘professional’ issues rather than curriculum matters. However, recently I was given a set of books about English to review and they made me reflect on issues around ‘professional autonomy’ and how different that once was for young, new teachers.

As a primary teacher who did an MA in ‘English in Education’ at London University’s Institute for Education nearly thirty years ago, I read these booklets with some interest. They reminded me of the halcyon days when I felt truly inspired to teach. I would turn up for two hours twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, over two years – each time I felt absolutely knackered from a full day’s teaching in a tough Hackney classroom – but within minutes, find myself drinking at a fountain of knowledge poured by the likes of Harold Rosen, Margaret Meek (Spencer), Tony Burgess and Jane Miller.

These books remind me of those sessions. I’m going to summarise them – all too crudely. But here’s the third one on Writing for ages 3-7.

In the first years of their lives, children are not only learning to talk but they are also learning to recognise and use graphic systems like drawing, writing and numbers.

Speech and writing are close relations but are not identical twins. Speech has a grammar that realises meaning in ways every bit as complex and rich as writing. As babies learn to speak, they are laying the foundations for their acquisition of literacy. The most significant event in becoming literate is when a child realises written marks are symbols of spoken language.

Oral and written stories, poems, songs and rhymes have a key role to play in unconscious and informal learning about writing and – especially for a young child – being read to. But teachers have a vital role to play too in making the unconscious, conscious and informal, formal – through appropriately pitched instruction – that is, skilled teaching. The teaching of writing requires an understanding of all the needs of a writer at work and of the complex and varied demands made on children when we ask them to write.

Teachers must encourage the confident ‘voices’ of early writers. They must provide support and instruction to bring children, without haste and anxiety, to an understanding of the conventions of writing and to a relaxed control of handwriting.

The premature introduction of, for example, grammatical and spelling rules, can be harmful to the confidence of the young writer and spoil the experience of writing as fun, active, participatory and collaborative as well denying opportunities for individual, quiet reflective thought.

Young children should experience a range of writing styles that represent the linguistic, social and cultural diversity of their classroom and which encourage exploration of the real and imaginary worlds beyond it. As is the case with early reading, parental support for early writing is of vital importance. Teachers should be the drivers of regular two-way traffic of fun and meaningful writing experiences between the school and the home.

All these principles apply with equal force to learners of English as an additional language (about one in six children in the 3-to-7 age-group) – indeed, such children have the advantage of being engaged in the complex process of making comparisons between writing systems. They are likely to have an increasingly conscious knowledge and transferable skill from one written form to another especially when comparing first language or bilingual edition books.

The new National Curriculum orders for writing at Key Stage 1 are over-preoccupied with the early teaching of spelling rules and grammatical concepts and terminology. They make the fundamental error of believing that analysis of the written language is a necessary preparation for competence in writing. The reverse is actually true: as developing writers confidently use their writing ‘voices’ on the page or the screen, they begin to grasp and command the correct use of writing ‘structure’.

The statutory guidance for writing at the Early Years Foundation Stage quite wrongly assumes that competence in writing emerges from being taught to read by the use of synthetic phonics.

John Richmond’s English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19: Writing 3 to 7 proposes an better balanced understanding of the effective teaching of early writing at the Early Years Foundation Stage and at Key Stage 1 than that offered by the government. It offers an alternative curriculum for Writing from 3-7, and an educationally sounder approach to the testing of writing at this age-range. It is available from the United Kingdom Literacy Association at http://www.ukla.org/publications/shop/, price £12 (£11 to UKLA members).  

Alan Newland worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer and headteacher in London for over 20 years and then for a decade with the DfE and the GTC. He now lectures on teaching professionalism and runs the award-winning social media network newteacherstalk.  You can follow him on Twitter at @newteacherstalk and book him for a talk. His book “Working in Teaching” (Crimson Publishing) was published in March 2014.

  

Talk, talk, talk…

I usually write about ‘professional’ issues rather than curriculum matters but I was recently given a set of books about English to review and made me reflect on issues around ‘professional autonomy’ and how different that once was.

As a primary teacher who did an MA in ‘English in Education’ at London University’s Institute for Education nearly thirty years ago, I read these booklets with some interest. They reminded me of the halcyon days when I felt truly inspired to teach. I would turn up for two hours twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, over two years – each time absolutely knackered from a full day’s teaching in a tough Hackney classroom – but within minutes, find myself drinking at a fountain of knowledge poured by the likes of Harold Rosen, Margaret Meek (Spencer), Tony Burgess and Jane Miller.

These books remind me of those sessions. I’m going to summarise them – all too crudely. But here’s the first one I read on Talk.

The spoken language is the mode from which competence in all the other aspects of language springs. Literacy – that foundation of the ‘civilized’ world – could not have come into being without the prior existence of speech.

The learning of spoken language is not merely an act of imitation for young children, but is far more powerful – it is a generalising act in which they perform, infer patterns and rules from the raw material of the language they hear – and then apply inferences to utterances arranged in certain orders and in some cases varying their form according to context – even when they have never heard it before.

Speech is the essential means by which children and young people learn. As a teacher you have a crucial role in guiding children’s use of the spoken language and creating contexts in which children can practise and extend their competence.

To be productive though, ‘group talk’ of whatever size needs a clear structure and purpose. That structure and purpose may be very simple: for example, you could set one single, open question with a time limit. Or you may set a more complex structure involving a series of questions or tasks. Sometimes you will be an active participant in the talk and sometimes just an observer. A key aspect of a teacher’s skill is in setting tasks for children that make demands at the edge of – but not beyond – the reach of a child’s existing state of knowledge or grasp.

Group talk may well involve reading and writing but it shouldn’t be an automatic preliminary to those. Talk should be regarded as an activity in its own right with equivalent status and seriousness to other kinds of language work.

It should embrace a range of purposes and take a range of forms, from exploratory – such as ‘thinking aloud’ or putting together hypotheses – through to the more presentational – like stating arguments or debating – from the tentative to the declaratory and from collaborative group situations through to the individual child becoming a confident speaker in front of an audience.

In the best classrooms, the culture and routines of ‘talk’ is a valid form of ‘work’. The most successful schools have broadly agreed policies on the important principles relating spoken language to learning and in my view, one such principle is that the use of properly managed talk is that it is respected and admired throughout. Quiet classrooms are not necessarily an indication of a working classroom.

Some 17% of the UK school population is bi- or multilingual. These children often outperform their monolingual English-only peers. Teaching multilingual children is not a different kind of teaching, just an adapted one, and recognizes children’s access to a variety of linguistic competence – like the way good teachers recognize a variety of ‘Englishes’ other than just Standard English. Good teachers respect the language of the child’s culture and community. They compare and contrast standard equivalents of non-standard forms that children use in everyday speech. This in itself is a fascinating study of language.

In my view, the government’s new legal requirements for spoken language are insufficiently detailed in the primary years and over-preoccupied with formal and presentational uses of the spoken language in the secondary years. Sadly it seems, the government’s true estimation of the value talk in schools is to be seen in the fact that achievement in the spoken language now does not count towards a student’s main grade at GCSE English Language.

To me that’s a retrograde step – both for English as a ‘subject’ and for teachers’ professional autonomy.

I recommend reading John Richmond’s English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19: Talk – it proposes an alternative National Curriculum for English, giving proper and balanced recognition to the role of the spoken language in learning at the Early Years Foundation Stage and throughout Key Stages 1 to 4.

It is available from the United Kingdom Literacy Association at http://www.ukla.org/publications/shop/, price £12 (£11 to UKLA members).    

Alan Newland worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer and headteacher in London for over 20 years and then for a decade with the DfE and the GTC. He now lectures on teaching and runs the award-winning social media network newteacherstalk.  You can follow him on Twitter at @newteacherstalk and book him for a talk. His book “Working in Teaching” (Crimson Publishing) was published in March 2014.

Are the values of teaching universal?

In England, teachers use to have a code of conduct and practice before the General Teaching Council was abolished. It was intended to make the values of teaching explicit both to teachers themselves and to the wider public. These have been replaced by the more prescriptive Teachers’ Standards – but serve more or less the same purpose.

But do teachers everywhere share similar principles?

It occurred to me recently that codes of conduct and practice are very much a product of their time and place. When I entered teaching (way back in 1979) we didn’t have a code, but if we had I’m sure it would have looked very different to the one we have now.

Here are a couple of examples why I think this is true:

In 1979, the idea of “striving to establish productive partnerships with parents and carers” was not really on the agenda. That’s not to say that many teachers and schools didn’t already work productively with parents – they did.  But the idea that teachers should do this as part of a ‘code of practice’ would have been a highly contested issue.

Similarly, “co-operating with other professional colleagues”. In those days, the view of many (albeit excellent) teachers would have been to say: “My job is to teach history, maths, chemistry or whatever – not to spend my valuable teaching time liaising with social workers, child psychologists, speech therapists or police liaison officers.”

And as for “respecting diversity and promoting equality”… whose diversity? whose equality?  Less than a hundred years ago, females in the UK didn’t even have the right to vote, let alone have the expectation that teachers would promote equality on their behalf.  Thirty years ago, teachers in the UK were promoting equality by immersing immigrant children in English. Now decades of research tells us of the benefits to language acquisition, cognition and identity from supporting bilingualism.

And what about crossing cultures and societies?

Do teachers in ‘liberal, democratic, pluralist and developed societies’ – like the UK for example – share the same values as teachers in relatively ‘conservative, traditional, authoritarian and developing societies’ like Egypt, Malawi or Bangladesh?

As a profession, do we merely reflect the dominant values of the societies we live in?

Or do we have universal principles to offer the world?