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A colleague (Sally T) once said: 'teachers should focus on teaching the students not the subject'. A simple suggestion that eloquently sums up my belief about teaching. Advice I have been passing down the ranks for the last 7 years in leadership, advice I recently ignored, and consequently a reminder of how life can take the piss. Recently moving to Norway (the homeland of my wife) to take up the role of Deputy Principal at Asker International School has meant coming to grips with a different framework for education. Armed with my teaching timetable and my IB certificate (for completing an online course over a one month duration), I eagerly began planning my lessons for the first term. I was happy with the lessons created, especially the ones focusing on inquiry based learning - after all, inquiry is the name of the game in IB circles. During one of the teacher planning days (before the start of the school academic year), Mr B asked how my lesson planning was going. I confidently replied that I had planned my lessons for the first month, this comment was swiftly followed by: "but I will probably have to scrap most of the lessons once I meet the students". The moment the words left my lips I realised I had been a fool. I had foolishly spent time planning lessons a would never teach - time in my life I would never get back. I hoped that I was wrong. Of course this is the equivalent of hoping the temperature will not fall below minus 10 in Norway during the month of January. Not impossible but improbable. It was only two lessons into the new academic year that I subsequently scrapped all my future lesson plans and began doing what I had always done; plan my lessons a week or even one day ahead. What a classic school boy error. I was reminded of my mistake last week when reading John Tomsett's book: This much I know about love over fear: Creating a culture for truly great teaching. In it he states:
"How can you plan next weeks lessons before you know how this weeks lessons have panned out? The idea that you have a scheme of learning on the virtual learning environment which gives you lesson by lesson plans is nonsensical. Using last years lesson plans when you have this year's students in front of you isn't logical."
The knowledge acquired by the teacher from previous lessons should be at the forefront of a teachers mind when planning future lessons. According to my former colleague Michael R "Everything is data". It is important to not fall into the trap of believing that the inner and outer workings of a student can be wrapped up neatly in a few numerical values on a spreadsheet, or even by the raiseonline terms of low, middle and high attainers. When we talk of classroom data, we should not be restrictive in our thinking. As teachers we need to observe, and interact with our students to know them better, to know what makes them tick. So that we can plan lessons for the students in front of us, as opposed to planning lessons based on what we want to teach, or what we think a student should be able to do. We need to engage in Assessment for Learning as much as our students. Teachers should know where their students are at, where they need to go, and strategies for helping them get there. With this thinking in mind, rather than saying to oneself: what lesson am I teaching Grade 8 today. Instead say: what do Grade 8 need me to teach them today.
An easy way to reflect on how well you know your students is through the procedure of writing reports for parents. If you find it difficult to write anything positively personal about a student, ask yourself why? Instead, more often than not a quick solution is searched for, which usually means trawling through a student's book looking for something to comment on, or you copy and paste a report you wrote last year about another student, or you use some computer generated impersonal report generator. The process of reflection is often missed. I personally see report writing as a way of testing myself. Perhaps it's my masochistic nature bubbling to the surface. This year I recognised I did not know enough about three students I teach when writing my reports. That is three students too many.
Strategies for knowing your students
Besides marking books, parental meetings, setting tests, reflecting on students answers to teacher questions, considering prior data and previous teacher comments, and strategies for building positive relationships (See blog on Being Human) you may also wish to:
1) Listen to students non verbal voice. One of my students walked past me two days in a row with her maths book during lunch break. When I reflect on the situation I am reminded of a Will Smith Men in Black moment. In the shooting exercise, all the men draw guns and start firing on a cardboard simulation filled with monsters. The military men shot the monsters and Will Smith shot the little girl. His reasoning was the monsters were just working out or sneezing and so on, pointing to kleenex in their hand or whatever. The little girl was 8 years old in a ghetto full of monsters with quantum physics textbooks in her hand and was obviously about to start something nasty. But just like the military men, I didn't think anything of it, instead I was making sure that the older boys were not trying to take the younger boys football, rather than recognise a picture that didn't fit in the playground. It was only when I received a parental email regarding their daughter's anxiety in maths that the fog cleared and I remembered the previous days playground conduct. I knew she was able to understand the maths, and apply the maths in most contexts. But she found the work hard, and interpreted this as struggling at Maths, which then led to a quantum leap to being rubbish at Maths. As a consequence, I disregarded my intended lessons and instead focused the next two lessons on helping my students recognise the extent of their maths journey to date. Had I not changed course and responded to the needs of a student/students then I was in danger of potentially having demotivated students and an additional barrier to learning, that I had made happen. I am happy to report she attained a grade in the top band for her summative assessment.
2) Frequently create a mindmap for a class of students without any documentation to aid you. Possible information chunks could include
- English Language
- Subject knowledge
- Character traits
- Memorable moment
- Allergy - What really annoys them?
- IB Learner profile
3) Create lesson opportunities which allow personal opinions to be expressed.
I am a massive fan of the requirement for English schools to create opportunities for promoting SMSC (Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural). I am also a fan of the IB learner profile as an area that must be considered when teaching lessons. Yet I have witnessed so many missed opportunities during lesson observations, and when listening to collaborative planning sessions for engaging students in meaningful discussions that could possibly help teachers know their students better by actively planning SMSC or the learner profile philosophy into lessons. For example, I see a history lesson on the Roaring 20s as an opportunity to engage in a discussion about attitudes towards women. I see an opportunity to have an open dialogue about what it means to be 'normal' when reading the first page of the novel: Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. And I see creating Maths word problems as a means to open up discussions on social issues.
The motivation behind this series (Creating a Classroom Culture for Learning) is about teachers developing a culture for learning in their own classroom, irrespective of the culture outside the classroom. However, school leaders have a responsibility to ensure that substantial planning time is allocated to enable teachers to plan lessons based on students needs. The guardian secret teacher blog: Why our working hours just don't add up is a sledgehammer reminder to any school leader regarding teacher workload. I am very proud to work in a school that recognises the importance of dedicated planning time and a refusal to make teachers teach to the upper limit of their teaching load. Teachers have to plan for 19 lessons out of a possible 28 per week. Collaborative planning occurs every Wednesday from 12.45pm to 3.30pm for all teaching staff, and we work on a budget that is 20% less than our rich state school neighbours. Every school has a choice on how to allocate its resources. Creating a structure that enables the most important resource in the classroom to flourish should be a priority.
