• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
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    • William Carlos Williams
  • poemics
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  • teaching matters
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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: accountability

travel // when I die

02 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2019, 7*, accountability, afterlife, afternoon, architecture, bardo, being, black, brick, brown, buildings, capitalism, century, clouds, crane, data, death, decades, dedication, depth, doing, echo, fields, floating, green, ground, Have, height, horizontal, identity, industry, interdependent origination, iteration, length, lintel, London, magenta, mind, notice, orange, passing, perspective, pillars, presence, purple, rain, rainbow, red, reference, ripple, rooftops, russian vine, samsara, sandstone, sapphire, self-cherishing, self-grasping, silence, sill, sky, sound, speech, Thames, thought, tide, time, train, travelling, trees, Uckfield-London line, utility, walls, white, world, writing

                                                                                travel

                                                                                noticing
                                                                at all is a product of
                                                                shifted perspective
                                                                related to behold;

                                                                when I’ve nothing to write
                                                                I’ve lost any perspective,
                                                                cornered by both these walls
                                                                I’ve walked along

                when I die
                this mind will no longer whorl about this pinchèd self
                in a world of diminished return and profusion of iteration

                                                                cranes atop
                                                                pulling them further up and up
                                                                from the ground on which they
                                                                balance on receding point;

                                                                communities of them
                                                                each taller than the last and the next
                                                                all along the wharfs
                                                                of endless account

                it will be expansive
                high and up in industrial and sandstone sky
                it will fathom all the deep of brown kelp in shifting purple

                                                                kilometres long
                                                                courses of brick
                                                                grimed black and utility-studded
                                                                updown onoff foothold and wire

                                                                ripple along nicely
                                                                across right-angled centuries
                                                                and occasional shot bolts
                                                                of deepest russian vine

                with no sound
                save diminishing echoes of a pleading late self
                having nothing left to refer to and nothing left to here, and

                                                                believe it or not
                                                                a rainbow exponential
                                                                to the white arch of Wembley
                                                                we’ll chase for miles

                                                                orange shimmering to
                                                                magenta through staccato tides
                                                                out and over flat roofs
                                                                on and into the fields

                all data wiped –
                suds off my hands from my shoulders –
                and did I back enough up for some grander vector to reach?

                                                                where trees grow from ground
                                                                shaping over decades
                                                                green-flamed cupolas
                                                                clamped to the sky

                                                                and from perspective passing
                                                                of open field
                                                                turn – creak –
                                                                the whole world

                I may well
                have built pillars of cleverness and thought:
                plinthed, fluted, capitaled and giddyingly architraved …

                                                                and there
                                                                Lancashire red brick
                                                                with high and whitey
                                                                sills stale and lintel

                                                                before washed-out
                                                                sapphire-afternoon of steely sky
                                                                and horizontal fingers of
                                                                scud-rain

                … but they’d just
                floated there upright in space ‘neither use nor ornament’
                straining on the string in my baby-fat hands, I’ve

                                never really
                                made stuff happen
                                and didn’t have to try

                                more than let more and more
                                of stuff happening anyway
                                happen through me

 

train trip; East Sussex to London to Lancaster to Ulverston, Cumbria; where we lived for three years and started a family; stay at Swarthmore Hall; visited Conishead Priory where we lived for 18 months after marriage and graduation; notes and observations on the journey, sense of bridging 32 years of lifetime(s); notes > (maybe) two poems, but two which could nevertheless not be separate, although distinct, like train tracks; three years retired, still processing if I achieved anything in this capitalist and samsaric world …; London centuries old, still processing …; architecture as the stage-scenary of endeavour; the ‘here’ in the 9th stanza is definitely (sic); this is, positive

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

afternoon & sky wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
architecture & thought wormhole: “And anger it is that lays in ruins / every kind of mental goodness.”
being wormhole: 11/1 by William Carlos Williams
black & sky wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
brown & green & walls wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Valley
buildings & crane & rain & red & speech wormhole: riders of the night
capitalism wormhole: `whappn’d!
clouds wormhole: at Kreukenhof
death & identity wormhole: psssssh
doing wormhole: writening
echo & mind & passing & sound & time wormhole: – creak —
Have wormhole: on facing the Have
London wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – An Old Piano
orange wormhole: ‘don’t look at it …’
purple wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I took my camera into the fields
rooftops wormhole: Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896
samsara & trees wormhole: breakfast
silence wormhole: window
Thames wormhole: London, 1809
train & travelling wormhole: beneath
Uckfield-London line wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
white wormhole: 10/22 by William Carlos Williams
world wormhole: none and all
writing wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – sooner; / and later

 

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how to teach

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 5 Comments

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2018, 4*, Academy, accountability, betrayal, career, classroom, corridors, flowers, game, ideas, infrastructure, management, OFSTED, politics, Principal, requirement, resentment, school, special measures, teaching, teaching craft, thinking

                I suppose it’s not actually your fault
                that I brought to the point of fruition

                those things which you were required
                to require to keep your sorry arse out of

                special measures and you didn’t have the
                first or second idea what to do with them

                because you had long since moved on to
                eleventh and twelfth ideas playing

                some stupid game about infrastructure
                and accountability and completely forgot

                how to teach

 

about and dedicated to the former Principal of the former school (oh, sorry, Academy … what was I thinking) where I spent the whole 29 years of my former career which had calcified even as it flowered it’s most beautiful petals and eventually snapped under so much pretty weight and fell silent and unnoticed to the ground (and a good job too, it would have been a light, colourful mess in the corridor or the classroom); all of which I am required to not name if I’m to keep the paltry amount of money given for me to just shut up at long last; even after years of escape it seems I still bear a grudge – I really must find a honey pot for it somewhere …

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

career wormhole: I am not yet ready
game wormhole: [once a] dilemminal [always a dilemminal]
management & teaching wormhole: new blue porsche
politics wormhole: looking / ridiculous
school wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
teaching craft wormhole: Structure & d y n a m i c
thinking wormhole: Khandro Tsering Chodron

 

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looking / ridiculous

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 1 Comment

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2015, 6*, accountability, debate, echo, event, future, history, humanity, injustice, Paris, politicians, politics, rhetoric, Syria, terrorism, time, white elephants

                there is always always a whole
                history behind every event

                never more so as we
                step over rubble into the future

                which we build now; and so much
                of politics has become

                so deft at skipping the history
                to gainsay the outcome

                that it has become flat
                blunt and spade-like for holding, nothing

                to account; history is human
                hurt from any injustice and from any experience which persists despite

                the rhetoric (oh, you weren’t
                reaching for the shelves, were you!);

                responding to Paris by
                bombing Syria was on the table there-it-was

                a rhetorical knee-jerk
                blind to any history

                hoping for crowd-approval
                like the echoes of a playground brawl;

                politics should be sharp and uncomfortable,
                include all difference

                include whatever white elephants are in the room;
                spade (sic) politicians who

                will not respond to the white elephant
                who will not respond to the history

                are left with only the puff of rhetoric
                braying like farmyard animals, looking

                ridiculous; air strikes in Syria are ridiculous

 

there were a number of terrorist attacks in Paris during January 2015; there was debate in the UK about launching an attack on Syria as a response; the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbin, was courting views on the response – I wrote a poem

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

echo wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
history wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
Paris wormhole: Le Pont Royal, 1909
politics wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
time wormhole: lack of center

 

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just saying, is all VII: // `spolitical

21 Sunday May 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2013, 4*, accountability, career, compromise, expertise, just saying, listening, managerialism, message, politics, principle, production, public service, responsibility, work

                just saying, is all VII:

                the drive to de-power the worker
                in public service; you cannot
                call-the-shots-because-you-are-an-expert
                … because you are the worker

                if you are calling the shots you must be
                a manager of some thing so that
                you can then be held accountable
                for the shots you call – kept on message.

                If You Are not a Manager you Cannot
                Call the Shots. Even if you are a genius;
                ‘take a responsibility, then we’ll listen
                to you’, I wouldn’t on the principle they

                wouldn’t listen to, they didn’t listen on the
                principle that I had no voice without responsibility
                compromise; de-experting workers
                is inexorable to production, in fact

`spolitical

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

career wormhole: wakeoutofadream
compromise wormhole: gone black
listening wormhole: within
managerialism wormhole: seen but not heard
politics wormhole: this sodden land
work wormhole: weight

 

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just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …

20 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2013, 2016, 6*, accountability, air, breathing, broken, career, dialectic, encounter, experience, fantasy, oxymoronic, pavement, practice, Principal, recognition, results-led education, sidelined, skill, slogans, staring, talking, teaching, time, voices, words

                just saying, is all VI

                agh; the Principal
                walking this way
                can’t avoid it have
                to talk to him; ‘how

                ARE you?’; and to
                my reclacitrant ‘OK’
                he tells me my
                experience and skill

                count for a lot and
                I walk away staring
                at the edge of the
                pavement trying to

                fit the words to
                decades of sideline;
                why didn’t I just
                scream in his face

                that his word and
                his breathing are
                oxymoronic to each
                other as I so often

                fantasise doing; but
                I am broken by this
                place in which these
                OK-spores are air,

                I have no leverage
                of dialectic from
                which to speak, so
                easy to evade my lob

                and practice by
                referring the Briefings:
                ‘a little precious’, ‘not
                a team player’, ‘ask him

                about his children’,
                ‘doesn’t affect results’,
                ‘doesn’t make sense’;
                smile and shift-agenda,

                endear by using his
                own name, slip in a
                Slogan and, there,
                a free and frank

                exchange which
                has left me accountable
                for my own outbreath
                …

 

as of September 2016 I am retired early from teaching – without prejudice – because I could no longer find any more inbreaths to keep practising; the encounter happened about three years previously, the humanomanagerialasphyxia virus took hold about 2001 beginning an odyssey with no resolve; now I teach myself to breathe again by embracing … no resolve; the next ‘just saying, is all’ will be about life inside the plastic bag over my head, I know it, I’ve written in, I’ve breathed it

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

air & teaching wormhole: this aching // and spacious dichotomy
breathing wormhole: sleep now
career wormhole: travel
practice & time wormhole: interim
recognition wormhole: happen//ing
results-led education wormhole: teached / in the ass
talking wormhole: familiasyncopation
voices wormhole: did I get old?
words wormhole: Prajnaparamita // Maitreya

 

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the sounds of 1969 // [would have] seemed that way – poewieview #13

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

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Tags

1969, 2016, accountability, appearance, ascent, becoming, being, Bowie, chords, clouds, coalescence, counting, crescendo, dawn, doing, doors, earth, echo, fall, gods, history, horizon, kitchen, looking, loss, lost, love, neighbourhood, people, possibility, rocket, silence, society, sound, stillness, streets, stumbling, suburbia, travelling, trees, up, variation, warp, weft, wish, years

                                   … oh,

                      here it comes again, between
                      the warp and weft of chording;
                      all the engines of thrust, all
                      the snare of history, all propulsion

                      `round various turnings, trails
                      left vaporising; counting … up
                      to crescendo, looking up to tread,
                      to lacunae; to ascend is to lose,

                      to step through that door: fall/
                      ascent mean nothing off-sphere;
                      tumult of horizon sitting in my
                      kitchen, stumbling on my planet,

                      there’s nothing I can do: there
                      are – so – many – more – chords,
                      variants on a minor, travelling to
                      where we are all along, feeling

                      very still … lost where we all are;
                      the sounds of 1969 looked very
                      different today – loved-up, peopled-
                      up, gods upped be-coming – up;

                                          ~O~~~

                      down the slippey ascension of wish,
                      up to the echoing boroughs of cloud-
                      bank, where the damp damp dawn
                      falls silent to urban horizon, higher

                      for to widen the neighbourhood
                      streets and higher to deepen the road-
                      side trees; none of it didn’t, but it
                      [would have] seemed that way

 

filtered through grill of angst: Space Oddity, 1969, Cygnet Committee, 1969, Memory of a Free Festival, 1969

Read the collected movements in David Bowie: Movements in Suite Major

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being & Bowie & doing wormhole: quite … / … yet – poewieview #12
clouds wormhole: dog bark
dawn wormhole: now, the verticals go down as well as they go up
doors wormhole: Seven A.M, 1948
echo & looking & people wormhole: 1966 … actually sic // of it allllll-bsssssssh – poewieview #8
history wormhole: London Park in Greenwich town – poewieview #5
horizon wormhole: com- / mute
kitchen wormhole: 1963
love wormhole: Grizedale College
silence wormhole: the open window
society wormhole: bookmark
sound & years wormhole: 1963
stillness wormhole: the windmill
streets wormhole: fine droplets / across the glass
travelling & trees wormhole: Saturday – poewieview #3

 

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portrait

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2013, accountability, Braque, managerialism, portrait, professionalism, public service, public service cuts, ugliness, value-bled education, valuelessness

 

 

 

                                                      portrait

                           that suit and chic of yours
                           that cleans and cuts to
                           assure such a tender
                           profession accountable
                           from all possible angle

                           makes you ugly as a Braque

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

managerialism wormhole: disappear
professionalism wormhole: poessay IX – … just saying, is all II

 

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just saying, is all – III

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2012, 2014, 3*, accountability, achievement, assessment for learning, career, CPD, dialogue, education, funding, GCSE, inclusion, intervention, love, measure, National Curriculum, nurture, outcome-led education, planning, politics, process, professionalism, public service cuts, pupils, results-led education, school, slogans, statistics, subjects, targets, teachers, teaching, vocation

 

 

 

                                                                                    just saying, is all – III

                                              I watched the first generation of pupils sit their GCSEs

                                              then I watched the National Curriculum
                                find a gear
                and crunch-jerk launch the level system of attainment
                                across all the subjects
                                              then I watched the whole dialogue –
                political and educational
                                and the funding that went with it –
                                              shift from process and nurture
                to outcomes and statistics

                                and then I felt the reform of teaching professionalism
                and watched the proliferation
of endless sheets of planning, four – part lessons, Assessment for Learning, Ready for Learning, Every Child Matters, Inclusion, Continuing Professional Development, targetting, intervention, Boulders into Pebbles, Investors in People, accountability, Achieving Together, Be a Part of It, G2O                      
                                the unforgettable 2 As & 2 Bs
                the Freedom to All Think Along the Same Lines (glorious times)
(and I’m really looking forward to the innovative work to be launched soon by Professor Cobbly from the prestigious University of Fisc’ut, Corporateshire, (not least of all because he happens to be my uncle))

                                              and all the while
                                those who work hard achieve well
                                              in the wash
                those who don’t don’t whether they are intelligent or not
                                if they are going to be angry or lazy
                they will find a way to be so
                                              whether you teach them to their very marrow
                                or just let them alone

                                              most teachers
                                just get through their career
                all of them measured to within an inch of their vocation
                                some keep their love
                                some make a difference
                                              sometimes
                                when no one is … measuring

                                              all kids
                                just get through school
                                most kids do OK
                                some kids thrive

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

career wormhole: tag cloud poem IV – C
education & results-led education wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
love wormhole: plethora: the Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002)
politics wormhole: my life is not your market
professionalism wormhole: the Lamp
teaching wormhole: which is worse

 

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which is worse

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

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2012, 4*, accountability, compromise, dialectic, dilemma, managerialism, practice, principle, teaching, thought

 

 

 

                                                                      which is worse

                                being held accountable
                                to a practice which
                                presumes a compromised thought

                                or being blanked from
                                the dialectic which would develop
                                a principled thought into practice

                or both?

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

compromise & managerialism & teaching wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
practice wormhole: prologue
thought wormhole: plethora: the Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002)

 

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the Lamp

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

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accountability, assessment for learning, communication, curriculum, learning, management, managerialism, National Curriculum, performance, performance management, politics, professional development, professionalism, resource, responsibility, syllabus, teaching craft

Since 1988 the government has been ‘reforming’ education: to make provision and attainment nationally uniform and transparent equally for the government, schools, employers, parents, teachers and, yes, pupils.   Since 1997 the government has ‘managerialised’ education: it has dismantled the semi-autonomous remit of the teacher to practise h/er vocation, it has redefined ‘professionalism’ away from vocation and value and into process and productivity in the name of ‘accountability’, and it has quantified this process and productivity and called it ‘professional development’ (soon to be ‘licensed’).   This has left teachers estranged from, and distrustful of, the very dynamic that makes teaching happen: the skilful, adaptive, speculative, compensatory, dancing, alternative, bargaining, creative, tentative, controlling, releasing, playing, explorative, human dialectic of communication between teacher and pupil.

How is this ‘reform’, this ‘professionalism’, experienced?*   The National Curriculum has been defined – and is periodically juggled with – into core/foundation/statutory subjects, clearly and simply, so that they could be listed in a pamphlet.   Very quickly these subjects became disseminated out into national/local/exam-board subject syllabi – what needed to be ‘covered’ in each subject, especially when the need to level/grade the content became compulsory as well as statutory (‘so amusing how the syllabi, at this point, became known as ‘specifications’ rather than syllabi).   When the syllabi arrived in schools they had to be managed into a fit state to enter the classroom, so they had to be disseminated again (perhaps, better, ‘dissected’), (or even ‘disembowelled’).   Each syllabus topic to be broken down into differentiated tasks, mapped cross-curricular-ly, and All/Most/Some’d.   The fragmentation going on from the simple National Curriculum to the classroom has been almost exponential.   What was simple at the essential level (government) became overwhelmingly complicated at the practical level (classroom) – it was pamphlet-able at the government level, it became incommunicable, unlearnable, at the classroom level.

* We were having a nice game of football one day.   As with all games there were hard bits, exhausting bits, unfair bits, but we were holding a 1-1 draw.   Then – while we were playing – there were new rules to the game introduced.   The goalposts were left where they were, actually, but we now had to move the ball around the field …on a trolley!   We all had to have trolleys ready for when we had possession of the ball.   The trolleys were fitted with directional wheels to aid mobility around the field, baskets to hold the ball, racks to hold the football boots that we’d need when we had to pass the ball, shoot or defend a negotiated tackle.   We were told, ‘We have given you all this equipment.   In return we want a fast, exciting, entertaining game.’   So we pushed these trolleys around the field.   The wheels mostly got stuck.   The ball usually fell out of the basket.   No one scored any goals.

The pupil thereby received curricula which were overwhelmingly broad and complicated.   They received them in restricted amounts of time (in an ever-squeezed timetable with up to fourteen different subjects including drives on technology, IT, Citizenship alongside the drives within the Big Three subjects) which, even for the most able, required them to develop guerrilla tactics to learn – in, learn-something, get out, next.   The pupil has lost the sense of studying (exploring, wondering … mastering) a subject, it now just receives – it consumes.     The pupil has become passive, incapable of developing h/er skills of independent study – not enough time for it (or rather, not enough perspective to develop any motive other than ‘getting’ it).   The pupils have become overwhelmed, even, with the simple ‘getting’ of education: overwhelmed by content, they have no perspective, or will, to link their knowledge together (to ‘stand under’ their studies to see how they all fit together), and they will become satisfied with a factual-based appreciation of their subjects at best (making A-level teachers scratch their heads at times wondering why on earth some pupils chose their subject).   At worst they will ‘can’t be bothered’ with it all because there is more to be gained in self-esteem by publically rejecting it all rather than the impossibility of trying to master it.

For the teacher: s/he might have been able to rationalise and deliver the disseminated monster that education has become, but it was decided that teachers are fundamentally a-qualified to do the job (certainly, any profession which strikes over pay in the early 80’s needs to be sorted out)!   The nobility of the teacher has therefore been systematically (and publically) dismantled.   Professionalism has been re-defined by questioning the received image of teacher as authority-by-role (both in discipline and knowledge), and even questioning the ‘semi-autonomous professional’, by infiltrating the hallowed ground of the classroom to ensure … measurability of what they do.   ‘Measurability’ of what the teacher does is now quantitative: by input (the production of the paperwork for the lesson which proves that it was planned, what can be seen to be ‘in’ the lesson to be ticked off), and output (professional development is now linked to a performance which is measured statistically – there is so much that needs to be ‘reduced’ and screened out of consideration to make a statistic measurable – even pay is now linked to that same extracted performance).   Teachers are no longer respected but are now accountable (as well as ‘accounted’) to their Head of Department, their Head of Year, their Senior Management team, their School Governors, parents, the government, the public…   The overwhelming proportion of a teacher’s energy has now to be focussed on making sure that they are justified to all parties, before they can start to communicate.   Teachers are now taxed by needing to manage their curricula fit for process and attainment (managing ‘within’) in response to a pervasive management from ‘outside’.   The management of courses has become more important than their delivery.   It is difficult for these courses to be coherent or stepped; it is easy for them to be overwhelming for both teachers to deliver and pupils to receive.   In the past some teachers were inspirational because they could provide the portal to the world of their subject by skill of communication – they knew, through their teaching, what the seed of the subject was that drew a child’s eye.   Now most teachers have a ‘seed catalogue’ and no ‘field’ in which to sow.   Teachers have been ‘accountability’d’ and ‘consistency’d’ out of their skill of communication – out of the skill of drawing the child’s eye – by having to focus on the (measurable) process of teaching rather than the communication of teaching.   Communication has become a rather indulgent distraction in the face of ‘hard’ realities like (selective) statistical results, finance, the school’s PR with parents.    Teachers are left actively paralysed in having to meet impossibly (impractically, needlessly) wide and widening curriculum and (summative) performance indicators.^

                                       ^
                                       The centipede was happy quite
                                       Until the toad, in fun
                                       Said, ‘pray, which leg moves after which?’
                                       This raised her doubts to such a pitch
                                       She fell distracted in the ditch
                                       Not knowing how to run.
                                                     – Marion Quinlan Davis

So how is Assessment for Learning a solution to the atrophying of teacher professionalism?   So many curricular and cross-curricular teaching schemes have been floated during the last twenty years that have shown that attainment (no matter how you measure it) is not affected.   It was necessary to look at the learning in education as much as the teaching.   It has emerged that Assessment for Learning is the mechanism which links the teaching (delivered) to the learning (received) and still enable the measurability so desperately needed (needed, needed) when education has become the political potato that it has.   How does it connect teaching with learning?   It provides a template through which topics can be taught and learnt using the same language.   Topics are delivered broken down into levels 3-8 or grades E-A* and pupils apprehend them at whatever level/grade they can develop.   Both teachers and pupils understand the language of levels 3-8 or grades E-A*.   The skill of the teacher is in providing the ‘field’ of endeavour, the work of the pupil is to cultivate 3-8/E-A* as far as they can.   This co-working, through a commonly understood language and purpose, is called a dialectic; the working of this dialectic is called … teaching and learning.   Assessment for Learning enables that dialectic so that the power to teach and learn can be returned back to their rightful owners.   When Assessment for Learning happens the whole of the edifice which has become education becomes workable rather than impossible – education becomes what it always should have been, an enlightenment.

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

communication & performance management & professionalism & teaching craft wormhole: I don’t think I could do it anymore
learning wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
management wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’
politics wormhole: The Future of Teaching: performance or capability (‘oh, not ‘teaching’ then?’)

 

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