the Apple

Tags

analysis, cognitive, connection, creativity, educational behaviourism, evaluation, feedback, function, growth, knowledge, learning, learning objective, lesson planning, measure, organic education, play, preparation, pupils, questioning, resource, results-led education, task, understanding, value-bled education

 

 

Teaching and learning can ONLY happen organically – when infused, before, during and after, with an understanding of how a mind builds its cognitive structure.   It’s simple: Knowledge >>> Understanding >>> Evaluation (KUE; actually I wonder if ‘Exploration’ is a better word than ‘Evaluation’, less preclusive, more open).   You can teach unorganically, reductively, intensively (as in, farming), results-led (value-bled).   It is much easier to measure (and therefore be used as political manure) like this.   But the learning becomes Pavlovian – set stimulae, set responses to get the grade – pupils are given the knowledge, and they learn (= remember) it, or not.   Pupils are also given the Understanding and the Evaluation/Exploration, and they learn/remember that as well, or not.   They are not taught, as such, but are Educationally Behaved.   Organic education is … the teacher’s apple (look at the shape of the diagram).

 

Preparing: teaching is the unpacking of (already established and recognised) knowledge.   Unpacking happens every lesson, beginning with the identification of the Learning Objective (Learning Horizon) from the curriculum.   Having focussed on the horizon, the map to it is opened-out by the teacher.   The map is the structure/template through which to unpack knowledge – the components of Knowledge, Understanding and Evaluation (KUE) which are the structure and levels of cognitive learning – and this map is the PLANNED lesson.   The way to write the map is to start with the learning objective and ask three sets of questions which deconstruct it into its constituent cognitive components – what are the facts (K), how do they work (U), what are the issues (E)?   The answers to these questions yield the raw ingredients of the lesson.   This level of analysis is conceptual and learned and requires a mastery of the subject in order to achieve it, clearly and efficiently.

Tasking: then comes the creativity in the lesson planning.   Working from the raw ingredients you ask: how could the pupil find, identify, collect, collate etc. the facts of the topic (knowledge), how could the pupil connect the facts together to see how the topic functions (understanding), how might the connections be tested to evaluate the functionality of the topic (evaluation)?   What is different about this stage of questioning is that you are thinking of questions that enable pupils to make the discovery themselves – the creativity is in the enabling, thinking of tasks that let them work the cognitive way back to the learning objective from discovery (of facts features – knowledge) through linking (the knowledge – understanding) to playing (with the links – evaluation).   If the tasks do not allow discovery/linking/playing then they have lost reference to what they were trying to achieve (the Way to the learning objective) and they become directionless and pointless – there is activity, but it is not clear why it is being done even though it may have some related or recognisable association with the learning objective.   The key, therefore, to this stage of lesson planning, is to build not any-old tasks that keep them occupied for a lesson, but tasks which ‘window’ the discovery, ‘thread’ the linking and ‘allow’ the play: growth.   If you ask the right questions in the lesson, the learning will grow itself.   Once you have got the questions right, only then do you think about resources and delivery – a mere formality after the main work of questioning has been done.

Lesson: then comes the magic of the lesson.   The pupil works as far as s/he can through the lesson (K > U > E) and checks their progress through feedback which is phrased in the same KUE references.   The journey is made naturally if the lesson has been constructed right ( // the questions have been posed organically).   There is no chore here (in the sense of work for a deferred or prospective outcome), there is the momentum of: what-is-it, how-does-it-work, let’s-play-with-it?   The learning should develop through stages of integration: having found things (discovery), you see how those things fit together (how they work, function), then you test how they fit together (practise their use if the subject is a skill, develop their use if the subject is a study).   There should be no sense of having to lead-the-horse-to-water, the only thing holding back the pupil will be h/er current cognitive development.*

*There are some pupils with a measured low cognitive ability (i.e. CAT score), or low ability to develop (SEN), who, indeed, are ‘stuck’, lesson after lesson, year after year, because – I would argue – they have inexorable experience of task-for-no-immediately-discernable-gain which emphasises the frustration that their diagnosis identifies.   Organically grown lessons should enable practice, lesson after lesson, year after year, of meeting the limit of their cognitive and learning ability and then pushing that limit a little further, rather than confirming their limit.   In this way their education would truly be a transformative experience of growth rather than a consignment to limitation.

Feedback: after the journey has been made, the product of the lesson is given to the teacher who measures how far the pupil got and puts a level/grade on it.   Every lesson.   Is this onerous?   No, because the breakdown of the lesson by the teacher should be clear and organic enough that the measure of the progress through it will be one of recognition, of mere identification: does it have those facts, does it show the connections between the facts, does it use/test the connections?   The only ‘new ground’ that might be developed in the pupil’s work (and will therefore need more than cursory viewing) will be the higher explorations in evaluation; but these will be new findings, new applications, and the teacher will want to read them in full.   Will the teacher need to give summative and formative analysis for each piece of work?   Once there is a shared assimilation of cognitive development (K > U > E through teaching, K > U > E in learning) between teacher and pupil, borne through lesson-after-lesson, year-after-year of organic experience … no.   Until then, yes, but make it a learning experience: single-word summations, prods, suggestions, questions, directions related directly to the level they have brought their work to and the next step beyond it.   Again, if the cognitive road-map of the lesson has been constructed clearly and organically then the summative and progressive feedback to be given is clear.

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

creativity wwormhole: relapse
evaluation & knowledge & understanding wormhole: Structure & d y n a m i c
learning wormhole: no biggie:
results-led education: what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie

 

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something simple to offer

Tags

Bloom's taxonomy, curriculum, educational behaviourism, evaluation, hierarchy of learning, knowledge, learning, levels of attainment, National Curriculum, organic education, results-led education, SATs, understanding

Abstract: Assessment for Learning has become the prime drive in education in recent years.   It has not launched easily because it seems to add yet another exponentially complicating layer onto a pedagogy which has already been excessively fragmented … but if used simply …

National Curriculum spent twenty years making teachers focus on content in order to measure pupils’ levels of attainment of that content.   Nationally.   SATs were implemented in the big three subjects in order to ‘standardise attainment’ and the remaining subjects gradually acquired their own level descriptors in order to keep up.   But the experience with SATs was that they soon became ends in themselves (especially because school performance was attached to them – a wholly un-educational mistake) to the detriment of the means (teaching and learning within a nationalised, uniform curriculum). SATs became grafted – rather Frankenstein-ly – onto all the subjects and their (uniformly burgeoning) curricula.   Descriptors of levels of attainment proliferated as extensively and as randomly as gas.   Confidence in using levels of attainment was never achieved, either in schools (moderation still came down to ‘hunches’ in despair of trying to apply the descriptors in a hierarchy of attainment), let alone nationally (cf. even SATs had to become very blunt measures in order to be comparable).

It was just all too complicated, for both teachers to do anything more than just ‘get through the curriculum’, and for pupils for whom the only constructive course was to indiscriminately ‘try harder’.   Most pupils don’t have a clear sense of how to learn because the content is too overwhelming.   Their un-trained response, at best, is to just include more detail, or make it neater, or at worst to give up – angry and defiant.[1]

Aaagh, what to do?   How to teach something simple-enough and attainable-enough to pupils without exposing ourselves to the charge of un-professionalism? Learning skills or content?   Thematic or integrated?   Do we lurch from one to the other, or just wobble?   Or do we stay where we are, dazed and confused?

Knowledge before (or without) skills is,

• vague (‘where are we going, why are we learning this’)
• unstructured (understanding is developed by association rather than analysis)
• un-measurable (or measurable only by expansion, breadth, detail rather than understanding or analysis)
• un-transferable (skills developed are particular to the subject, or even topic, they were learnt in)
• un-applicable (true enquiry needs to go deeper rather than just more broad)

Skills before (or without) knowledge is,

• pointless (‘where are we going, why are we learning this’)
• wide but superficial (understanding is developed by association rather than analysis)
• only measurable according to the effort made; and its neatness!

Knowledge considered irrespective of Skills, or Skills considered irrespective of Knowledge are un-holistic, lead to un-natural learning and are un-effective[2].

The solution is … Assessment for Learning.[3]   Assessment is the means of identifying progression for any given aspect of an attainment target.   Assessment for Learning is the means whereby the pupil understands what this progression means so that they both know how they have achieved so far and how they can progress further.   For every single Attainment Target (every lesson/learning cycle) we need to present, task, assess and feed-back in a clear level 3-8 way.   In order for us to do this and for pupils to understand (and use) it, it needs to be simple.   Therefore:

Level 3	Knowledge
Level 4
Level 5	Understanding
Level 6
Level 7	Evaluation
Level 8

Level 3-4 you have to know it (detail, facts), level 5-6 you have to explain it (how it works), level 7+ you have to test it. What is ‘it’? It is any given Attainment Target. To break this down a little further:

Level 3	Knowledge	Detail, fact
Level 4		Collections, sorting of details, facts
Level 5	Understanding	Explaining idea behind detail, fact
Level 6		Explaining how ideas fit together
Level 7	Evaluation	Testing ideas for purpose, enquiry
Level 8		Consolidating enquiry

With this simple structure we could take an Attainment Target, any Attainment Target, and we could present it, we could task it levels 3-7, we could assess pupils work on it levels 3-7 and we could feed back to pupils levels 3-7.   What precisely is required for each of levels 3-7 would depend on the respective Attainment Target as exemplar …

Examples >>>			History – Peasant’s Revolt	Geography – Water Cycle	Religious Studies – a Mosque
Level 3	Knowledge	Detail, fact	Key names, places	Key words: rain, clouds, sun etc.	Key words: minaret, quibla etc.
Level 4		Collections, sorting of details, facts	Names & places on a timeline	Key words on a diagram showing cycle	Key words on diagram of Mosque
Level 5	Understanding	Explaining idea behind detail, fact	Causes that made names and places happen	Explain how each element happens	Function of the key features
Level 6		Explaining how ideas fit together	How all the causes came together into PR	Explain how elements work in a cycle	How Mosque practices worship, study, community
Level 7	Evaluation	Testing ideas for purpose, enquiry	Did the PR succeed, what did rebels & leaders say v. do?	Explore where WC is problematic	Mosque as ‘submission’ & ‘peace’, umma
Level 8		Consolidating enquiry	How does PR fit into wider Medieval age?	How WC features on global scale issues	Mosque within Islam

We would need to deliver our lessons with tasks that access the Attainment Target at a level 3-4 level (knowledge – all), at a level 5-6 level (understanding – most) and at a level 7+ level (evaluation – some), so that each pupil can concentrate on the task that corresponds to their target level.   This would de-complicate the curriculum (by making it both presentable by teachers and accessible to pupils) AND develop skills (because pupils would know how to develop from level to level because they are simple and they would be used to them lesson by lesson, rather than give it, at best, their best shot).

Isn’t this all just so familiar? Hasn’t every teacher since the 1960’s had Bloom’s taxonomy wheeled before them, o so very satisfactorily?   It maps the cognitive development from identifying facts (knowledge) to connecting knowledge (understanding), to testing connections (evaluation).   Well, ‘Phew!   That’s a relief – thank goodness Bloom thought about all that complicated stuff – now we can get on and teach!’   I am not sure that the taxonomy has been integrated into lesson-to-lesson teaching, partly because it seems possible to have lessons ‘happen’ without reference to it, partly because it takes time and creative energy to plan the working through of a piece of learning (both of which resources significantly disappear when teachers begin their teaching career), partly, also, because the pervasive drive and focus on ‘results’ (grades) in education has required teachers to condition reactions to learning in their pupils rather than nurture them through cognitive development.

Assessment for Learning should be the very working through of this cognitive hierarchy in each piece of learning: used at the beginning (structured KUE teaching), the middle (integrating K>U>E learning) and the end (formative >>> (occasional) summative KUE assessment).   The result of this will be educated pupils who have developed their intelligence (and know how to learn) rather than educated pupils who have ‘received’ their education as is their due consumer right.

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[1]And this, quite possibly suggests the explanation for why there is a dip in KSIV: the majority of pupils, overwhelmed by KSIII perform flatly at KSIV simply because they are already tired and frustrated at the beginning of year 10 rather than a sense of seeing how far they could take their learning developed at KSIII.   They possibly pick up at KSV simply because they have ‘dropped’ all of the subjects which completely overwhelmed them before, not because they suddenly learn to study better.

[2] (I’m sorry), Aristotle said that the form and essence (of anything) are only notionally conceived of separately, they cannot actually be separate, the same as you cannot think of the shape of the wax of a candle separate from the wax itself.   If the wax is the ‘knowledge’ and the shape is the ‘skills’ (of understanding it), the teaching of one over (or before) the other is non-sensical, or certainly ineffective.

[3] Why hasn’t it worked so far (its been touted for a good 4/5 years to date)?   Simply because it is too complicated: a complicated, 8-levelled system of attainment across many possible skills applied to an often-revised but still complicated curriculum.   The three elements – content, skills and measure – have never ‘plugged’ into each other because there are simply too many ‘pins’ and ‘sockets’ to co-ordinate.   All we have managed to achieve so far are intricate level descriptors for single pieces of assessed work which have become so complicated that you have to be a very clever pupil to follow their progression (even when we have tried to easy-speak them).   They have become complicated in anticipation (we have been required to show how we are meeting Learning Objectives) rather than through use (i.e. ‘Learning’), and therefore they are not useful.

Postscript: this was first written and published around 2007; seven years later OFSTED (and therefore school management) have decided that the ‘way forward’ is to concentrate on differentiation using … Bloom’s taxonomy; we don’t use the words ‘Assessment for Learning’ anymore (I’m not sure anyone but the academics ever got their head around what it meant and because it didn’t produce any demonstrable change in whatever it is we measure as development these days, it was quietly dropped in the clamour of some other technique – learning History, maybe).   But apart from changing reference from Assessment for Learning to something else (which I decided to keep anyway seeing as I spent years getting my head around it; and it works), I didn’t have to edit this at all; we have made that much progress standing still in so many different ways …

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

evaluation & knowledge & understanding wormhole: tiered
learning wormhole: poessay VIII: / educational behaviourism
results-led education wormhole: just saying, is all – III

 

teaching: which is it going to be, procedure or nurture?

Tags

government, managerialism, money, organic education, performance, politics, professionalism, resource, spending, structural time, teaching craft, value-led education, workload

The only solution to teacher workload is to structurally invest time.   Any other spending on education without investing in structural time costs less but is not cost-effective because it doesn’t enhance the provision of education.   The provision of education can only be enhanced by recognising and resourcing the central resource to teaching: the teacher.   The principle resource a teacher needs to do her job is structural time.   The job of a teacher is a holistic job which incorporates many aspects.   The individual teacher must manage those aspects pro-actively, not in crisis, and certainly not compromised into a situation of being exploited.   The teacher does not need to be managed by a system which doesn’t recognise the holistic nature of her job, nor by anyone who is not directly involved in her teaching.   When the job of teaching becomes divided, time-managed, finance-managed, politically-managed, pressure-managed, productivity-managed, then the workload becomes too much.   The cup is not even half-full it is leaking very slowly through numerous hairline cracks and the sellotape used to mend them.

Teachers need to be managed as a human resource rather than as an a-human means of productivity.   When this is done the ethos of teaching will take care of itself.

I see these two strategies (management of human resource; nurture of the ethos of teaching) as being symbiotic: having additional staff to teach the same number of classes will mean that each teacher will have more time to prepare, assess and feedback on the lessons they teach.   It is simply no use at all giving a teacher a full timetable and no structural support time to deliver that timetable.   When no structural time is given to the preparation/feedback of lessons it is left to the individual teacher’s sense of professionalism – in their own, unpaid, time – to provide that preparation/feedback.   If the management of teaching comes to rely on – and expect – that level of professional commitment without either paying for it or supporting it, then it is exploiting teacher’s professionalism.

You would need to halve every teacher’s timetable (// double the amount of teachers) in order to support professionalism rather than exploit it.   Only then could you expect (and receive) true, clear attainment in a school, a year group, nationally and for each individual without at all having to manipulate statistics.   Yes you would have to double expenditure on education but it would be the only cost-effective way of spending that much money.   Saving money by spending smaller amounts on peripheral items of education (yes even on new buildings, computers, status) makes little difference and is soon used up.   A teacher is integral to teaching and lasts for 30-40 years if well-maintained.

The national government ought to do its job (define the Education Act, provision/entitlement – not to stick pins into the system while seeking some other goal); the local government ought to do its job (provide the resources to schools with which to serve the provision/enablement and not have to find ways of saving money but simultaneously expect the same service); and the schools can then do their job: enable.   If this happened there would be no exploitation of teacher professionality, education would happen and there would be no need of bolt-on interaction between governments and schools.   And teachers would work primarily – and happily – with the true sense of professionalism (i.e. vocation) rather than the peripheral effect of professionalism, committed (obliged) hours of (result-only-measured) work.

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

managerialism & money wormhole: Put service back into people rather than productivity
performance wormhole: Continuing / Professional / Development
politics wormhole: management and managerialism
professionalism & workload wormhole: Professionalism … in teaching
resource wormhole: teaching performance
teaching craft wormhole: Put service back into people rather than productivity
value-led education wormhole: I think I know why I don’t like teaching, even though I quite like teaching and am quite good at it, even if I do have to say so myself

 

Put service back into people rather than productivity

Tags

communication, decision, education, holistic education, management, managerialism, money, organic education, structural time, teaching craft, values

As an individual, and not overly-excitable, teacher I have been growingly resentful of, and frustrated with, and exhausted by, the management of education on a quasi-business level.   I am moved with concern for the whole school when decisions are made on purely structural, financial criteria at the expense of educational criteria.   I am worried that individuals within the school (both pupils and teachers) are seen as secondary concerns with management decisions, not as those who are the beneficiaries of those decisions.

I would like to hear much discussion about why we teach, the value of the subjects we teach, what we would like our pupils to end up with having graduated through our institution, what we consider to be ‘an educated pupil’, how we can best educate such a wide range of ability, effectively, on whether a teacher is an artist or an operative, is a crammed curriculum the proper way to culture a pupil, what are the values of the school and how do we actually communicate them to the pupils etc?

I personally tussle with the way we currently educate our children; I have problems with much of the affective syllabus we deliver.   Therefore I would welcome a holistic and natural overhauling of what we teach and how we deliver it.   But I am unshakeable in the conviction that education is possibly the most important activity that one human being can do with another.

There are only some jobs done in teaching which could be handed over without increasing the need for administrative communication and liaison.   They usually don’t ‘stand alone’ but are part of the business of teaching children.   If you extract an aspect from a teacher’s whole job and call it ‘administrative’ and thereby give it to somebody else, you simply create yet another route of liaison and communication and extend the administrative nature of the task across two people.   It makes it worse.   You need to recognise that the job of teaching has grown plural, but still remains a whole job – a holistic job.   If you try to split the job up into aspects you simply end up making the job even more – and unnecessarily – complicated.   To enable the job of teaching to happen you need to provide the structural time for the teacher to do the whole job.   Money would be better spent on increasing time for teachers to co-ordinate the tasks themselves as part of their teaching.

A teacher – of whatever level or duty – hasn’t the time to do their job properly because they have a full timetable to teach.   The ancillary tasks I input in my ‘own’ time: after school hours and at home.   Because these ancillary tasks – nevertheless essential to my teaching – occur in time which is in conflict with my family and personal time, they are variably performed well or badly (or not at all).   However they are essential to my teaching and therefore my lessons are consequently taught well, badly or not at all.nbsp;  The performance is haphazard and therefore the learning of my classes is haphazard.   The stress I experience in my job is that engendered not only from having too much to do (in order to do it well) but also in knowing that I could have done it well if I had had enough time/energy for it.   I knowingly run substandard lessons because I haven’t the structural resources to do otherwise.

This leaves little structural time for teachers to prepare/feedback on teaching or perform pastoral support.nbsp;  If you increased teaching/pastoral-support teachers you would be spreading tasks which are part of a holistic activity across more than one teacher and learning experience.   The opportunities for that holistic learning experience to fail would thereby increase.   If you reduce the teacher’s timetable, that teacher could do her teaching and pastoral duties herself.

The key to establishing a ‘community’ style of organisation in the school (rather than the present ‘boxed’ one) is to find the mechanism which bridges the gap between teacher aspirations, expertise and experience and the management structure which allows it to work.   As has grown in recent decades, an overly-weighted managerial system seeks to regulate human communication (in this case teaching) within a structure which cannot allow for individualism, spontaneity – the humanity inherent within communication/teaching.   To weigh it the other way – towards establishing a community of educative, human communication – would need the re-empowering of the teacher with trust in the care and instinct which made them take up the profession of teaching in the first place.   There need to be managerial mechanisms which value those instincts rather than just make them accountable.   A new structure of management and implementation must encompass both teachers’ frustrations and their hopes.   If the structure of a school fails to meet teachers’ frustrations it will fail because teachers will retreat to their own efforts and not share in the responsibility; if it fails to meet teachers’ hopes they will start to become frustrated.   A new structure is going to have to be quantumly different – in scope, in value and in trust – from any other business-management scheme which has existed in the last 15 years (since, say 1988) in order to inspire the confidence of a staff.

You do not need to teach teachers how to teach, you need to allow them to teach.   The management of teaching needs to be supportive before it is either organising or assessing.   It needs to treat them like performers rather than operatives.   Change in teaching does not need to come from the bottom up (teachers have done enough of that for the past 15 years), but from the top down.   There is a need for change of the contextual structure in which teachers work.   There is a need of change in the way management views, values and manages its resource: to view it not as a manufacturing tool which is set to optimum productivity but as a human service which needs a supportive culture in order to thrive.

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

communication wormhole: Woodbrooke labyrinth / affirmations
education wormhole: Now, let’s think this through, shall we? The clunkish philosophy driving today’s education.
management wormhole: management and managerialism
managerialism worhole: inverse superhero
money wormhole: dropped ’till you’ve shopped
teaching craft wormhole: teaching performance
values wormhole: where is there a Middle Way when you want one … / … / … oh!?

 

:just wondering …

Tags

2012, 6*, career, communication, managerialism, organic education, practice, recognition, responsibility, teaching, time

 

 

 

                        I did you the honour
                        of offering my thought
                and plan and map and practice all free of charge and
                        wrapped up quietly
                        and you were gracious
                enough to beneath-your-notice disregard it all

                        three years later
                        I was blessed with the need
                to widen my responsibility ‘to help us all out’
                and you seemed somewhat perturbed and even a little incredulous
                        when I declined
                        the precious opportunity

                        four years later
                you suggested with great tact and charm
                        that I cultivate
                what I’d actually been practising for four years now and seemed
                        genuinely concerned
                        when I became ill

                        five years later you
                wouldn’t talk to me            politely
                        ten years later
                you told me I was respected
                        but I was still ill

                so I was just wondering –
                if it’s all the same to you – when
                        exactly
                are you going to let up on making the tough decisions
                        on everyone’s behalf and
                        in everyone’s life enough to
                fucking listen a bit so that we can do something worthwhile for a change

                        and breathe?

                                                           :just wondering …

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career wormhole: ashramas
communication wormhole: management and managerialism
managerialism & teaching wormhole: Continuing / Professional / Development
practice wormhole: breathe, be / and sit still
recognition wormhole: compromised
time wormhole: patient

 

Apologia

Tags

agenda, anxiety, AST, Big Picture, bureaucracy, career, compromise, creativity, dialectic, education, management, managerialism, organic education, performance management, politics, professionalism, resource, responsibility, results-led education, truth, value-led education, values

After years of struggle, isolation, stonewalling (Hadrian-walling!), silence, evasion a teacher might, quite out of the blue, be offered a role or responsibility so that their work might be developed and disseminated for the benefit of educational- (for the Benefit of All!) provision.   At last, recognition!   But then, minutes later you are being led to your desk in a temporarily-divided corridor room (in which you will have to battle for desk space by pulling back the desk through the temporary wall), there where you will practise your advanced skill (by bottling it up into a tube and sending it through the tube system), your very own prison cell …

Recognition (in the system which has systematically repulsed work which is not constructed, developed or packaged in the pre-scribed manner) is the opportunity to be exploited.   Responsibility is the means through which you will be exploited (given with laurel and epaulets into your own hands).   Opportunity is the (‘very interesting’) work of making your skill ‘fit’ into the Big Picture.   Experience is the history of compromise through which values and ideals will be lost into the Big Picture.

Success in the Big Picture Bureaucracy entails that truth is an agenda over which you have no control, principle is declarative, creativity is a formula, debate is a compromise, influence is an exercise of power, delivery is an over-riding Tough Decision, professionalism is the exercise of abstraction.   A skill (in teaching, say) is developed (despite Continuing Professional Development) through a dialectic between the Provision (the Teacher) and the Receptor (the pupil).   This dialectic yields truth which is explorative within the service (not pre-defined or even pre-determined), a principle which is exercised freshly, uniquely and adjusted-ly each time, creativity which comes from the minute detail of the dialectic, debate which is the (means of the) dialectic, influence which is an agreement, delivery which is the nurture to see the dialectic through, and professionalism which is effective (dialectical) giving.

The compromise is not evil, but it is misguided, borne out of an impatience with the progress of organic education, wanting to direct and control the progress of an education which has become ‘intensive’ as a result.   Why was there an impatience?   Because education came to the attention of politicians (themselves caught in their own compromise borne of neo-conservative power-control-agenda in the face of emergent globalisation) and the regulation of education became a propaganda (both ‘outside’ and ‘in’ the service) through which to justify Global Truth as Control…

Therefore I offer my work – itself borne despite recognition, support, investment, enthusiasm from the School – not to the school but wide open to the world of anyone who might culture it.   I will publish it (with a view to balance the paucity of alternative-values educational publication compared to the whole wash of government-published material), I will not make money or career out of it (in order to avoid the Compromise), I will offer it anonymously (as long as I can, in order to avoid becoming a Voice which must be accountable to an agenda item and not the dialectic).   I will cast it as a seed.   Let it stick in the dirt.   Let it grow.   Organically.   If it will.

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

compromise wormhole: just what
managerialism wormhole: nightmare
professionalism wormhole: there was a call and far from no response
resource wormhole: the ghost with open wound
results-led education wormhole: ‘once upon a quarter century …’
value-led education wormhole: through a cracked glass greenly
values wormhole: the path / no echo