Sarah was Deputy Head at Uppingham where we overlapped for a short spell. As a young teacher, I remember thinking she was superb; reading through her posts reminds me of why.
I hope Bryanston continue to leave up her posts up on their website as an archive. In case they don't, I'll be liberally cutting and pasting from them whilst I can. Here's an excerpt, for example, from her post about school rules:
Bryanston’s fundamental rules are, by contrast, ultra simple. There are just four of them.
A breach of common sense or courtesy is a breach of school rules.
A breach of the law of the land is a serious breach of school rules.
We ban sex, drugs, alcohol and smoking and you are liable to be expelled for involvement in either of the first two.
Furthermore, the following are automatic suspension offences:
night wandering,
being on the roof of the main building,
smoking in a building.
I love that simplicity.
I suspect you can't do away completely with a more comprehensive set of rules somewhere - in fact the comprehensive set at the last three school's in which I've worked now bear an uncanny resemblance to Uppingham's as they stood in 2011. Those rules no doubt still bearing the hallmarks of Sarah's work earlier in the noughties.
But Sarah's simpler set are far better for sharing, better for ready reference in pupil planners and on noticeboards.
A gap between our trip from MCS to MCUK and our longer ride presented the opportunity for some supply teaching.
This has been a hugely valuable professional experience placing me firmly back in the classroom and offering an insight into a variety of different schools. I've picked up lessons in French, chemistry, maths, drama, geography and English.
Having been prepared for the worst, in the main I've been pleasantly surprised by the behaviour of the pupils - the vast majority have been polite, helpful and keen to learn.
I make no bones about it though: this is a tough way to earn a living. The call comes in at around 0730 and I could be off to anywhere within a radius of 50 miles or so. Sometimes the work set is best described as 'dry' and so maintaining the pupils' interest in it, whilst having neither the time nor authority to deviate from what's been set, can be a hard gig.
It pays to be well prepared:
lunch packed
work clothes on
bag packed with:
board pens
spare pens and paper
'emergency' ideas for generic lessons (in the rare instances where no work has been set)
laptop with an adaptor for VGI and HDMI cables
As soon as I arrive and sign in I've found it pays to make verbal contact with a senior member of staff to announce my presence and get a feel for the conventions. Then I'm into it - five hours straight usually with a short break for lunch...
We held a micro TeachMeet yesterday at Malvern College Switzerland. Of all the things you can do on a staff training day, I find these the most valuable.
Here's what I learnt:
PetchaKutcha is a way of organising a presentation that restricts you to twenty slides on which you spend a maximum of 20 seconds. Excellent for teachers and a useful scaffold for pupil presentations.
Whiteboard.fi is a useful digital alternative to physical whiteboards. Great for AfL.
Seneca learning is a great little tool for revision and homework. There seem to be tests on just about everything including A-level Economics :-)
Teacher introduction by numbers. Try putting up some numbers about yourself arranged on the board similar to this as a springboard to introducing yourself to a new class. Ask them what they think the numbers represent and watch the discussion unfold:
Answers: 2 children; 20, 21 ages of children; 1989 year of teacher training; 27 years in Switzerland; 10,887 money raised in recent charity event; 4, 5 number of house moves/cars.
Noughts and crosses. A good end-of-lesson exercise. Put a noughts and crosses grid up on the board. Add keywords words to each box. The game is played by asking teams to define the keywords in order to place their o or x.
Diana Laurillard has devised a 'learning designer' found here. It can be used to put together a scheme of work and then assess to what extent the course is balanced and varied with a pie chart like this:
Do Now Activities, as recommended by Doug Lemov are a great way to start a lesson. This is especially true if they involve revisiting materials from earlier in the course to reinforce the learning. Here's one I tried today for A-level History:
There are people, I know, who secure immediately every job they apply for. I am not one of those lucky people. I know as well as anybody the sting of disappointment that accompanies a rejection email. The sting gets worse, of course, the further along the process you get; the most painful rejections come when you've been to two or three interviews with a school, taught a lesson, done a presentation and even started to get to know some of the staff.
Right now we're in the process of recruiting for roles at Malvern College Switzerland and so I have found myself on the other side of the fence, having to disappoint people. If you're one of those people, I feel your pain; this little post is for you.
I've tried to list the reasons why people's applications failed to get through to the shortlist stage. This, I hope, will give a bit more insight into the process than the: 'It was a strong field' brush off that is rather too common in job application correspondence, but that helps nobody.
You may have failed to make the shortlist because your application displayed one or more of the problems listed below. Only a tiny handful of these mistakes are immediately 'fatal' but when placed in a pool of applications without them they place your application at a disadvantage; and that, in a large field, is all it takes not to make it to the shortlist. So here we go:
Things you can fix:
Not following the rubric. We said we didn't want CVs and yet you attached one. We asked you to apply by the TES and yet you emailed us direct etc.
Sloppy spelling or, more common, sloppy capitalisation. This affected more applications than, as teachers, we should be happy with. I think people have become inured to a sort of digital slang that is seen as acceptable on an online form. It leaves a bad impression.
Asking questions like: 'Will my sofa fit in the flat?' before having even been contacted by the school. Questions like this (and I put in this bracket questions about money) give the impression your primary interest isn't the role itself.
Asking questions that are answered in the applicant pack and/or on the website.
Copying and pasting a personal statement that was clearly made with another school in mind.
Writing a perfunctory personal statement of only a couple of sentences in length.
Not writing a personal statement at all and instead saying something like: 'My CV speaks for itself.'
Leaving gaps in your employment history. However long and tedious, this part of the form needs to be filled in assiduously. You're applying for a role in a school, there will be lots of children about, so there's a non-negotiable safeguarding element to this.
Not providing references at the outset. Asking us not to contact them before deferring to you is fine, but leaving that section of the form completely blank rings alarm bells.
Denigrating - even obliquely - a former employer. Maybe they were horrible and you firmly occupy the moral high ground but we haven't met you yet and so for us, it's 50/50. Those aren't great odds.
Leaving other gaps on the application form. If a section really doesn't apply write N/A. A blank leaves you open to the suspicion that you haven't taken sufficient care.
Things you can't (immediately) fix, but that nevertheless, all other things being equal, did factor in decision making:
Not offering the right level of flexibility in terms of additional subjects taught.
Not having A-Level and GCSE experience (or having less than an otherwise equivalent candidate).
Not having boarding experience (or having less than an otherwise equivalent candidate).
Not having the requisite co-curricular and extra-curricular experience, or not showcasing this sufficiently.
Having a career history that suggests you've moved around rather too often, never staying put anywhere for long.
Not having the necessary experience of KS4 and 5. We had a lot of applicants who were excellent, but had never taught post-16.
Finally, as a startup, we have been very keen to 'get the right people on the bus' as quickly as possible so that we can begin planning for the tasks that lie ahead. This has meant that we have shortlisted for some positions - as we said we would in the application pack - before the application deadline. Annoying though this is, it is just possible that you were a perfect candidate but that we never got to see you because we'd already appointed by the time your application was submitted. Also, the need for some positions diminished, with the recruitment of teachers able to teach multiple disciplines.
So there you have it. Helpful, I hope.
****Addendum****
Since writing this post I have become aware of other reasons why candidates might not be accepted to international schools. To be fair, none of these applied at the time we were appointing our first wave of candidates at MCS, but I do know that they can occur at the murkier end of the international market and in schools operating in countries where such things are the norm.
In such situations, the people who interview you may not be those who make the final decision. Decisions not to appoint can be made for a whole range of reasons which you as a candidate cannot account for. They include:
Loss of bottle - The ultimate decision maker decides that the budget won't stretch to another candidate and so despite having jumped through all the hoops you're not appointed.
Changes of plan - X was going to teach Y but it now transpires can also teach Z and so things have been reorganised to make do without your services.
Racism/xenophobia - Never openly admitted to, of course, but some schools won't appoint certain groups because 'parents won't like it'. Awful, but it does happen.
Visa issues etc. - You may have been the perfect candidate but because of your passport it's either impossible or too difficult to get the right visa for you to work in the school.
Ignorance - Those making the ultimate decision may not have much experience in education. If your qualifications are unusual in any way they may see it as too much of a risk to appoint you.
Delusion - Some decision-makers think that they're going to be able to fill their positions entirely with the 'very best' (Oxbridge educated, first-class degrees etc.) They will reject candidates who don't meet these ideals until doing so becomes completely untenable - and possibly beyond this point.
Cost concerns - You have several children, say, and the school is already running tight margins. A cheaper child-free member of staff may be sought even if you're objectively the best candidate.
A presentation I'm putting together requires an engaging slide to give a bit of background as to who I am.
This is potentially dull stuff, so I wanted to make something that would catch people's interest. Looking around for ideas, I headed to Doug Belshaw's blog where, sure enough, he has a post about representing his CV as a London Underground map.
Mmm I thought... maybe I could do the same as a piste map? So I had a go, using Keynote as he suggests. Here's the result - a bit of fun if nothing else :-)
(With thanks to Jon Standen for passing on this meme!)
Steve Munby gave an excellent presentation yesterday evening in which he presented his thoughts on school leadership in the pandemic era. He structured what he said around six principles, which I share with you here:
Show up and 'walk into the wind' Crisis moments are not the time to delegate. People need the reassurance of your physical presence more than ever in times of crisis. Clear your diary and be in school alongside your staff.
Focus on leadership as service. Steve suggested that rather than asking: 'What kind of leader do I want to be?' ask: 'What kind of leadership is wanted of me?' Remember that in leadership context matters - leaders need to change their style to suit the context they find themselves in. In a crisis, the chances are you'll need to adapt your leadership style for the new reality.
Ask for help. Steve encouraged delegates to become 'invitational leaders' who actively look for help from others. We were encouraged to seek out mentors - people we could call on for help and advice. We were encouraged to be honest with ourselves and accept when we don't know enough. Asking for help builds trust. By revealing your own vulnerability you encourage others to reveal theirs too and to be honest with you.
Be decisive, but quick to review and amend. It's likely that in a crisis you'll make a mistake. Own up to it, be prepared to U-turn, don't soldier on just to save face. People will respect you for your honesty and humanity.
Deal with the urgent, but make space for the strategic and for the future. It's easy to get engrossed in the immediate during a crisis as a leader. Steve encouraged us not to neglect the big-picture stuff. Steve referenced the work done during the darkest days of WW2 on the setting up of the NHS as an example of thinking ahead even in the midst of a crisis. If the leader him or herself doesn't have the time or the headspace for strategic thinking then there's no reason not to delegate it. The point is that strategic thinking shouldn't stop during a crisis.
Be authentic. This last point hammered home the need for honesty and transparency in a crisis. It may well be that controversial or unusual things need to be carried out during a crisis. Mike stressed the importance of managing up in this sort of situation and spelling out to the Board and/or your line-managers what actions you are taking. As Mike explained, if nothing else, getting their agreement makes it harder for them to dismiss you if your solutions don't bear immediate fruit.
A couple of weeks ago I gave this presentation to parents entitled 'Making Kids Cleverer':
As I explain at the start, the thrust of the arguments draw heavily on David Didau's book of the same name. The arguments centre around two things:
the importance of knowledge
the role of knowledge in increasing cleverness
I deal with each in turn below:
The importance of knowledge
Teachers are bombarded by advice from non-teachers about what should be taught in schools. Most commonly, a wealthy entrepreneur, who didn't do well in school themselves, argues that schools should be teaching things like creativity, innovation, collaboration. Often these things are grouped under the heading '21st Century Skills'. It all sounds so noble, so reasonable - who would not want their children to have these skills? But there are problems:
Firstly 21st Century Skills are a conceit. There is nothing new about needing to be collaborative, creative or innovative. It has always been necessary to have these skills.
Secondly, these skills cannot be taught in isolation; they all rest on knowledge. You cannot just walk into a class of 15-year-olds (or 35 year-olds for that matter) and ask them to come up with creative ways, say, of conducting an adenoidectomy. Being creative here requires detailed knowledge of human anatomy, of surgical history, of biochemistry, of histology and so on. And just as this is true of highly specialised throat surgery so it is true in any other field you care to mention, even the more prosaic ones. Coming up with novel ideas depends on a store of knowledge on which creativity can draw.
Then there are the educators who maintain that we only need to focus on '21st Century Skills' because in the 21st Century you can Google everything else (if you think I'm creating a straw man here, have a look here - plenty of people, educators amongst them believe this stuff). The truth is, anyone who's ever asked a Year 9 class to 'go away and research x' will know how inefficient this way of learning is. Children cannot access the material about x on the internet because they don't have the vocabulary or the pre-existing mental hooks on which to hang their research. Direct instruction of new material, carefully modelled in small sequential steps by a teacher-expert is a much more effective way of getting children to learn. Dylan Wiliam explains this superbly here. If you were ever in any doubt about the importance of learning things by heart, you won't be after watching this little clip:
Lastly, there are the futurologists who maintain that we should be shoe-horning into the curriculum the latest and most expensive baubles from the tech industry. Their argument is that not acculturating children to the latest set of VR-googles, phablets or smartphones is an act of gross negligence. But this argument is quickly undermined by pointing out that only a couple of decades ago, state-of-the-art education looked like this:
So we needn't worry too much about 21st Century Skills -certainly not to the point of trying to teach them in isolation - and we should have the humility to accept that what is state of the art today, won't be tomorrow. What we should be teaching in schools is the material that has stood the test of time. People who advocate teaching children the accumulated wisdom of the ages often quote Matthew Arnold, who argued for passing on:
...the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits...
In terms of choosing what actually counts as the 'best which has been thought and said' Didau points towards the Lindy effect and the observation that it is the most durable knowledge and ideas that will be most useful in the future:
What this means for educators is that the sort of knowledge that is likely to be of most use to our students in the future is the sort of knowledge that was also useful to our ancestors in the past. This requires a bit of mental effort to assimilate because most of us are, myself very much included, are attracted to novelty and modernity. But it's hard to argue with the logic of Lindy's observation and the weight of evidence that supports it. What it means in practical terms is that teachers should be passing on the knowledge and ideas that have stood the test of time in their subjects. Fortuitously, in England at least, subject specialists collaborated with the government to put together in the form of the National Curriculum lists of essential knowledge that should be passed on in the various subject disciplines. The first listed aim of the National Curriculum co-opts Matthew Arnold as seen in bold below:
The national curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the essential
knowledge that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that
has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity
and achievement.
There is scope for teaching other things, of course, but teachers shouldn't be ashamed of championing knowledge - in the form of the accumulated wisdom of subject specialists - as the foundation of a good education.
The relevance of knowledge to cleverness
Hopefully, by now you are convinced of the efficacy of a fairly traditional, knowledge-based curriculum as likely to be the most future-proof of all the various curricula that schools might pursue. But we have yet to explain how increasing children's knowledge (or as Dylan Wiliam has it, the contents of their long term memory) makes them cleverer.
One illustration of the importance of knowledge comes from an experiment in which expert chess players and novices were asked to memorise the positions of chess pieces on a board. Where pieces were in positions that could occur in an actual game of chess, the chess experts did better on the memorisation task than the novices. But where chess pieces were placed randomly on the board the difference between the experts and the novices diminished almost to nothing. Expert chess players are at an advantage in the first case because they have memorised knowledge about possible sequences of play. They're at no particular advantage, though, where pieces are in positions that are not possible in the course of normal play:
As in chess, so in other fields of human expertise. In order to become expert at something you need to know a lot about it, and your knowledge needs to have been memorised to the point where it's become part of your psyche and can be recalled with little or no effort. If it requires effort to recall the knowledge space in the limited confines of working memory will be used up. This means that, if tasks can be completed at all, they will be slow, halting and prone to error. Since an important aspect of being clever is the speed of cogitation failure to have the knowledge to act upon in long-term memory is a serious handicap.
Although some aspects of cleverness are inherited, this research shows that cleverness can be increased. Consider these two babies - one lucky, the other less so:
The great news for teachers is that the unlucky baby can more than make up for the disadvantages he has inherited providing he is given a wholesome diet of knowledge and guided towards getting this knowledge into his long-term memory. School can make all the difference and no-one need be defined by their genes. The key is that education needs to focus on helping children know culturally important information. Beguiling, though the alternatives might be they are a distraction. And it's the most disadvantaged, as ever, who have most to lose from well-meaning teachers prioritising the wrong things. The English teacher, Joe Kirby, sums this up far better than I could, so I'll let him have the last word:
The opportunity cost of allowing my pupils to focus on supposedly relevant topics they already know about like celebrities, TV and social networking, is that it limits my time to help them catch up with richer kids who get rich cultural knowledge at home. The opportunity cost of spending entire lessons making posters and trailers, doing enquiry circles and opinion positioning, carousel groupwork and fun games is that they have less time to focus on broadening their horizons by reading and writing about the greatest literature, (auto)biographies and speeches ever written. Given that poorer kids start secondary school thousands of words behind richer kids in vocabulary, it seems to me that we are widening the gap if English in disadvantaged schools is taught without an unrelenting focus on explicit knowledge of context, novels, plays, poems, grammar, rhetoric, spelling and vocabulary.
