• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
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    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
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mlewisredford

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

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: structural time

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

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

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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

 

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Put service back into people rather than productivity

26 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 2 Comments

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!?

 

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the Hothousing of Teaching

28 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

observation, OFSTED, planning, professionalism, structural time, teaching craft, workload

Preface: http://theassailedteacher.com/2013/10/29/the-gooey-center-more-goo-than-center/

Any lesson that is taught requires preparation, planning, resourcing, differentiating, targeting, assessing, etc.   You do not just walk into a classroom and make an educational experience happen, there is a lot of hidden work done (outside of, say, 1265 hours) which makes all of this happen.   The extent to which all of this ‘hidden work’ is done has become paramount with the growing requirement of accountability and yet there has not been the slightest investment in the production of those lessons in terms of structural time.   Teachers need to do all this work outside of the school working day.   And it is a lot of work; and I would argue that if done properly takes as much time to process a lesson as it does to teach it.   Every time a pressure-point is introduced – reporting, marking, any sort of deadline – there is no investment by the school to ‘pay’ for it: it is the requirement of each professional (because they are professionals) to meet the pressure.   When the pressure is met – and it usually is – at best there is a glib recognition of the work this must have involved … and then we’re on to the next pressure point.

When teaching 22 high-quality learning experiences a week, the discussion over one’s one guaranteed free period is truly risible.   In order to be anywhere near fair, a teacher should teach 12 lessons per week and be guaranteed 12 free hours to do this.   The pressure of teachers is not essentially that of ‘paperwork/administration’, it is the fact that they are not given any time-support to do their job expected at such a high standard.

The effect of no structural time-investment in teaching is that the production of teaching takes on a ‘needs must’-flavour.   There is little possibility of something like the image of the ambulance driver taking the elderly woman from her front door to the ambulance – with human care! – in teaching.   There is little possibility of working/speaking/communicating/organising/assessing etc in a way which is communal in school rather than organisational.   There is every possibility of the image of the defined/closed-round/self-contained/self-sufficient individual/department/management in squares.

However the main issue – it becomes clearer, year after year – is not the mere fact of the pressure which tells on the school at all levels, but the lack of structural concern that the school/we give ourselves while trying to meet those pressures.   We do not give thought to – and there is no structure within the school to give support in – our professional/emotional/creative/functional welfare.   We just demand and are demanded of; and the very thing that is being demanded of us – our teaching – is drained and desperate because of it.

We do not nurture creativity in teaching because it is too expensive, we do not teach in dialogue because it is too time consuming, we work coping rather than creating.

There is no structural investment in teaching which has reduced teaching to a compartmentalised and exhausting process.

Nowhere is this more invidious than when OFSTED criteria are used to measure teaching.   The criteria – in their very nature – are there to measure a performance: there is a deliverer and there are receivers.   The effect of this is to have a measure, a value, a judgement of your teaching which is pre-emptively business-flavoured and performance-related and which does not accord with the reasons you are teaching in the first place.   The inspection does not obtain a true picture of what is really done in teaching at all.   There is a lot which is important besides what will be seen in one lesson.   That a judgement of a teacher’s work will be made despite all else that is done cheapens the effort and the push and the sacrifice which is committed to the job week after week.

This faulty philosophy of managing education has had various effects on the job of teaching.   It has resulted in larger classes, less security of free lessons and less free lessons, teachers being obliged to take on responsibility posts for less remuneration, responsibility posts, especially middle management posts, having to take on considerable additions to their brief – inclusion of pupils with extreme learning difficulties within generally mixed ability classes, the empowering of parents with a voice but with little check on their ignorant use of this power etc.   Much of this has resulted from putting schools on a financial-basis for which they need to hold themselves accountable and this affects the flavour with which educational decisions are made.   Likewise accountability has been insultingly slapped across teachers faces making them have to respond to pupils, parents and society on a servantile basis rather than on the basis of benevolently providing a service.   It means that all levels of teaching cannot be done as well: slapped together, hastily thought about, hastily assessed, stressed, not able to fully appreciate or implement the syllabuses/courses, management decisions, discipline rules etc, enough to be fully effective within them.   The ‘art’ of a teacher is that she is in control-enough of what they are doing to be able then to see the particular need of a pupil and respond to it, that there is enough investment in the resource of time to allow them to respond, to be able to sit and reflect on the pupil or the tutee enough to be creative and pro-active in teaching/tutoring the child.   The squeeze on time of the teacher, the value of what the teacher can do when given the time to do it, the demands on teachers growing more and more and the resultant inability to do any of it well as a consequence, all of this is significant to the effective, and nurturing, delivery of education.

Because teachers have been seen as a means of production they have had to endure numerous drives to increase productivity.   We are now meant to teach a uniform National Curriculum and have learnt not to trust the natural communicative dialogue which is teaching.   We are meant to situate our teaching within a broad and minutely-referenced planning scheme.   We are meant to differentiate our teaching in order to meet the needs of all pupils.   We are required to assess pupils’ work at all levels with specific mark schemes which meet the curriculum and allow for progression and equal opportunity.   We are meant to report to parents more specifically and more often.   We are meant to mark pupils’ work recognising not only achievement but also setting targets for further development.   We are meant to report to parents with an annual report and also ever-more specific monitoring procedures.   We are meant to confer with parents as tutors, but also be available for consultation as subject teachers as well.   We are meant to include all pupils in our teaching even though this creates not only a very wide ability band but also a very wide emotional/motivational band as well.   And all of this increased “productivity” has been achieved without paying a single penny for it.   Teachers have been required to improve their productivity (and been assessed in so doing) without any investment.   They have neither been paid for increased production nor have they been paid with time to prepare.   A teacher in this school is required to teach 22 planned, differentiated, assessable, reported-on, targeted, marked, monitored, inclusive, equal-opportunity hour-long lessons per week.   This is so much more than simply being in the classroom with a group of young people, this is high-quality performance.   That teacher might also have a responsibility point to organise a whole area of the curriculum.   This teacher will be given only 3 hours to prepare and process these 22 hours quite apart from the management responsibility; one of those three hours will be used to cover absent teachers.   Very inevitably the teacher will have to do the work in unpaid time and this will be seen (if it is recognised at all) as a mark of the teacher’s professionalism if she does so.   But she will not be paid for it and she will not be structurally supported in her performance at all with appropriate time or conditions.

This is why teachers and departments and managers have ended up ‘boxed’ (defined/closed-round/self-contained/self-sufficient/individual departments and management levels, in squares that ‘communicate’ with each other only in meetings, through paper and now with voice-mail and e-mail).   This is why teachers distrust inspection (and even professional development).   This is why teachers learn to trust what they individually can do rather than invest in a department or school scheme which will often be seen not to work.   This is why teachers are overloaded with work because they do it all themselves and are given no time to do it in.   They are tired of re-inventing the wheel again and again because the system keeps trying to regenerate in an effort to enhance the delivery of teaching.   They will nevertheless take on the ever-more complicating work which management lays on them – because all those demands need to be covered and because teachers are professional.

The highest skill in teaching should be … teaching: the whole purpose of the college in the first place is to teach and therefore the aim should be … teaching.   Teaching, and the support of teaching, should be the principle focus of the college and should therefore rightfully be the recipient of most of the college resources.   Teachers come into teaching and teach, not because they are paid to do so, so much, but because they value giving to others in the various ways in which teachers give.   The whole notion of a profession is that it is a job which is motivated by principle rather than by salary-only; if you in any way de-value those principles you take the life out of the profession, you reduce the job to mere task and you devitalise the whole institution of education.   By making teachers – the primary and almost sole resource of education – responsible for the financial stability of the institution is a management focus which will destroy itself; you can’t sacrifice – or hold ransom – the prime resource of an institution in order to enhance that institution’s performance.

Concomitantly, pupils would seem to becoming alert to teachers not being in full control of class/course/politics/situation; they are naturally playing it as much as they can especially where this is more gainful for a pupil’s self-esteem than the skill of self-discipline.   This manifests as taking longer in the class to settle, cheeking back any reprimand or denying that they were involved and claiming victimisation in the long run (non-ownership of consequences of behaviour because we cannot always make it stick), persistent undermining of uniform, the loss of classroom culture, pupils seeing the climate of pushing where you can from yr.7 on, abuse of school property, break-time tendency to be seen as “own time” and the nascent development of an ill-defined sense of “rights”, a sense of pupils demanding attention to their individual feelings as paramount over the feelings of the group, deterioration of teacher-class relationship, pupils are less willing even to consider trusting teachers and will as much challenge them.

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

professionalism & teaching craft & workload wormhole: Now, let’s think this through, shall we?   The clunkish philosophy driving today’s education.

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

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  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • 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
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • 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
  • others
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • William Carlos Williams
  • wormholes

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  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 8; reflectionary
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