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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so; where it has taken birth may it not decrease, but may it increase infinitely …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: workload

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

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ Leave a comment

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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Professionalism … in teaching

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

communication, giving, managerialism, OFSTED, performance management, professional development, professionalism, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, stress, teaching craft, workload

Teaching is giving (giving is professionalism).   When I teach I give.   When I present I give vision, I give focus.   When I differentiate, I give a bridge.   When I resource, I give tools.   When I mark work, I give ‘eye contact’ through that work.   When I set targets, I build a shared vision.   When I report, I recognise, I applaud or I care.   When I monitor, I remember.   When I plan, I give a whole world.   When I include, I give patience, I entrust faith.   When I tutor, I give the fence (zen wisdom would say: ‘to control your cow, put her in a large field’; Shunryu Suzuki Roshi).

Professionalism in teaching is not primarily getting reports in on time, it is not getting to lessons on time, it is not getting a certain percentage of my class a higher grade pass, it is not meeting OFSTED criteria.   All of these are effects of my professionalism, not measures to make my professionalism better (as a colleague keeps on saying ‘your pig won’t get fat simply because you keep on weighing it).   When you demand of my professionalism you are doing so outside of the educational interaction that is my day to day practice, and if I have to respond to your demands, my educational interaction is compromised and I am under pressure measured by criteria which are not necessarily requisite to my teaching.

I can only throw together an occasional good homework, inspired and serendipitous, while setting homeworks every week.   I can only inspire one child with a vision for their work while teaching 340 others.   I can only throw un-thought-through medium-term plans out when I am teaching 22 out of 25 periods a week.   I can only think about my teaching with wistfulness and regret when I have to Plan, Differentiate, Assess, Report-on, set Targets, Mark, Monitor, be Inclusive, ensure Equal-opportunity etc.   Take the above as an acronym: PARTIMMED!!!

We cannot do anything well because we can only devote ‘part’ of our ‘time’ to it because we have too much to service on top of teaching.   The experience of this is stress.

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

communication & giving wormhole: Assessment for Learning: the Prologue
managerialism wormhole: Structural Time
performance management wormhole: compromised
professionalism & workload wormhole: the Hothousing of Teaching
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi wormhole: don’t move
teaching craft wormhole: Resource

 

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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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Now, let’s think this through, shall we?   The clunkish philosophy driving today’s education.

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

education, politics, professionalism, public service, results-led education, stress, teaching craft, workload

The philosophy with which education (and all public services) has been treated in the last 15-20 years is one of treating service as business.   The service receiver is the client, the service is the product.   Simple.   This philosophy, begun by Tory-thought constriction, consummated by retentive New Labour (Frankenstein-monstered by the Coalition), has shaped the provision of public service.   The insidious result is that education, teaching, has become a process and stopped being a practice.   Workload has increased exponentially while the education that ends up in pupils’ heads is unaffected by all this work and continues to go round and round again like a badly loaded washing machine.   It is the wrong philosophy to use in a service.

The issue of workload is annoying because it is inextricably linked with the job we do.   If we try to identify particular jobs that we could not do within teaching it only slightly relieves our workload, if at all, and it will often leave yet another liaison to have to manage anyway.   There are two ways in which workload can be understood: one is simply an ‘accumulative’ model that more and more discreet jobs are just added to the basic job – the crisis point occurring when the proverbial last straw is added.   The other way of understanding it is seeing successive refinements and developments of the job as an integrated and necessary component of doing the job ‘well’, an ‘integrated’ model.   The accumulative model applies to jobs which are ‘piece-meal’, the workload is regulated either by hours of productivity or rate of productivity – efficiency can be realistically measured and enhanced but cannot easily be exploited: overwork will affect the rate of production.   The second way applies to ‘professional’ jobs whereby productivity is usually in the form of a service.   Service cannot easily be quantified numerically, it can only be measured by the degree of customer satisfaction for her investment.   Ways are found to modify the service to meet the needs of the customer.   Overwork is controlled by regulating the number and weight of client cases (when one’s case load is full one can either begin a waiting list or delegate).

Public service jobs are neither piece-meal nor client-controlled services.   However they have been administered over the last 15-odd years as a perverse mixture of the two, although neither model, together or individually, is an appropriate way to treat a public service.   This perverse philosophy has worked its way through education and I believe is becoming apparent most in the issue of workload which can neither be addressed ‘piece-meal’ or ‘performatively’ because it was the wrong philosophy with which to run the public service in the first place.

The experience in teaching is one of more and more jobs just being added on and added to.   ‘Productivity’ is more and more forced to be numerically-based.   Jobs are being added on/to in the name of enhancing the service but are seen as integral to doing the job, they are not so much ‘add-on’s’ as ‘doing properly’s’.   Extra work in teaching is not regulated by number and weight of the ‘customers’, the number of pupils we teach grows both in class size and in the number of classes we teach as more and more is squeezed onto the timetable.   The ‘customers’ do not directly invest in education anyway, they haven’t directly paid to be there at all, they are just there.   The regulation of what happens to them comes from the management of the school/LEA/Government*.   You cannot take off jobs because this would be the undermining of the service; you cannot refuse to do the work because this would be unprofessional.   The regulation of workload is established by the holding to ransom of the education of pupils in the name of ‘professionalism’.   There is consequently no check on the hours it takes to achieve the target productivity nor any negotiation about the increase in productivity envisaged.

The whole notion of treating the education service the same as a business is a fundamental philosophical mistake.   Business exists fundamentally to provide a service to meet the customer’s needs.   The customer responds to the business by buying the product.   The dynamic involved is that of the market force which requires the business to make a response to the market and to establish the most efficient way of providing a service in order to maximise its profits.   The aim of the business is to meet a need in order to get from the customer.   Within education you are involved in providing a service to give to the recipient.   Therefore education is not subject to the market forces as is business.   In being in the position to give to someone, that ‘someone’ must lack it in the first place, and you must have what that someone needs in the second place (the facilities for health, education, advice, protection etc.)   Because these ‘someone’s’ do not have and you do, then you are the determiner of when and how and how much etc. to give; you must decide this because they cannot.   To give them the same sort of power as the consumer – that of having a say in the transaction, the when and how and why of the transaction – shows the absurdity of the comparison; the recipient of the service cannot determine the nature of the transaction.   That stroppy pupils, with some vague sense of empowerment to do so, will arrogantly criticise the methods of teachers; and even more when parents who do not understand the nature of education come in to ‘fight for their rights’ and compare the school adversely to a badly run business, then the damage is complete, irreconcilable.   The philosophy does not work.   That the school has to run its service under this perverse philosophy is never going to work when looking at the service as a whole…

… and it doesn’t work internally either.   In running education like a business the governments are setting up a business mechanism which inherently wrong-foots the whole profession.   When we are responding to ‘targets’, ‘initiatives’, ‘budget concerns’, ‘drives’, ‘parent-response’ etc. we are involved in a business-dialectic which fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the education service, that of the professionalism of the service provider.   Teachers are not business people, they are givers.   But when we are responding to ‘targets’ etc. we are conducting our ‘giving’ like a business. And this establishes an inherent dissonance in our work which is irreconcilable and destructive.   The feeding from Government to LEA’s to schools to school’s management to HoD’s to teachers to pupils of ways to improve ‘productivity’ simply produces pressure, from Government down to pupil.   There has been a huge amount of work in recent decades in schools trying to enhance teaching and learning, much of which is done on the assumption that because there is a perceptible lack in some aspects of education (literacy, numeracy, teenage pregnancy, ill-health etc) it must be the fault of the means of production, the teachers.   Therefore we are constantly ‘training’ and developing ‘professionally’, and still the ‘productivity’ is unaffected, and the sense that we don’t really know what we are doing in teaching becomes stronger in the classroom, in schools, in households, in the press.   But I wonder if you stop treating education as a process and rather as a growth, where teachers become nurturers rather than operatives, where schools become greenhouses rather than factories, then literacy, numeracy, teenage pregnancy, health will maturate as it will, rather than mutate as it is forced.

* This was written well before the dismantling of LEAs all over the workplace floor, and the junked-together creation of Academies with no bolts or screws; no one is sure how to put it all back together again, even if they wanted to …

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

professionalism & results-led education & teaching craft & workload 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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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

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

accountability, management, performance, professional development, professionalism, results-led education, stress, teaching craft, tick-box, value-led education, workload

a focus on the mechanism used in schools to ‘improve standards’ called Professional Development which actually just measures the effective endeavour right out of the job itself; rendering it Absurd …

I think I know why I don’t like teaching.   In the last 10-12 years the need and obsession to identify accountability as a means of defining professionality in teaching has worked through the system like a virus.   As it has strengthened and gained ‘currency’ as legitimate discourse within public service, it has found ways of measuring the delivery of teaching.   In measuring the delivery of teaching, it has had to focus on aspects of teaching which are measurable (i.e. what can be seen to be done, what can be ticked to have been seen).   To focus on the aspects of teaching which are measurable, the monitoring of teaching can only be done periodically, according to its own timetable (i.e. not ongoingly as part of the whole delivery of teaching in the school), and thereby creates a whole additional pressure and expectation for the teacher.   A teacher is left with a dilemma which they can’t refuse: either teach with humanity, compassion and principle and be declared unworthy of the licence to teach; or teach to the tick-boxes, whatever that takes, and teach yourself not to feel loss.


Because performance management is based on this occasional and additional measure, there is an inbuilt disregard of the motive and commitment – the extra time and energy – that goes into the actual day to day, lesson to lesson, stack-of-books to stack-of-books, tracking to tracking, resource-creation to resource-creation of the job.   That is all extra to a ‘bottom line’, it is disregarded (it is taken as given), and it is especially disregarded when the adventitious measure of the teacher falls short in some way.   In this way morale is deflated – ongoingly and relentlessly.   The only strokes you’ll get from the job will be if you happen to be good at providing things which are measurable, a skill quite independent of the skills of teaching in the first place.

An NQT’s (Newly Qualified Teacher completing their first year after qualification) contract will not be renewed.   Kids love him, he energises both high and low ability pupils because of his natural cleverness and ability to engage young people in a natural, intellectual dialogue.   However, because he refuses to give work and consideration to items highlighted in his performance management – whether he puts a starter here or a Learning Objective there: these things which are easily measurable (tick-boxed) where he doesn’t score well – he will not continue teaching at his initial school.   He has natural communicative and pedagogic ability but the system will not nurture or exploit it unless he mangles that ability into a meticulous, measurable procedure that would numb and atrophy it altogether with fore-thought.   He might chose not to – I would say that is a wise and courageous choice; I wish I had that conviction.   I wonder how many other ‘natural’ teachers are excised from the profession in this way.

Be very clear about this: the teaching profession is being bleached clean by retaining those people who can demonstrate narrowly-defined, adventitious and algorithmic teaching skills (bish-bash-bosh skills, the quickest way to make a certain statistic rise), leaving those teachers inclined to organic and human communication to wait bitterly for their retirement if they can last that long.

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

performance wormhole: Assessment for Learning: the Prologue
professionalism & teaching craft & workload wormhole: Hartley’s Jam
results-led education & value-led education wormhole: ‘but, Mark, what do you want …’

 

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Hartley’s Jam

19 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

education, management, performance management, politics, professionalism, teaching craft, workload

In the 1970’s, Hartley’s Jam ran a TV advert, the punch line of which was watching a stream of whole fruits pour into an open jam jar with the words: “we put a pound and a half of fruit into each pound jar” and this is sealed when the lid of the jar crams it all in with a door-slam which makes the whole image shake: KCTHUUUM!!!   Jam – almost onomatopoeically – contains fruit which cannot be wholly recognised because it is mashed and pulped – pips and peel give clues that this was once fruit.   Jam is OK, but it is, after all, a way of preserving fruit; fruit is far more nutritious when fresh and replenish-able.

There are plenty of fine and correct educational ideas which are poured into education: from government to management to teachers.   They make sense, they are creative and colourful, and yet they end up in about 500,000 little receptacles, already nearly full with teaching.   And then comes the lid – KCTHUUUM!!! – shaking of careers and lives.   The lid is ‘professionalism’, and it is screwed tight: accountability, league tables, residuals, performance, ‘long holidays’.   Inside each ‘jar’ is much pressure, little room for manoeuvre and only occasional pieces of fruit: some jars are conserve, some contain just jelly; all of them are sweet, because they are jam: teaching.   But they are not fruit.

I feel I do a job-and-a-half in one job when I have to incorporate additional fine and good ideas into my single job of teaching.   What are the solutions?

• make the jar stronger so that it can withstand the increased pressure?   If you pay me more, then I have to take on more responsibility and ensure even more that it all works, and not just in my classroom.   And I would still have a full timetable.   The pressure would be even greater but I would still be paid to take it, and my jam will be even more pulped.
• make the jar bigger so that it can fit more in?   If you increase my hours you would have to pay for them, and why pay for them when you get those extra hours for free anyway?   And I would still have a full timetable, therefore no more would get done: a 2lb jar, 1lb of jam, for twice the price!
• take the lid off?   You will not be able to rationalise teaching, some of the fruit would pour in, the rest would fall outside the jar, rolling all over the table and probably onto the floor.   You would pay me my fabulous wage and no control over my delivery…

But if you halve my teaching I’ll give you a bowl of fruit year after year.   It would be more expensive but it would be sweet in all sorts of different ways – and, in the long run, healthier.

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

performance management wormhole: ‘but, Mark, what do you want …?’
professionalism & teaching craft wormhole: Assessment for Learning: the Prologue

 

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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

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • 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

recent leaks …

  • IN THE ‘SCONSET BUS by William Carlos Williams
  • nowhere / that can be seen
  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VI, Patience – verses 128-132; reflectionary
  • travelling,
  • despite all / depiction
  • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – tenderness
  • POEM by William Carlos Williams
  • on / that / day
  • poessay XI – piquant love
  • travel // when I die

Uncanny Tops

  • brave new world?
  • zagged
  • Dr Strange VII - the madness of Mordo
  • quite … / … yet - poewieview #12
  • just one, open, nerve,
  • south horizon
  • Chapter 3
  • thought-provoking blog
  • the silent night of the Batman
  • the MagOO Effect Effect

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