In reality for around six years now, but the title scans with the “Wild Rover” first line, the second of which is “And I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer”, which probably doesn’t sit well with the idea of Governance or good management.

I became a Governor in one school after a few years of waiting until I reached 60 and effectively “retired” from the front line, having been invited onto the Governing body a few years before. It was a body in need of bodies, to ensure that meetings were quorate.

I’d like to think that it was for my lifetime in front line education and continuing involvement in specific areas, such as inclusion and parent partnership, as well as initial teacher education. Governors bring a wealth of expertise into a school and can act as critical friends as well as supporting the school in the development agenda.

Getting a “good” after an Ofsted inspection was testament to the hard work of the staff and management, including the Governing body. It also bought further time for necessary continuous development.

After a few years, a second school identified itself as being in even greater need of support, so I did a transfer having worked with the recently appointed Executive Head and Head of School in my ITE role. We had enjoyed many interesting exchanges of ideas, which they felt would help their new agendas, in a school with a very chequered history.

As Governor with particular responsibility for coordinating with SEND and inclusion, pupil premium and vulnerable children, I have been able to spend quality time with different staff, enabling them to articulate their developmental focus and actions, clarifying our joint understanding where necessary and occasionally offering areas where additional thought might be useful.

All visits to the school in any capacity as a Governor are written up and shared with the body, to ensure everyone is aware of what’s happening.

Where I am still involved in education, I also buy, receive and read a wide range of books. Where these could add something to the school, they are offered and have evidently been of value. I would especially mention Paul Dix, Jarlath O’Brien and Mary Myatt’s recent books on behaviour and ethos as having been well-thumbed. I have struggled to get the books back on occasion…

Twitter occasionally throws up interesting reads, too, so these are forwarded for information. This did occasion the school’s involvement with the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants process, led by Rob Webster, which over the past year has developed significant conversations within the staff as a whole.

The Governor role is an interesting one, in that, while Governors are included in the Leadership and Management area of Ofsted, we are always at one remove from the day to day realities, which is why I feel that my school visits are essential, to fit the imagery with the reportage. It would be easy to take everything at face value, especially if you value the management and their work. I know that both the Executive Head and HoS value the conversations and the challenges that arise. This has been noted in discussion with the allocated LA inspector.

For all that, though, I am probably one of the quieter members of the Governing body, preferring to reflect before speaking. Governor meetings can become reactive in nature, and we all know that “stuff happens” in schools, but a reflective Governing body is more likely to support progress, avoiding creating “busy work” and distractions from the day job for already pressed managers. A reflective body is also more likely to look at itself and the roles, to add some value to the journey.

The education system is a bit like an Airfix kit; the bits have to go in the right place, with the right amount of glue, if the finished model is to look like the picture on the box. As in many reorganisations in education, there isn’t always a very clear picture on the packaging, so bits are in danger of being put in the wrong place.

With an emphasis in 2019 on the school curriculum, keeping sight of the school picture will be even more important.

Strong Governance needs to be a part of every school, but it needs a strong local base, supported by a supportive, easily available, local centre of information. I’m lucky that my LA still retains a Governor Service providing up to date training opportunities.

Like all school development, it never ends, simply because it is a human system, subject to human frailty as well as strengths. It only achieves through the efforts of others. It’s my pleasure to be able to continue offering support and occasionally some mentoring based on experience.
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An open book? How do you tell your story?

Do you offer children something to think, talk, read and write about?

It’s been a quiet Christmas break, which is how it is when you get a bit older. It’s usually making sure that younger generations have a good time; that they are fed and clothed and have presents to open. It has been interesting to drop in and out of Twitter to see what’s being discussed. It can be an eye opener, or occasionally a tablet shutter, as views pass that might elicit a type-delete response.

However, recent tweets about the curriculum suggest that Curriculum is the current hot topic, as Ofsted are putting it at the centre of their next round of thinking, and some commentators seemingly jumping on the opportunity to propound their “knowledge rich” agenda, as if it’s a new phenomenon.

My career in teaching started with training at St Luke’s College, Exeter, from 1971-74. Although Plowden was a high-profile element that was the new core of pedagogic reflection, the sharing of knowledge was central to the science course that I started and the Environmental Education course to which I transferred in year 2, providing a broad subject base for Primary, which became my passion.

It was based on knowledge, the interpretation of which into classroom narratives was left to us. We explored “programmed learning”, which was exemplified by exploring the stages of making a cup of tea or a piece of toast. This showed us the essence of embedded knowledge that is assumed in giving instruction or developing a narrative. It made us better “storytellers”; a mixture of substance and exploration. If you think of sharing a book/(his)story with children, their background knowledge inevitably impacts on their understanding of the whole; that’s Hirsch in a sentence.

We talked of challenge in tasking, with the challenge depending on our understanding of the knowledge that the children had already encountered; it was effectively tested through use and application. Within the task, when children encountered difficulty, it highlighted areas that had ether been missed or had not been assimilated effectively, so in-task teaching would occur. There were tremendous similarities to my own education experiences in the 1950/60s. It was also writ large in the available resource materials, such as Nuffield Science 5-13.
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Knowledge and challenge were intertwined.
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And, in my school experience as a teacher, it remained so throughout.

I still have a copy of the textbook that underscored my initial training; Environmental Studies, by George Martin and Edward (Ted) Turner, who was the course leader. For those who would wish to claim that knowledge-rich is a new phenomenon, I’d offer them this book, from 1972 as both a starter knowledge across subjects that sought to give an introduction to thinking practically about the world, supplemented in each chapter with an extensive bibliography for extended reading.

The premise of the course was to provide teachers with the background to introduce children into their world through three layers, Investigation and interpretation, communication, inspiration. Over time, this gave rise to my personal mantra of learning challenge as something to think, talk, and write about, leading to presentation, preferably to a known audience.

The course explored the living and non-living world; essentially chemistry, physics and biology with added geology; the past world around us, architectural features, local archaeological sites and using artefacts; rural and urban living, settlement studies, including use of materials for dwellings and other buildings; conservation, especially within an urban settlement; histories, especially from a locality perspective, but also within a national and international perspective. (Ted Turner took as his inspiration the notion of the Renaissance, especially Leonardo da Vinci. That allowed the summer field trip to be to Florence, at a time when it was possible to wander into galleries freely. However we also had to write about the other aspects too; planning how we would use the available resources to offer the broader curriculum.

Mathematics, of measures, counting and data, language, art and music were significant features.
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It was a good basic starter, to which I later added two part-time Diplomas, one in Environmental Sciences and the second in Language and Reading Development.
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Every school within which I worked, from 1974 onwards, had curriculum organisation, to differing degrees. Some had simply headings, of topics that had to be covered within each year, others had broad resource materials from which to develop the topic narrative, which was left to the classteacher to develop based on knowledge of their classes.

The 1987 National Curriculum was a 95% match with our existing curriculum; I was a deputy in a First School.
The subsequent Dearing Review gave a 95% correspondence.

When I became a HT in 1990, there was a need to create a firmer base for the curriculum, which could have been described as a little ad-hoc.

We had a mix of planning layers, starting with whole school and year group. This was premised on allocating topics appropriately.

Every topic had a “topic spec”, which was designed by the subject lead, ensuring that the NC expectations were clear, articulating essential knowledge, skills, challenges, available school and locality resources, plus reminders of quality outcome expectations (Level descriptors rewritten as descriptors of child capability).
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Every teacher received their planning file in July, before a half day of a closure that allowed them to organise their planning thoughts before the summer holiday. A copy came to me as HT, so I knew in July what the next year “learning map” looked like.

The first two weeks were always designated as “getting to know and settling” weeks, with a teacher designed topic. The second Friday was always a closure, half a day given to planning the detail of the next (few) topic(s), including resourcing from school stock. Topics ranged from a week to several weeks, depending on the needs. The interplay of topics with English and maths allowed for topic generated information to be used in writing or to create mathematical opportunity that offered measures, counting leading to data, or shape and space exploration.

Because the year was based around revisiting areas, especially in maths and English, revision of ideas, aka interleaving, was embedded.

In so doing, we had a curriculum with meat, two veg and a good helping of dessert.

It was planned longer term, so that it had substance. It was broad, balanced and relevant, drawing from the locality as much as possible, to fully immerse the children into their community, as well as drawing from wider opportunities; we did take the children on local trips, but also to London, to the British Museum for Greek, Roman or Egyptian exhibitions. However, time was always against us for day trips, with at least two hours each way on a coach and costs getting ever higher. The IWB did allow us to bring a level of experience into classrooms, taking over from the video or CD player.

While “bright ideas” might be imported, these were always evaluated against what was already offered. If they added something, they were incorporated.

It was a cycle of constant improvement, supported by every subject lead having at least a half day with a County inspector to review the school offering as a whole.

The 1997 National Curriculum with the accompanying strategies, did put some of this under strain, especially when we needed to replace experienced staff. It was noticeable that some applicants were used to a narrower diet. However, personalised CPD opportunities, eg shadowing colleagues, allowed insights into expectations. Staffing stability helped with this; we held onto the “tribal memories”… see blog…

The breadth paid off in national testing, too, where English, maths and science scored highly. Every subject was valued, with quality outcomes celebrated throughout the school, with displays or presentations opening learning to others.

The 2014 Primary National Curriculum was always a worry to me, even though I was not school based, but working in ITE and with parents and inclusion. It articulated English and Maths extensively, while others were diminished. Listening to Tim Oates, early in the process, saying that it was designed to be easier to test highlighted an underlying political agenda.

As we are now a couple of days into 2019. Perhaps a chance for reflection and refinement?

I have no problem with a conversation about what children should be exposed to through their school experience. There must be a clear narrative to learning; it is after all, the school’s internal book.

Every subject can be explored by a 2-year old, a 12-year old or a 22-year old. Their ability to interact with the experience will vary widely, from an initial exploratory phase, which I would see as “play”, through to accommodating, reflecting on and reacting to, ever more sophisticated information. We are on a constant journey, carrying with us, at any point, the accumulated wisdom of earlier experiences. So a “knowledge organiser” as our “topic specs” can be seen today, will vary considerably for each age group, and should do so. It should support a developing narrative approach, not become a knowledge dump which an inexperienced practitioner might simply regurgitate.

Order and organisation are key to teaching and learning success, over different timescales.

I would argue that annual plans allowed teachers to ensure coverage while also developing each topic at depth. Colleagues also benefited from collegiate sharing, either one to one or within practical workshops.

At classroom level, each teacher planned in ways that suited them. They were personal diaries, only considered if there were question marks over children’s progress. Classroom teachers are paid to think. They need to think clearly, on multiple layers, always with children and their progress in mind. That’s why it can be tough at times.

When teaching becomes top-down, teachers start to look at what is expected, to second guess what “those above” are looking for. That this has, on occasion been subject to the management or Ofsted rumour mill, can’t be denied; one local school or colleague passing on their tips from their own inspection, so others copy.

To hold to your own course can be challenging, but it is your own school’s journey that’s important.

It’s your narrative, your history, your present.

More important, it’s your children’s narrative, their history and their present.

That’s your data; what you do for them and what they get out of it. It’s a mix of the obvious, the displays and the books, but also their attitudes in school, their capacity to engage in talk with others. It’s a story, based on words, not numbers, so that children can engage with their own developing narratives.

Children’s pleasure in overcoming challenges and learning…led by teachers who enjoy teaching.
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Curriculum 1971-2014; broad, balanced and relevant.
Curriculum 2018; knowledge rich (or learning rich)?

Put simply, classroom learning is children, context, engagement, guidance and adaptation, evaluation of outcomes. The whole captured within communication.

Remembering always the maxim that education( life) is a journey not a destination. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century.)

It’s strangely fascinating occasionally just to be a bystander to conversations on social media. There’s a current penchant for everything curriculum, as if it’s the next new thing that no-one has ever thought of before You can almost hear the sound of cash tills ringing with the book potential.

The recent Ofsted commentaries on curriculum are strangely reminiscent of earlier HMI statements, one series of which was dubbed the “raspberry ripple” books because of their covers. The September 2018 commentary suggested that there was a lack of curriculum development expertise. In some ways this is not surprising, as for twenty years curriculum and pedagogy has been engaged through ever tighter dictat, seemingly removing teacher and school discretion, whereas autonomy is the life-blood of a thinking organisation.

Forgive me for being old(er). I started as a classroom teacher in 1974 after three years at training college; my first Primary class will now be coming up to 55 years old. In that extended career, I never worked in a school without a curriculum in some form. Some were stronger than others. They might have been based on a scheme for maths and English, with Topics (now called the foundation subjects) being the area that was apportioned to specific year groups. Once you knew the topics, there was the search for the available school resources, or perhaps an investigation in the locality to seek out appropriate places to visit or people with local interests. We were, to all intents and purposes, organising the knowledge, supplemented by the County Library Service and, from time to time, museums and costume services. It was relatively easy to put together a package of essential knowledge that would be shared, sometimes with teachers making some kind of information book that was derived from the various sources.

In looking through my notebooks from my career, I came across a diagrammatic version that was the top layer of an early curriculum map. It’s not detailed, but an overview that enabled themes to be allocated to year groups, then further developed through locality resources and resource boxes.
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In many ways variations on this have been a feature of my career. Start at the top layer, then work ever deeper, providing greater detail at different points to support teacher thinking in their classroom. This last layer might include agreed details that have to be structured into the theme narrative and retained for future use.

​These early thoughts were supplemented further with a very active inspection and advisory service and teachers centres that provided both courses and in-house support to school development.

From an earlier blog:

Curricula are usually written by experts, from the expert perspective, ensuring that information is delivered, whether or not it is appropriate for the learner’s current needs. 
As teachers, unconstrained by predetermined curricular expectations, we were able to assume the mantle of experts, reflecting on what the four year olds brought with them in the way of life experiences which would be the start points for school based experiences and exploration.

So history started as My story, based on storyboards created with a series of photos, then developed into His or Her story, with reference to parents and grandparents. Local walks to look at houses of interest started a link between History and Geography, with sketch mapping, drawing in situ or photos being taken (development time, much easier now?). Parents and grandparents came to tell their own stories, recorded onto c45, 60 or 90 tapes to be replayed and reflected upon. For homework, children were asked to telephone grandparents to ask a series of questions. Timelines were created throughout, so historical perspectives were constantly being revisited, as knowledge was added. And we got back to the Victorians with photograph based family trees, together with the accompanying narrative.

Building materials became the stuff of science, complemented by Lego or other construction material, as well as clay models of houses, made out of very small bricks, fired in the kiln. Trials with garden clay compared to the bought variety. One child brought in a tile found in their garden, which we took to the local museum to be told it was Roman. Visiting the local church we discovered even more tiles, being used as wall bricks and on the way back a local aunt offered the chance to have a look inside a house originally dating to 1580. I know, risk assessments, CRB etc. The Tudor context allowed exploration of timber as a building material. One idea often led to another, with settlements, including the Anglo-Saxon beginnings of the village being explored, with the support of the local history society.

In reality, what is a curriculum? It is a series of related contexts within which learners will enhance their understanding of the world in which they live, allowing opportunities for language acquisition, broadening communication, real contexts for writing and other recording.  The mathematics of measures and data creation supported the core learning at every age. So the basics were the backbone of topic work. The contexts provided the creative structures into which the relevant subjects could be fitted.

Asking questions and seeking answers were the basis for both library research and experiential science activity, which might be based on the notion of finding out interesting ideas to share with the rest. Every subject had value for what it brought to the child as thinking and learning opportunities. The art table was a permanent fixture within the classroom, with half a dozen children regularly interpreting information in picture form.

When the National Curriculum was brought in in 1987, I was a deputy in a First School. Our audit of the school curriculum against the NC showed a 95% correspondence, with a couple of tweaks to be effected.

This became a feature of revisions; small tweaks were needed to accommodate the update.

I came across my notes from 1987, when I had responsibility for science. I had grouped the sixteen attainment targets, yes 16, into three main areas; scientific processes, our environment, make it move/forces, and three supplementary areas; electricity/magnetism, sound and music and light. These might have been organised as larger, three-week projects, or perhaps a week of experiences.

It was not long before a reorganisation led to the sixteen ATs becoming four main areas; virtually the same content, but a reduction in areas for assessment, essentially materials, physical world, living world and scientific exploration.
When I became a HT in 1990, we worked hard on the curriculum, because, although the school had taken on elements of the NC, there were gaps which needed to be addressed.

The approach was refined over time and can ne read about in a blog on planning. There is a clear focus on layering.
In addition, as a school, we also looked at quality versus quantity in writing.

It was clear that children were being asked to undertake a considerable amount of writing, but that, for the most part, any writing in subjects other than English were of poorer quality.

We moved from this to identify the main writing approach for the week, which would be developed through different stages; modelled, organised and drafted, with occasional redrafting for display quality, for an audience.

The two-page approach to writing that we developed is shared as writing process, tweak your books which morphed through all writing in one exercise book, to using the exercise book as a personal organiser. This highlighted that writing is writing in every subject. It allowed for each week, or fortnight to be devoted to a particular project, perhaps a report from a practical experience, to letter writing, or imaginary story. As a head, I encouraged teachers to consider the use of time available for quality writing. This could be an hour by hour for essential teaching and modelling, note making or early organisation activities. It might be a morning to enable a range of drafting and evaluation/critique activities. Timetable flexibility allows quality to emerge, rather than unfinished work. Over time, the time frames reduced to emphasise fluency.

Topic areas, essentially the foundation subjects, were organised in different layers, as articulated in the planning blog. Topics lasted as long as was needed, but all allocated topics had to be shared. Topic themes were resourced by subject coordinators, with a topic specification and a collation of the resources available within the school. Book resources were sourced through the County Library Service.

Within these areas, we reflected on the commonality of learning themes and came up with the “Making Sense of Experience” model; a means of looking at deepening experience, at any age. The “Experience, explore, explain” mantra was central to the thinking; simple enough to remember, but embedding many different elements.

In 2014, the current NC was enacted. Having listened to Tim Oates, when we shared a panel, telling the assembled staff that the 2014 version was created to be easier to test, I started to worry. With it being maths and English heavy with testing in these areas, the next few years have shown that the wider curriculum has diminished, in some cases significantly. However, there is a strong argument for the curriculum retaining its breadth and depth.
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So why are we where we are?

My simple answer would be estate-wide small thinking, more from the point of view of ever closer attention on the minutiae of teaching and learning, especially by some individuals who have made national and international names, and a lot of money from publishing, by a focus on small bits. The words that we use, such as differentiation, assessment, planning, writing, reading, phonics along with others, have been packaged and repackaged into formulae, then interpreted into book form, to be sold into the education spending market, which itself has grown significantly over the past 25 years.

A couple of the latest high-profile areas are “growth mindset” and research. Each has the potential to become formulaic, distracting and ultimately to be devalued. The former, to me is what teaching and learning are all about, otherwise what’s the point and the latter, as an investigative mind-set, is what I’d want from all teachers, seeking to refine their practice.

The issue with buying a scheme for doing the thinking for you is that you can stop thinking about the whole and how things fit together, and that’s what I’d say some have done. These schemes can dictate timetables, as children are packaged up into appropriate sized groups to undertake the specified activities, often led by the less well-informed members of staff, so that, although “coverage” might be assured, the depth of understanding might be suspect for many. These groups are, by default, mini sets or streams, so can become self-limiting systems. Time is also lost, as children move between areas of the school to be part of their small groups.

There has been successive reorganisation of priorities, with literacy and numeracy taking over from English and Maths, with a subsequent downgrade of other subjects, all of which provide the background information against which English and Maths operate in the real world. There is talk of the knowledge curriculum, but the knowledge areas of the curriculum, in some places and for some children are under some threat.

The small thinking arises out of a sound-bite need for politicians, to show that they are doing something to improve the situation. The Literacy Hour was not the be-all and end-all of the Literacy Strategy, yet it became the simplistic message given on the radio and TV every morning. For the past four years, we have heard phonics equals reading as the mantra.

The problem with both messages is that it can distort practice to the point where other aspects of each subject, which are equally or more vital, are diminished, so teachers and children lose sight of the bigger messages.

Levels became the bête noire of the system because they became distorted into data points, rather than remaining as the progress descriptors that they were in the beginning. From misuse, they lost their purpose and became distorting, as they became high stakes in showing progress. The number and the data point lost the accompanying words, but, at least in some of the foundation subjects, the words could still be a useful starting point for reflection on progression.

Like all things, I’d argue that a focus on detail is essential, but that at every stage any change in one aspect needs to be reflected upon across the whole learning system, otherwise it can be distorting.

It’s a little bit like an exercise regime where concentration on one part of the body can create a distorting effect.
It's got to start with the whole, consider the parts and then put the whole back together. 

And when it comes down to simplicities, the whole relies on effective communication in all forms, pitched to the audience, using words that they can understand, sharing images to supplement the words and to enhance the capacity to make links with earlier experiences.

It takes an aware teacher to be able to do that with facility. Teachers need subject and pedagogic knowledge. Thinking teachers sharing a thoughtful curriculum and supporting each other with their own knowledge and sharing successful pedagogy can significantly alter the curricular diet for every child.
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A young man decided to become a teacher…

When I was interviewing for staff as a headteacher and when I am interviewing prospective entrants into the profession for ITE providers, I ask what on the surface is a relatively simple question; “What was the significant event that persuaded you that you could be a teacher?” This allows the interviewee to reflect on their past, but also to develop the theme through significant skills that they bring to bear on their role. This tipping point can be important to explore, especially where the candidate is a mature trainee, changing career course.

I have a vivid memory of one trainee who described how she had been involved in a summer residential scheme with a group of physically disabled children and supported them individually to overcome fears to be able to attempt to tackle a climbing wall. Another told of how he had worked in a refugee camp and learned that he could find innovative ways to help children learn without expensive resources. The insights and the obvious enjoyment of the experience came through and they both went on to become a very high-grade prospective teachers.

While some get into teaching through their interactions with children, discovering that they can communicate effectively and make relationships, enabling their charges to attempt challenge, others love their subject and sharing their knowledge. Marrying the two creates a whole, which is the purpose of teacher training; the what and the how.

Why did I become a teacher?

I had a job with ICI, in a biological research station, nestled into an old quarry beside Brixham fishing harbour. Becoming a “scientist” had been my lifelong ambition. The reality, of counting bivalves and worms in bottom samples that we sourced from the North Sea off Teeside and Whitby, palled after several months, partly because of the horrendous effects of sea-sickness and partly the counting. Finish one tray, record, start another. When looking at colleagues who had progressed to Experimental Officer, it became clear that I’d be doing the same for years to come. I loved the outdoors, the environment, entomology, history, geography; in fact I was interested in the world around me. Ok, I was probably a bit geeky, in that respect.

A mature team colleague at Paignton Cricket Club had just finished his teaching course at St Lukes College, in Exeter. After talking with him, he suggested taking the train to chat to someone about the possibility of training. There was a significant shortage of teachers, as the generation that had trained before or after WW2 were coming, en masse, to retirement.

As it was June, the campus was empty, but a kind receptionist tracked the head of science to his room and sent me along. We chatted broadly, across science, but also sport (St Lukes was a PE college) and after half an hour asked if I wanted this to be an official interview. Fifteen minutes later, I was sent to fill in the application forms and started that September. That is a decision that I have never regretted, even when the going has got really tough. I found my natural niche.

I did change course after the first year, moving from pure science to Environmental Studies, which was a brand-new course designed by the previous head of science to enable Primary teachers to be able to teach the breadth of the curriculum.  

Teaching practices in Totnes, year one, and Torquay, year three, meant digs for the first, during a winter of power cuts, so planning and marking by candle-light. For the second, I had a lift from two PE specialists, both of whom were on their way to international status, so the hour or so each way passed quickly.

The second-year experience was an extended study practice, where the entire teaching group was twinned with a school in Sidmouth. We would be paired with a small group of children, plan for learning, enact it, evaluate the outcomes and make subsequent decisions for learning. Getting to know the children also meant home visits. This entailed staying on in Sidmouth, walking to the family homes, having a scripted chat, then a long bus trip back to halls, which were six miles out of Exeter, unless someone with a car was around.   
 
It became clear during 1974 that the teacher shortage was coming to an end. At the same time, the James Report was considering the potential for offering teachers sabbatical time after a period of service. It was envisaged that this would support further training, perhaps to Masters level.

Both had an influence on deciding to get a job for September 1974. Even as a probationary teacher, I had a class of 39 mixed ability children. There was no such thing as a teaching assistant, nor technology. Resources were very limited, but there was a pleasure in creating learning opportunities from little, using the local environment as a significant resource, eg taking the class to the local graveyard to read the first chapter of Great Expectations…

Becoming a teacher was never designed to make me rich; perhaps comfortable was the best that could be hoped, and it was a career, which, in 1974, was still considered an asset. I started teaching in the year of the Houghton award, where teacher pay was enhanced after many years of very low pay rises. Four times that income, plus a small borrowed deposit, was enough for the mortgage that bought the first house; I could aspire.

Today, a teacher in similar position would need a mortgage ten times their income and a large deposit. That cultural shift will have a huge impact on life plans.

Teaching is teaching and of it’s time. It has always had to adapt to changing needs, but, over the past thirty years, we have seen revolution from politicians that have put pressures on the system, such that successful, experienced people left. This inevitably reduces the core of knowledge available, with new people having to learn from scratch how to make things work for them.

The fact that you are teaching one approach while a “new” version has to be developed and embedded is stressful and an additional burden.

Change has rarely been handled in an evolutionary fashion, apart from the first iterations of the National Curriculum, which largely described what my local schools were doing, with 95% correspondence. Managing “improvement” would reduce the stress burdens of people who are, at the core of their role, paid to think.

Governments often see change as synonymous with improvement and then have to twist and turn as consequences become apparent to everyone. It can be analogous to the cowboy builder; who put this up like this…?

I’d still encourage someone with aptitude to become a teacher, and also, in time to develop themselves towards headship. Both are great jobs and they are very much and always will be needed.

I sometimes think we need Governments to step back and let teachers get on with the job and to become the advisers in the system. Children, in every classroom, deserve teachers who enjoy their jobs, know that they are doing a good job and that their efforts are appreciated.
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Leaders, at every level, from Government down, only achieve if each classroom is a space for learning.
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The HMI report for 2018 includes a commentary about the teaching of and support for SEND.

​In many ways, I am not surprised. Working with Inclusion Quality Mark for eight years up to 2014, it was clear, from visits to and supporting schools, 2013-14, attending and presenting at conferences, that the complexities of the changes that were being wrought on schools in a very short time would be very difficult to achieve. That the changes also included system changes outside schools, at a time when austerity cuts were really beginning to bite, only served to exacerbate the situation for more vulnerable children.

Schools felt that they had to focus on curriculum and assessment, the latter having been put into free-fall by a Government unwilling to offer clear guidance. As schools would also be inspected on the new system, it became an imperative, especially for schools which felt vulnerable; borderline good, RI or SM.

Systems are still not yet fully effective in all schools. The sheer weight of requirement, especially for Primary schools, to embed mathematics and English, meant that the wider curriculum was sometimes given less prominence, to a point where this is flagged up as a concern for the 2019 inspection framework. It is also feasible now, after four years, that schools are beginning to see issues with their earlier decisions and are making adjustments.

One big structural change in 2014 was to put emphasis on the classroom as the prime place where good or better teaching and learning is seen as addressing the needs of all individuals. Therefore work has to be well planned, well delivered, activities engaged with, feedback given and supportive, developmental feedback afterwards.

In which case, the class teacher becomes the conduit through which SEND decisions are effected, with enhanced responsibility. Consider for a moment the position regarding Performance Related Pay (PRP) where a teacher can be held responsible for the outcomes of all groups of learners.

Teachers need to know their children very well, to be able to personalise interventions and commentaries. The deployment of available support, for specific purpose, with defined, checkable outcomes, will be essential. However, as the highest trained person in the classroom, the teacher may reasonably be expected to take the greater burden of the most challenging learning needs, while the support does just that, supports other learners.
All aspects need to be considered, starting with the appropriateness of the task, or the necessity to adapt, the need for support to achieve an appropriate outcome.

Within the task, the deployment of staff to be the eyes and ears, with the capacity to intervene appropriately to need will be essential. It will become an essential skill to spot and deal with issues as they arise to smooth the learning path. These interventions will need to be noted in some way. Therefore a methodology needs to be considered. In the first instance, the exercise book could become a part of the dialogue of concern, noting advice given, as well as clear, readable, understandable feedback. A secondary need will be to keep a track of teacher thinking, within and between lessons, through post it notes, amended planning, or diary format.

The teacher needs to get better at initial investigation of issues.
 
In addition, within the 2014 NC, the idea of levelness gave way to yearness. I blogged about this, from 2013, as I could see considerable potential pitfalls, especially for children who didn’t “make the grade” in the previous year. This may have been further exacerbated as teachers chose to stay in the same year group for a few years, to make use of their need to get to grips with yeargroup requirements.

Primaries are possibly in a much more difficult position, in that the new National Curriculum is very year-group based, with the assessment criteria as articulated, to know and understand the year group requirements. The use of the phrase “Secondary ready” cast an implied level of expectation against the achievements at year six. The rhetoric to date seems to suggest whole cohorts moving at the same speed. Topics are also relatively year group specific, which could cause issues if a child is either slower or faster than their cohort at learning in a specific subject. It is arguable that for Primary schools, level-ness has been replaced by year-ness.  So measurement of progress will be against year group expectations. Within the documentation, it is possible to infer the hierarchy of expectation, so schools may do that to ensure that their learners are tracked against the new criteria.

Where schools have been freed from the need to use levels and asked to create their own systems, those which have been shared through social media like Twitter have to date looked very much like levelness in a different form. And they always will, because the schemes shared have been recording sheets to keep a track of children’s performance.

And that’s my main issue. Subjects have hierarchical skills, which have to be introduced, practiced and embedded in produced work. Levelness articulated the hierarchy of skills and allowed this within whole class tasks and topics, with all learners challenged at a personal level, in the best practice. Level and grade criteria support expectation, planning, in-lesson interventions, reformulating of challenge to need, feedback, both oral and written, then food for thought after the lesson.

Year-ness will do that, but I have a slight worry that the articulation of achievement within the new system at Primary level has the potential to become a new system created barrier to learning for a number of vulnerable learners.
We had a system that could have been tweaked to make it more coherent, challenging, robust and acceptable through the system.
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We may embed new issues. I hope that I am wrong.
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All classes are mixed ability, even a set or streamed group, so creates an internal dynamic that needs to be accommodated; from prior records, simple starter assessments to confirm or ask questions, to seek to refine planning that allows appropriate imparting of information and learning challenges, both of which may be subtly altered in delivery through engagement with individual or group needs.

This is articulated in another blog; 65, based on the teacher standards.

Not all Special Needs get identified early. Some become more obvious as school challenges get harder. Some may have a source outside school, but which impacts in the setting, eg social and emotional needs.

Individual responses will offer challenges and cause concern. This may multiply over time, if established as a seeming pattern of response. Investigation and recording of the developing situation informs a discussion with the school SENCo. Not to do so might result in a request to do so over the next period of time. This delay can be the source of irritation in a teacher who wishes an immediate remedy.

From 2013
·         SEND is no longer “someone’s job”, it is everyone’s job…

Training is an interesting issue, in that there are and will be significant calls from all sides for “more training”. The availability of external staff is likely to be seriously strained in the near future, as all schools ask for the same personnel. I can see a number of options addressing these needs.

Local specialists (possibly including Special School staff) to create fact sheets available to all local schools, to address possible concerns across a range of needs, ASD, ADHD, SALT, OT as an example.

• In-house solutions 1. Some special needs in learning can be evidenced against the outcome of younger children. Therefore, by definition, the expertise is in-house. Exemplar portfolios will help with decision making, if they incorporate both a statement of what’s evident and a description of potential next steps. In “old money” a level 2 child in year five is operating on a par with an average year 2 child. By talking with the year 2 teacher, the professional dialogue will offer insights into routes. In a separate system, it may be necessary to make links with feeder schools.
• In house solutions 2. The school SENCo, if (s)he has undertaken the required training, should be in a position to offer the broad-brush explanations necessary for class-based colleagues.
• Planning for learning needs to look at the dynamics as well as the fixed points. The plan, based on expectation, should prompt thinking on the hoof, ensuring interactions that result on lessons being tweaked to the evident needs.

The basic principle of SEND, know your children well, and that would be my suggestion for the 2019 inspections; how well do schools know and support their children’s needs?

It could be that simple…

Everyone needs someone to talk with?
 
In watching my Twitter feed over the past few days, it has been interesting to note the concerns raised in response to some colleagues coming together to express concern about the use of excessive isolation for some individual children. It made me go back to a number of school visits that I made with inclusive practice in mind. Perhaps it’s always better to look at realities rather than just to express an opinion. I am happy to accept that the schools concerned were wishing to demonstrate their inclusive credentials, so will have been a self-selecting group.
 
In no school, out of over fifty visits, did I encounter isolation facilities. The closest example would be a school that set up a restorative centre, in a small building at the centre of the school where children could either be sent or take themselves, should there be a need to do so. There was always at least one member of staff on duty, available to offer a listening ear. Other staff were available around these listeners, to provide greater help as needed. For some children, being able to articulate their feelings and needs was sufficient for them to see a way to resolve what they had perceived as a problem. For others, who needed signposting to wider help, resolution took longer, but identification, advocacy and coordination helpd to reduce the time between identification and help.
 
I am struck by the similarity of approach with the Samaritans, available to listen to people in need. This is also available in prisons, with prisoners acting as listeners to others. Articulation of a problem can sometimes put it into a practical frame with commensurate practical actions to be taken, in order to resolve the issue for oneself. Articulation also allows another to question further, to seek additional clarity.
 
In looking at this area, we have to accept that each school operates in a specific context, which includes the community, families, and available staffing, so each has to determine internal practices that address issues that arise. Current school funding may well be putting pressures on school ability to provide nuanced support to individuals. Sadly, this can lead to off-rolling as an alternative to supporting a child through their personal issues.
 
The route to exclusion should be well documented for most children, especially where issues are identified as persistent low level. For this, clear documentary evidence should be kept, for future reference as needed. I’ve appended a copy of an earlier blog that seeks to do this.
 
There are occasions, in any social situation, and we should recognise schools as always being a microcosm of their context, where the issue is immediate and dangerous, so requires immediate response to keep others safe.
 
In simple terms, every school decision should be capable of justification in the face of robust challenge, with evidentiary statements available for external review; in the first instance the school Governing Body, especially if faced with parent requests for review or complaint.
 
 
School 1
There is much evidence of creative and innovative practice. This is broadly shared within a staff seeking to develop its own capabilities. Within a challenging environment, staff often exceed what might reasonably be expected. This is fully recognised by parents and students, who expressed fulsomely their praise for the staff, individually and collectively.
 
Staff development is a strength of the school. Starting from being valued for the role being undertaken, staff accept challenge, which is not only met but often exceeded. Individual staff are enabled to take on responsibility, supported to succeed and enjoy personal growth as a result. This is a staff with considerable personal and collective expertise. They also present as happy, throughout the staff group.
 
Innovative practice is encouraged from all categories of staff.
 
There is much joined up thinking, with staff articulating their working relationships with others. This was particularly evidenced in conversations with the staff who are involved in Inclusion, where each found ways to describe how they work together for the good of children. This was endorsed through other conversations focused on curriculum entitlement, where children are supported to succeed. All conversations had a focus of building capacity, taking personal responsibility, good communication, demonstrating that each child in this school has an identifiable Team Around each Child, should they need that level of support, always looking to enhance opportunities.
 
Joined up thinking is also evident across other aspects of the school, with staff describing how roles interlink and sometimes overlap, to ensure coherence and consistency as well as a high level of adaptability to personalised needs. This was clearly described with regard to KS4 routes. The discussions about the timetable also showed flexible thinking. The timetable does not create curricular constraints.
 
The staff are enabled, supported and challenged to ensure that the best possible opportunities are created for children, that, where possible, barriers to progress are identified and remedied to minimise the impact of disruption. The whole staff are the eyes and ears of the systems. They are vigilant, proactive or reactive as necessary or possible, developing functional capacity in the child, the family, with support, or the school, where individual staff may be coached in specific skills.
 
Documentary evidence shows the interactive approach that is taken within the school to ensure that all vulnerable children are identified and supported through an internal Team Around the Child, as well as utilising appropriate external agencies for focussed work, both inside and out of school.
 
Inclusion Group descriptor
 
Multi agency meetings scheduled termly
Regular meetings with outside agencies re individuals, to help in overcoming barriers to learning i.e. Speech and Language Service, CAMHS, YPSS, YoT, Connexions, Social Services, EWO
Extended Services Core offer & Freetime Project
Extra-curricular uptake is high
Annual Reviews – SEND
Parents meeting with SENCO/ GLs / Inclusion Manager re bespoke programmes for students 
School nurse
 
School 2
The enriched curriculum is evident and the search for quality outcomes is a feature of a walk around the classroom areas, which benefit from a range of well put together displays. Children’s work in progress shows an attention to detail and care in finishing.
 
Words and phrases that come to mind when thinking of The F Education Centre include: -
 
Humanity, empathy, complex, personalisation, order and organisation, enriched curriculum, adaptable, creativity, stability, complementary, rigour, fun, expertise, valued, trust, communication, excellent information, distributive management, reflective, coherent, sensitive, independence, participatory, articulate, visionary, opportunities, clarity, team, expertise, problem solving, integrated, coherent, normality, humour, humility, spirituality.
 
These can be summed up as people matter and a personalised approach as the default position.
 
These are essential characteristics of the staff team, who work tirelessly to ensure that the pupils attending the Centre are given the best possible opportunity to succeed. There is a significant team ethic, trust and collegiate approach, which ensures that each team member is supported by the whole group.
 
School 3
The college policy can be summarised as a dynamic continuum. There is 1) rigorous analysis of evidence leading to 2) detailed planning, including the provision of appropriate resources and staffing. 3) Students are actively sharing in their learning journey, which is 4) tracked and reviewed at regular intervals with 5) accurate and detailed records being collated and disseminated, allowing the process to be cyclic and developmental.
This process has been evolutionary, with some avenues having been explored, adapted to need or rejected, if not useful to college development. As in all college development, mistakes were the catalyst for rigorous consideration.
          As a result, Inclusion is evident in every aspect of college life, ensuring that Every Child Matters and, as an extension, that every person associated with the college is also fully valued.
 
SEAL is an integral part of college life, ensuring that Emotional Literacy is embedded within the inclusion aspects of college life. This includes active engagement in restorative conversations.
TAs have many individual specialisms, enabling them to be a strength of the system, supporting pastoral and learning needs. Many have been developed to become significant members of staff, including through GTP routes into teaching roles. The college supports staff personal growth.
 

Seeking greater clarity by fine tuning actions through a

Record of Actions, Discussions or Decisions, Interventions and Outcomes

(RADIO, in case you missed it!).

Building an individual case study.

Essentially, SEND practice describes a sequence of events, which seek to refine the actions and focus of attention, to identify, quantify and qualify the exact nature of a problem. Once this has been established, remedial action can take place. The longer the gap, the greater the problem can become, as further complications can become built into the experience, not least of which is learner self-esteem, affected by adult and peer responses to the circumstance.

Every teacher is a teacher of individual needs, which often identify themselves as little concerns when a learner either exceeds or does not grasp what is being expected.

The SEND framework 2014 does state that poor teaching approaches will handicap decisions on a child’s special educational needs. SEND is not a substitute for poor teaching or poor teachers. High quality teaching and learning should identify, describe and track needs within a classroom. Work sampling, annotations and record keeping will all contribute to good decisions. Some may say that this is additional work. However, it could be argued that well planned, well focused activities, with good oral and written feedback, to identified needs, in itself constitutes a reasonably clear start point of a record. An annotated personal record, for discrete individuals, as describe below should also be kept.

Teachers receive their classes from someone else, even at the earliest stages, where a parent or nursery member of staff has already become aware of little foibles, or gaps in understanding, or an area where there appears to be extra talent.

The parent is the child’s first teacher; it is to be hoped that their relationship is such that they get to know their children really well, through interactions at home and in places of interest that generate speaking and listening skills. As a Governor of a school in Gosport, as well as my own education career, I know that this is not the case, with children arriving operating at two year old levels, of speech and socialisation.

The adult role, teacher and support staff, is to be vigilant in spotting the child reactions in different situations, noting areas of concern, but also of achievement, so that a balanced picture can be built. The profiles built up during the Early Years stage is a more refined document than may have formerly been available.

If concerns emerge, there are likely to be three phases;

1.    Short (wave) term, classroom based. The teacher and other adults become aware that an area of need exists. They develop a short-term plan to address the issue and agree a monitoring approach that allows them to spot and track the outcomes. Where feasible, discussions with the learner might deepen the adult understanding of the learning issues. Outcomes are checked carefully to deduce any patterns arising, which are then shared with parents and decisions reached about next steps.

2.    Medium (wave) term, involving internal specialist colleagues. Where an issue goes beyond the current capacity of the classteacher, the school internal specialist, the SENCo, should be involved to oversee the record, to discuss with the teacher and the parent possible ways forward and to agree a new plan of action in the classroom. This may involve using a discrete approach to the identified problem, with some specified time need. For example, a child with a specific reading issue might need some individualised time with an adult, whose role is to undertake a miscue analysis during each session to deduce with greater accuracy the nature of the problem. The SENCo may be involved in classroom observations, keeping records of on/off task behaviours, relationships, task application, with outcomes being photocopied and annotated to deepen the understanding of the problem, thereby refining the classroom action. Interventions strategies must be SMART targets. Too often in SEND situations, classteachers operate at too global a level, so that the refined needs of the individuals are missed, until they become more critical. There is a need for regular work sampling and annotations to describe the learning journey and issues still arising. The lack of such a record could handicap a child and the teacher, as it will be requested before specific help can be offered, especially if the school SLT has to allocate additional funding/adult support to address the issue.

3.    Long (wave) term, the school will involve a range of specialist experts, to support the diagnosis of the issue. Diagnosis depends on the quality of record keeping in the classroom and the school, if patterns are to be describe and the area for investigation is to be narrowed. As a result, a programme of action is likely to be agreed, timescales set and evidence needed identified. This is likely to be similar to the needs above, but within a refined remit.

Over time, a case study emerges, with a record of actions, discussion, decisions, interventions and outcomes. It may be, at this stage, that the collective wisdom is that there is a problem that is greater that the system capacity to identify and remediate the need. In the new SEND framework, schools will apply for consideration of an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

The evidence file is sent to a panel for consideration, along with other applications. Each case is judged on its merits and there is no guarantee that awarding an EHCP will be the outcome. Equally, an EHCP may not guarantee extra funding or alternative education placement. The EHCP, if awarded, is quite likely to be a tighter descriptor of the learner’s individual needs, the education response to be allocated by the establishment, the timescale and regularity of reviews.

SEND issues cause teachers to become worried. I have suggested ways in which a teacher can expand their understanding of teaching and learning outcomes across the range of learners they are likely to encounter, in another post. Scroll down the page and click on download.

In an earlier blog I looked at my childhood from the point of view of my locality and the distances that I could explore as a child under eight.

When I was eight, as a family, we emigrated to Australia as “£10 Poms”, based on my father being a State Registered Nurse. For my parents, who had lived through WW2, father as an army medical orderly and mother in a munition’s factory, the idea of a new life was enticing. As children we had no idea of what to expect, apart from being told that it meant being able to play outside a great deal, as there would be lots of sunshine.
​
So, we sold up in the UK, packed everything from one life and headed off on the train to London to catch the boat train to Southampton. Now living a few miles from Southampton, we often pass the railway gate into the port where we caught the P&O ship Oriana for the five and a half week ocean voyage to Australia, via the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, Colombo, then Perth, where we disembarked for the extensive train ride to Adelaide, to pick up another boat that took us to Sydney, and another train journey to Brisbane. Here we were billeted in a transit camp, a holding place from which a job was sought, followed by house purchase, meaning that we ended up living in a suburb called Zillmere, in Beams Road, which was an area that has since been extensively remodelled.
​

However, it did offer the outside life that we were promised. At that time the walk from home to school took us across open fields to Boondall Primary; the barefoot walk often meaning a bit of a hop and skip to avoid the snakes that crossed our paths. Boondall Primary meant that I learned to play cricket, on a concrete strip and Aussie rules football, both played barefoot. You learned to be a bit nimble on your feet.

Weekends and holidays offered extended opportunities to walk to the local creek, with our fishing tackle, a mix of a rod and line together with a number of coke bottle lines. This was a local affectation, with the line wound around the coke bottle, twirled around the head and the weight taking the line out into the creek. Catfish and eels were regular catches. A small picnic allowed us to stay out a bit longer than perhaps we should have in the days before easy contact through children having their own phones. Suffice to say that none of us wore a watch either. I do remember a very angry, or worried, mother hitting me after I arrive home late.

Best friend John’s dad had a chicken farm along the road. The alternative to fishing was snake hunting, with the family Jack Russell and a forked stick, sitting in the mulberry tree picking and eating mulberries, with inevitable stained clothes, or climbing the banana trees to cut a bunch of bananas.

It did become the idyllic place to grow up, but it was to change again, with parents deciding that we were returning to the UK, but with an extended timescale, not telling us of the plans. Once the house was sold, we moved to the coast, to Shorncliffe, a very short walk from the pier and the shark-fenced beach. The pier meant much more fishing, often into the evening, with frequent hauls meaning that we were well fed on fish for days. Sharks of different types were also often hooked, resulting in a bit of a tussle. Shorncliffe School changed the Aussie Rules to Rugby League, and swimming at the Sandgate swimming pool.

Neither school has left a detailed imprint on my learning, apart from the sport and the copperplate writing done at Boondall with old-fashioned nib pens.
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Memories are of being outdoors, exciting my life-long interest in nature in all it’s forms, with a particular interest in insect life which led to an unrequited wish to become an entomologist. Seeing a manta ray leap from the water while fishing on a short pier beside the fishermen’s cooperative on Nundah Creek will stay forever, as will the memory of cockroach races along Shorncliffe Pier. 
​

Homesickness eventually overtook my mother, which drew our four year stay to an end, with another six-week trip back to the UK, the reverse of the original. I think it’s probably true to say that, through the eyes of a child the excitement of the cruise foreshadowed the break up of my parent’s marriage on our return and their eventual hard-fought divorce. That 54-year-old memory is seared into my mind, dulling my memories of my teenage years. The few black and white photos that have survived the travelling and inevitable distribution across family members show shadowed smiles, perhaps based on an awareness of inevitable change.

All part of life’s rich developmental experiences...developing resilience that would be useful later in life.

As a result, I learned, at a young age, how to explore, to be safe and self-reliant, but also to be fully aware of my surroundings, orientated and secure, attributes that I learned to use more especially during my later teens.
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If modelling thinking is a key element of teaching, why do we appear to remove concrete apparatus when the mathematical concepts start to get more difficult?

Based on an earlier blog: https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/talking-maths

It would be interesting to know when the concrete apparatus is withdrawn from the teacher explanation repertoire, as this can be seen as only useful for SEN children, yet, used effectively, can enable even more able learners to make connections through very clear visual manipulation. This can be demonstrated through the use of Dienes base 10 material to explore place value and four rules with decimals to three places, using the 1000 block to represent 1.

How do you know what a child is thinking unless you ask them directly to explain something?

We have become used to Talk for Writing, so why not Talk for Maths? If teachers and children engage in learning dialogue, the teacher can get a better view of how the children are thinking and the learners might become more secure in their willingness to have a go, especially when facing novel situations. We also talk of it being ok to make mistakes, especially in the context of Growth Mindset thinking. I would suggest that an openness to dialogue underpins GM, in that a child should be able to share insecurities and to be able to talk through a resolution. Learning to think and talk is an important stage in being able to do so internally, from the scaffolds developed through discussion and manipulation.

The early days of my teaching career were in a school that focused its approach on the work of two key figures in mathematics; it helped that the head was a County adviser for maths, so we also benefitted from regular visits by his colleagues in the inspectorate.

There were two key elements highlighted, logic and modelling mathematical thinking supported by continuous use of structured materials. The work of Zoltan Dienes was central, embodied in the structured approach created by Harold Fletcher, whose workbooks were the spine for mathematical activities by the children. For both, we were given the key background texts to read and understand. In this way, we avoided falling into the trap of just doing the activity booklets, as both the teacher guides and the senior staff accentuated the central place of concrete apparatus. This, in itself, was accentuated through staff training as a group or 1:1 coaching to need.

From https://www.stem.org.uk/elibrary/resource/30000 an extract of Fletcher’s background.

Harold Fletcher was seen as an outstandingly gifted teacher and educationalist. While he was always a firm believer in children being able to calculate accurately, he found from his own teaching that they could achieve remarkable results in other aspects of mathematics. Harold Fletcher considered the mathematics he wanted children to learn under six strands:

Number Pattern Shape Pictorial Representation Measurement Algebraic Relations.

With the help of a team of experienced teachers and educationalists, Harold Fletcher wove these strands into a teaching sequence which was called Mathematics for Schools. Examples of classroom activities are used to describe the mathematics, complete with teacher dialogue, diagrams and outcomes from recording.

Each element of number, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication along with place value was developed showing the use of concrete materials and styles of notation (many of which would be seen later in the Framework for Teaching Mathematics (NNS; National Numeracy Strategy).

​

Shape begins with an introduction to solid shapes before bringing in 2 dimensional or plane shapes. This is followed with measuring, area, capacity and volume before concluding with symmetry and tessellations. As with all aspects of the series it was stressed that concrete materials should still be used.

Pictorial Representation focused on students, from an early age being able to collect information, record it in pictures and most of all, think about it and use it for further number practice. The foundations for graphs were introduced before dealing with them further in Algebraic relationships. A final section on “How can I help my child?” contained some do’s and don’ts. A pdf of a parent guide is available from the STEM site above.

The second key character in my mathematical education as a teacher was Zoltan Pal Dienes (Pal anglicized to Paul). Looking up some detail, I came across his relatively recent obituary.

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DIENES, Dr. Zoltan Paul Obituary from http://www.zoltandienes.com/obituary/

Age 97, of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, passed away peacefully on January 11, 2014. Zoltan Dienes, internationally renowned mathematician and educator, was both a public figure and a much loved family man.

Zoltan was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1916, son of Paul and Valeria Dienes. His early years were spent in Hungary, Austria, Italy and France. He always had a fascination with mathematics, even hiding behind a curtain to hear his older brother’s maths lesson, for which he was deemed too young!

At 15 he moved to England. He received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1939. Zoltan understood the art and aesthetics of mathematics and his passion was to share this with teachers and children alike.

He was fascinated by the difficulties many people had in learning mathematics and wanted others to see the beauty of it as he did. Consequently, he completed an additional degree in psychology in order to better understand thinking processes. He became known for his work in the psychology of mathematics education from which he created the new field of psychomathematics.

Referred to as a “maverick mathematician”, Zoltan introduced revolutionary ideas of learning complex mathematical concepts in fun ways such as games and dance, so that children were often unaware that they were learning mathematics – they were having a wonderful, exciting, creative time and longing for more. He invented the Dienes Multibase Arithmetic Blocks and many other games and materials that embodied mathematical concepts.
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According to a Montana Mathematics Enthusiast monograph from 2007, “The name of Zoltan P. Dienes stands with those of Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner as a legendary figure whose theories of learning have left a lasting impression on the field of mathematics education…

Dienes’ notion of embodied knowledge presaged other cognitive scientists who eventually came to recognize the importance of embodied knowledge and situated cognition – where knowledge and abilities are organized around experience as much as they are organized around abstractions. Dienes was an early pioneer in what was later to be called sociocultural perspectives and democratization of learning.”

I had a wry smile when I realised that his initials are ZPD, which is immortalised in the work of Vygotsky as the Zone of Proximal Development, something, I am sure that Dienes would have appreciated.

Conservation of number became a shot topic of conversation on social media during the week. It is, without a doubt an underlying concept in the learning of mathematics, akin to chunking of information to make subsequent thinking and manipulation easier.

Definition
Conservation of numbers means that a person is able to understand that the number of objects remains the same even when rearranged.
What is conservation of number?

• Conservation of number - the logical thinking ability to recognise that the numerical value of an object remains invariant with physical rearrangement - is a fundamental "cognitive milestone" during children's development (Crawford, 2008 p. 1). 
  
  
• The concept of conservation was developed by Jean Piaget during the mid-1900s, who claimed it as "concrete operational" and, therefore, "unattainable" until children are of 7 or 8 years old (Halford & Boyle, 1985, p. 165). 

It is interesting visiting schools and classrooms, watching many numeracy lessons. It is often clear that children are regressing to counting from one, which suggests that they have not reached the conservation stage, even when dealing with relatively small numbers. This might be down to lack of modelling, therefore expectation, with high adult oversight and interaction.

Some of the materials being use for modelling may be less helpful, in that they might encourage children to start counting from one, for security.

Multilink or Unifix blocks are common in early classrooms. Where the mathematics takes children beyond tenness, breaking the chain into ten rods can be useful to accentuate that concept. It is heartbreaking to watch a child count, then have to restart the count because they have been interrupted. Making rods of ten would allow for interruptions and a means of continuity.

For this reason, I still have a preference for Dienes base ten equipment, as it allows early access to models of exchange, creating tens then hundreds. It accentuates place value and, using the function machine conceptualisation allows all four rules of number to be modelled effectively. With a visualiser attached to a class IWB, the modelling can be done on a large scale, enabling more to access. I recognise that in the days before such technology, there were visual limitations to modelling to large groups.

From Maths No Problem, the following accent on concrete apparatus seems to fit with this approach.

Concrete, pictorial, abstract (CPA) is a highly effective approach to teaching that develops a deep and sustainable understanding of maths in pupils. Often referred to as the concrete, representational, abstract framework, CPA was developed by American psychologist Jerome Bruner. It is an essential technique within the Singapore method of teaching maths for mastery.

Recently working with ITE trainees, in the conversation the idea of conceptualisation was raised. Using the simple example of 2+2=4, the trainees were challenged to explore the underlying necessary concepts to have a full grasp of the challenge. Twoness, fourness, addition (including synonyms) and equality, or balance, linked to balanced equations, eg 2+2=3+1. It was an eye opener to some.


​Race to the flat
A very simple activity that can be very effective in supporting rapid calculation could be called race to or from the flat.

As long as you have Dienes base 10 materials and dice, this can be developed to cater for a variety of needs.
The rules of each game are simply described.
·         Decide whether it’s a race to or from the flat (100 square). Decide whether, when the dice are thrown, the numbers are added together (any number of dice) or multiplied (two or three dice?).
·         Dienes materials available to each group, plus dice appropriate to the needs of the group.
·         Each child takes turns to throw the dice and calculate the sum or product.
·         This amount is then taken from the general pile and placed in front of the child. The calculation can be recorded eg 3+4=7. This can provide a second layer of checking.
·         If playing race from the flat, the child starts with ten ten rods, then takes an appropriate amount from these.
·         Subsequent rounds see pieces added to the child’s collection; recorded as needed, eg round 2, 5+2=7 (7+7=14; the teacher should see one ten and four ones)
·         The first child to or from the flat is the winner.
Altering the number of dice alters the challenge.

An extension could be a race to the block (1000 cube), or from the block, each child starts with ten 100 squares. If multi-sided dice, or different numbers of dice are available, the challenge alters yet again.

I came across some notes from some years ago, where I sought to put together examples from Dienes to enable colleagues to utilise the system to support their maths teaching.

They open their eyes, they sense the world, they look, they listen, they feel, they taste, they smell.
They see apparent chaos around them with a central feature, a parent’s face, their voice, their sustenance.
They respond, through crying, gradually having some muscle control and smiling, making responsive sounds.
It all takes time, but, somehow, while we can only engage with their externalising, their brains and bodies are developing in very sophisticated ways.
They start to interact with their world; their life journey of experiencing and making some sense of these experiences.
 
Each of us carries around the distillation of our passing experiences, formal, some sustained like years in education, or training programmes, many informal, some fleeting experiences, others based on life, our families in childhood, then our friendship groups and personal decisions about partners and life location.

Every one of these experiences impacts on us, some as they are pleasurable, others because they are traumatic. It can be easier to recall life’s highlights or low points than the more mundane aspects of our lives, as the significant events are our life “landmarks”; transitions almost. While our memories do alter over time and recreating earlier life can sometimes lead to embellishment, at any point in time, we are the sum of the parts.

Recently exploring my earlier life through looking at locality maps, it was clear to me that in geographical terms, the bulk of my life to the age of seven was restricted to a distance of around one mile from home, with occasional school holidays spent with more distant family. From the age of five, this was often independent and outside with friends; perhaps a luxury for today’s children.

My world expanded exponentially when we became £10 Poms, sailing to Australia via stops allowing visits to Pompeii, Athens, Aden, Columbo, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, followed by the train journey to Brisbane. Five and a half weeks of watching out for dolphins, whales and flying fish. Playing deck quoits and other novel games. Watching the sellers with their fully laden, colourful canoes arrive beside the ship with their trinkets hoping for a sale, goods and money exchanged via ropes and baskets. Children and adults prepared to dive for coins thrown from the boat. It was interesting at the time, although my adult self can see it as demeaning. It was certainly “eye opening”. There was a very different world from the seemingly grey experiences that had preceded it.

Life has certainly happened since then. I have blogged about it, highs and lows, as I remember them. I won’t rehearse the features now, but it is worth reflecting that life memories are filtered through forgetting, as well as remembering.

On 13.09.18 I tweeted that I was reflecting on the following: -
We’re all constantly creating our internal models, developing them as new information appears. Challenging this creates internal tension; destabilising for some. Learning how to accommodate and adapt to circumstance has enabled ideas to progress; a life skill.

This followed a day when I worked with ITT trainees, followed by a session with their mentors. Within the room of some twenty nine trainees, there was clear evidence that some elements of their new experiences were causing internal tensions; the personal, getting to know their context and everyone and everything within it that might impact on their professional lives; the demands of studying and running a household, some with much reduced incomes; the detail of the academic information that they were receiving, some after a significant gap since their degree. Accommodation and adaptation take time, which, at this point in their existence is at a premium.

Children are learning to take in information, learning about learning, at the same time as having to accommodate to a multi-faceted world. There is a truism that young children are naturally inquisitive, prepared to try things out, familiarising themselves with novel experiences, through what we often call “play”, which they then describe as “fun”.

As an adult, I often engage in familiarisation activity; a new camera, smart phone or laptop requires familiarisation. For a while, I “play” with them to see what they can do, in my case, using prior knowledge that comes from earlier experiences with the same technology. I am sure that my camera, smart phone and laptop can do significantly more than my current uses, but, for now each serves the purposes for which I want them.

If I am listening to a speaker, as I will at an education conference, or in a university lecture from a colleague, I can be distracted by a single point that triggers a line of thinking; it resonates or challenges a previously held piece of understanding. This may lead to a bit of note making or doodling an idea trying not to forget the thought from “the moment”, which can happen with just trying to listen and hold onto everything that has been said. The single nugget can form the basis for further reflection, discussion or reading, leading to a change in my understanding.
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In the same way, school lessons offer a similar scenario with new information being shared hour by hour. The difference could be that in school it is every hour, whereas an adult has the luxury of taking or making “time out to think”. Children in school don’t necessarily have the opportunity to reflect, unless it is built into the plans. It is to be hoped that every lesson offers something of quality to think about, to talk about and perhaps to make notes, or write about in order to remember.

In the early days of school learning, learning to order and organise thoughts is a key element, which is supported by teacher organisation and presentation of the different curriculum elements, ensuring that necessary links are made overt between aspects of learning, so that children are not left floundering with the bits of a jigsaw but no image within which to place the pieces. It is to be hoped, too, that learning in school might lead to extension in the home; appropriately set home activities can extend vocabulary or lead to further discovery. See talk homework.

It is incumbent on the adult generation to offer life opportunities to children, in and out of school, that allow them to participate in the experience, to explore with whatever is their current capability, and to articulate their thinking, enabling an adult to engage further with questions or clarification. The act of learning can be “fun” to children. They need to learn that learning is not something that is done to them, but that they are active participants in constructing their own schemas.

As a headteacher, I used this ideal as the basis for the school teaching and learning policy, which is on the blogsite. It was simplified into one diagram, as follows.  
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At any point in time, we are the product of our experiences. If they are broad and supported by articulate adults prepared to unpick inconsistencies and add further value to the experience, the child can thrive, with the opposite also having an element of truth, although we may have to accept that children can succeed "despite their home/school experience".

If a child lives in a knowledge/language-rich environment they will experience and learn to use a wide range of conceptual words. The Bristol language studies of 1971 led by Gordon Wells showed the impact on less rich environments. It has implications for the language rich environment of schools, too, especially if the home contexts are known to be less rich.

Schools and parents, within their communities, are partners in bringing children into their world. Learning to work effectively together is essential.

When a book starts with a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who happens to have been one of my heroes, there’s a fair chance that whatever follows will be interesting.

That quote runs as follows, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find why they are falling in.”

This is an incredibly simple, yet powerful message; find the source of the problem rather than always dealing with the outcomes.

Jarlath tells the stories of his early days in teaching, openly admitting to making mistakes, but thinking about them and learning from them. He reflects on much early advice that any bad behaviour was always the “choice” of the child, that there were “simple” ways to ensure good behaviour, such as seating plans, for the class to devise their own rules, don’t smile until Christmas.

The evolution of Jarlath’s thinking, through many described episodes of having to question why some children were causing problems, working patiently with his team when a Head Teacher, building professional in colleagues and personal capacity in children. He quotes the title of Paul Dix’ book; When the adults change, everything changes and Linda J Graham’s Queensland study that found that self-regulation has a great bearing on a child’s educational outcome; it’s the learning to self-regulate that can cause additional social problems.

His introduction ends with a short series of things that he has learned over his almost twenty years of experience: -

·         Some children regard schools as risky, unsafe places to be, where failure is inevitable and painful and must be avoided at all costs.
·         Lasting behaviour change takes time.
·         Learning needs to be an intrinsically rewarding experience.
·         Negative behaviour communicates an unmet need.
·         Behavioural difficulties can be regarded as demonstrations of skills gaps that are getting in the way of a child being successful.
·         Sometimes we choose actions, sanctions and punishments that only meet the neds of the adults. We do this in order to say that we dealt with a situation, but, in reality, the situation remains, at best unchanged. At worst, damaged.
·         Time invested in children is never wasted.

Getting to know the children for whom you are responsible as a class teacher is fundamental to making appropriate decisions at the right time. Early Years and Primary teachers get to know their children very well, very quickly, simply because within a week, they will have worked with their class for almost 25 hours. At most, a Secondary specialist might see a class for 5 hours, some will be an hour or less a week. This will inevitably create a different dynamic in relationships.

The social demands of school will put some children into an anxious state. For adults to be aware of this and to be able to offer support can be the difference between sinking or swimming. Recognising that “they” are not a homogenous group is a first step. “Spotting and dealing” is an important element of teacher awareness. Personally, I have used the term “behaviour whisperer”; getting to a child in time to offer advice and guidance to head off a developing issue. Too often we are just too late and have to deal with the outcomes before the child need.

Some children need help in articulating their feelings; having someone who will actually listen can be slightly threatening if it is a novel situation. Jarlath uses anecdotes to amplify situations that he had faced and his behaviour within and after the situation. Teasing out the reality can be time consuming, something that can be a luxury in a busy school and we have to be aware that behaviour issues cause teacher stress. For that reason, it is essential that whole school systems are very clear, communicated at every opportunity and followed through by every member of the school staff, office, caretaking and lunchtime staff included. Civilised social situations are a team effort.

Some children may need a form of mentoring; someone who is interested in and has time for them. Jarlath quotes Carl Rogers; Show children unconditional positive regard. Our personal manner can determine how some children will behave for us.

Jarlath’s book is an excellent review of the multiple factors that make up a complex school environment including rules and expectations, motivation and rewards, sanctions and punishments, restorative approaches, partnerships with parents, and a chapter on SEN and behaviour.

His last chapter is a reflective challenge to one’s own style, with a refocusing on behaviour as a social interaction, environmental factors in the school’s control including the behaviour policy, ability to adapt to the needs of children in certain situations. He also challenges potential misuse of behaviour policies, with a focus on SEN children and the impact of involving senior staff purely for punishment purposes.

Schools need to be purposeful places if children are to succeed. Internal systems should enable the highest level of success for each child. A “we’re all in this together” approach, including parents, shares the load and offers hope to some vulnerable children. And it’s worth having in mind that we all get things wrong some of the time; no-one is perfect.

Jarlath offers insights, but also, throughout each chapter, points for further reflection on a personal as well as an institutional level. This is a book that would benefit all schools, to be read in conjunction with Paul Dix.
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Jarlath finishes with a quote from Dr Kevin Maxwell; Our job is to teach the children we have. Not the ones we would like to have. Not the ones we used to have. Those we have right now. All of them.

Teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin; on one side, the teacher, the other is the learner. In one lesson the emphasis might be on the teacher to share essential information, in another it is for the learners to demonstrate current achievement. It’s a dynamic, fluid scenario.
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Everything that is meant to happen in a classroom is determined by the teacher, as it always has been.

The teacher is the lead thinker in the classroom, responsible for the analyse-plan-do-review-record cycle as it affects each learner.

Looking at any records that are passed from school to school or internally, is an essential start point for thinking.

The teacher is the organiser of the space, resources and interpreter of the curriculum (knowledge), divided up into appropriate sized chunks to offer on the journey. This journey needs to consider the whole year of journeys, ensuring that all end up at the planned destination. It’s no good starting off in the hopes of getting through everything. Some slippage is inevitable; schools are very good places for creating detours. If it’s caused by bad planning, that’s the teacher responsibility, not the learners. It is imperative to note developing gaps, to seek opportunities to “bridge the gap” at an appropriate time. (See planning blog)

Their ability to weave a good narrative, to speak articulately, using and extending accessible vocabulary and in a register that enables the learners to be partners in the development of their own interpretation. Artefacts, images and modelling are essential aids in supporting learners in creating their own working images; dual coding.

The teacher is also the team leader, especially if there are other adults involved; they need to know what’s expected of them, working under the direction of the teacher.

It’s the teacher plan that determines how everything will run. The teacher is also the determinant of appropriate behaviours for learning in that space. They can appear, on occasion, to be judge, jury and executioner; it is a position of some responsibility.

The learners, at the outset, don’t know the journey, so they need to be shown an outline, an overview, so that all subsequent parts have a logical place, with checks at the beginning that they are equipped to make a start, followed by regular progress/retention checks on the way that they are “keeping up”, or that they are “getting it”.

There are different structural demands within different pieces of work; an example might be the difference between a letter and a report. Each has structural constituent elements that need to be demonstrated within an acceptable finished product. These could be considered as the “success criteria” for each activity; what the teacher is looking for as an outcome.

Using visualisers during a lesson, to show what you are seeking, by using child examples, is an excellent means of sharing emerging quality, especially if it is always supported by further developmental discussion; modelling improvement.

There is subject specific knowledge. If this has to be retained for future reference/use, it can be useful to create aides-memoire, memory joggers, that attach to the edge of books/pages, that can be flipped out to need, especially if spellings are challenging. They can become, over time, if learners are shown how to be ordered and organised, useful aids for revision; personal knowledge organisers.

Understanding whether a learner has mastered essential knowledge is often judged through oral or written responses. Where this demonstrates language needs these can also be highlighted on flip sheets; eg write answers in complete sentences.

Flip sheets offer continuity of expectation, clarity of focus and brings the learner into the centre of their learning. (See blog on exercise books as personal organisers)

Teachers can’t remember the learning needs of every child in every teaching group. This is exaggerated in Secondary, where 200 plus children might be seen in a week.

The closer that a learner need can be tracked over time, the more chance there is that individuals will make progress.

It shouldn’t be down to a flip of the coin.
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So, to summarise
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·         Plan long, medium and short with different emphases on what’s recorded and share with supporting adults. Organise the “knowledge journey” developmentally.
·         Order and organise space, resources and consider the available time.
·         Pitch and pace each lesson to known needs of the curriculum and the learners.
·         Set learning tasks that provide some challenge.
·         Share outcomes as learner models of expectation within and between lessons.
·         Evaluate throughout, ensuring continuity of expectation.
·         Checks en route, memory, use and application in challenge.
·         Simple personal record systems of developing vocabulary and presentation needs.
·         Books to become personal learning records.
·         Know your children as fully as possible, recognising that you can’t see exactly what they are thinking.
 

Education Jig?

For a number of years, I was involved in folk music, either as a bodhran (Irish drum) player, or through teaching. It was a part of the physical curriculum and an after-school club. The dances were learned and rehearsed with village events in mind; harvest, Christmas, spring and summer fairs. On occasion, they allowed for sharing with our exchange schools, so everyone was able to join together, making mistakes and generally enjoying a shared activity. Despite having two left feet myself; a friend who was a regular caller for ceilidhs would always make sure that I was alright, which was kind, but also very embarrassing; a bit like being singled out by the teacher.

Teaching dance came easier, as it involved giving clear instructions and the ability to count. One that comes to mind is the farmers jig, an eight couple, 32 bar, longways dance, four boys in one line facing four girls. There are four key parts

A1 Bars 1-4 Facing up, partners hold inside hands and take 8 steps forward.
            5-8 All turn towards partner to face down the set and take 8 steps back to place. 
A2             1-4 Taking two hands with partner, all take 8 slip steps to the men’s left.
                  5-8 All take 8 slip steps back to place. 
B1             1-4 Couples 1 and 2, couples 3 and 4 right hand star; 8 steps.
                  5-8 Couples 1 and 2, couples 3 and 4 left hand star; 8 steps.   
B2             1-8 All face up the set, Couple 1 separate and cast out on their own side, the lady leading the ladies whilst the man leads the men, everyone dances down to the bottom of the set.
Couple 1 meet and make a bridge in the last couple’s place, the other couples meet their partner, take inside hands and dance under the bridge back to their lines, having progressed one place.
[N.B. As the others dance under the bridge, the dance starts again immediately]
Repeat the dance with a new top couple each time.  

This dance has been around for many years. although it is a very traditional dance, it will have been interpreted through different tunes over that time, some bands drawing from the traditional tune set, others creating their own 32 bar tunes to offer variety; variations on a theme, but it is essentially the same dance, learned by the caller and repeated over time.

It can be a bit like that in education. There are certain things that have been common features throughout my career. If you are sharing information, or giving instructions, the transmission is through direct instruction, largely via the teacher’s voice, supplemented by imagery or artefacts. The imagery might include video stimulus from an external “expert”, such as David Attenborough, enabling something like the Amazon rainforest to be brought to life.

The interpretation of the instruction will inevitably lead to variation, in retention and quality of performance. Keeping with the dance analogy, timing is everything. The “caller” or teacher has to keep a close eye on timing, or everything goes awry, with inevitable slippage and potential disaster as an outcome.

However, once the basics have been mastered, I found that it was possible to challenge the children to come up with variations on the dance, to personalise it to our school. In that way, the initial walk up and down might become boys making arches and crossing over the girls, for a count of eight, repeated with girls making arches. The 32 bars of stars might be altered to right and left arm turns or doh-si-dohs. Within the basic theme, variation allowed the creation of minor variation, which is inevitably how we have such a variety of folk dances, even based around the 32-bar theme, simply because of the maths; 2*16; 4*8; 2*8 +4*4 or just 32.

Some while ago I wrote a blog about virtuosity and how that meant learning to play your own tunes; I could have said dance your own dance. Virtuosity in teaching means trying things out, taking stock of those elements in need of some reflective improvement, trying the changes in practice and refining responses over time. It is almost as simple as that, although I am very aware that current school life doesn’t always allow time for personal reflection, nor for picking a colleague’s brain to support the thinking.

Like any good folk dance caller, a teacher needs to know the dance, the tunes, to be aware of timings and be able to coach those who are in evident need, if the assembled participants are to perform. If they can, the feel-good factor is invariably high, with success making for positive feelings afterwards and once you have mastered the basics, there are many more, really complex movements to try...

You can watch some children, including Argentinian and Spanish visitors, taking part on this you tube clip.

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Map via Google Maps

Browsing the map above, I was able to consider some of my memories for my life up to the age of seven, when, as a family, we became £10 Poms and sailed off to Australia, to return nearly four years later via a homesick mother. Perhaps another blog...mapping childhood to eleven?

Looking at the map, it is interesting to note that from an early age, perhaps four-ish, the cul de sac nature of our road, which was a bit of a hill and very few people owning cars, meant that we were able to play with friends in the road, easily able to get out of the way if a car was moving. Back alleys and easy access, meant that the large field behind the road also became part of our playground, enabling us to make dens, climb trees and generally be independent. Falling from a tree and landing in a nettle patch showed that I could come up in huge lumps, but, apart from that and a few scrapes and grazes, it was an outside existence, meaning that we were out of the hair of our parents.

Bury Meadow meant kick-about football, with the jumpers for goalposts and as many a side as wanted to play, usually after school on light evenings, after tea. Returning home at dusk, because no-one had a watch, we had time to have a wash, a cup of milk and a biscuit, clean teeth and off to bed. It also occasionally meant arguments and fallings out and agreements to meet again the following evening and mean to keep it.

School was St Sidwell’s Primary, which was the basis of “The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler”, by Gene Kemp. Her daughter apparently was a school contemporary, which I found out many years later, as my class, in 1987, wrote letters to her and she replied with a signed copy.

It seemed, as a five-year-old walking alone, to be a very long way to school. Perhaps it was having to pass by Exeter prison, the army barracks, loiter on the bridge over the railway bridge to watch the steam trains pass or cross the busier roads. There was a parent line on the playground, with day one meaning a teacher meeting families as they arrived and sending us children to a specific class line, to troop into school together. School memories include outside toilets and little boys seeing how high they could reach; PE outside on rush mats; being sent to read outside in the sunshine -Janet and John- because I had finished my work early; having a piece of writing about science printed in a school booklet; having the school bully push me against a wall during playtime causing a scar on my forehead that is still there. It was a very happy time, though. I enjoyed school and it was a place that encouraged and fostered a love of learning across a wide range of experiences.

We got a pair of mice from a kind teacher, to have as pets. Of course, they breed exponentially, so finding people to give the resulting offspring to became more and more difficult.

We took in lodgers, who had the second reception room, some through the British Council; Bhati Vadgama, Mr Offer and Miss Alawi are names that come to mind. Miss Alawi’s father was Sheikh Alawi, who was the head of the scouting movement in Zanzibar. He took us to the cinema, but not on Saturday morning, to see a proper film, which was a real treat. Wonderful, generous people, who added significantly to our life experiences.

Saturday mornings were children’s cinema; "We come along on Saturday morning, greeting everybody with a smile…" so started the song that started the screening with the “bouncing ball” on the screen that took over from a man with a pointer.

There was a corner shop at the corner of Hoopern Street which became the happy recipient of our returned glass bottles and the provider of a small bag of sweets, at four a penny, or a wrap of sherbet, to take on our adventures. We often came home with coloured tongues.

We were independent quite young. Playing didn’t cost anything, perhaps apart from the cost of a plastic football. There was a lot of sharing and swapping, so toys and tea cards exchanged allowed access to a wider range of opportunities, although inappropriate swaps did sometimes upset parents. A chemistry set for Christmas was a real highlight, but not when the potassium permanganate solution spilled on the mantlepiece and me.

Childhood is a time of exploration, of making sense of the world around, geographically, seeking landmarks to offer orientation. Wandering around, with friends, allowed this to be a reality. Being responsible for getting myself to school added another dimension. Childhood necessarily has to be different now; the world is busier and, in certain environments, perhaps less safe. Car travel can divorce children from their environment, enhancing their dislocation from the real world.

So, I’d hope that, as young children, they would walk their locality with parents, talking about landmarks, constructing their internal maps, so that, when the time comes, they can safely negotiate the roads and get themselves to specific places and back safely, alone or with friends. To me, it is also the beginning of an interest in geography, enhanced through a variety of relatively simple school experiences, such as making sketch maps of their walk to school, mapping the school grounds or giving instructions of how to get from one part of the school to another, developing an appropriate vocabulary.

Keeping children safe means giving them independence skills.
 

Picture; Old man seated on a chair by Rembrandt, National Gallery, London

Children’s relationships with grandparents will vary, depending on their geographical distance; some will be very close, others more distant, which alters how they might interact. I have many memories of my paternal grandmother, with whom we lived when my parents separated and divorced, and early life memories of my Welsh grandparents with whom we often spent weeks during school holidays. Each of them added to the sum of my existence, either through proximity or quality extended time that allowed walking and talking. None of them was particularly well off, but all were generous with their time.

They form a part of “my story”, my personal history and a rich vein of inspiration. I learned what resilience was from my gran; click to read the blog, whereas my love of nature came from my miner Uncle Don, who would walk the hills with us after a night in the pits.

I used the following short story many times during my career, within PSHE type activities, looking at the inter-relationships between generations.

The story, written by Lynn Bottomley when she was aged ten, appears in the book Wordscapes, by Barry Maybury, OUP, 1970, a book that was given to me by my first ever mentee, in 1978. Short stories are an excellent thing to have on a “just in case” basis, for those five minutes that often occur, sometimes at short notice.

Georgie and Grandpa

Two of the most interesting characters I have met are my little brother Georgie, aged two months and my great Grandfather, aged ninety-seven years and two months.

I am interested in both.

To my amazement their needs are similar and yet I would have thought that Grandpa would have had fewer needs than Georgie. After all, Georgie has need to develop the habits of taking care of himself, whereas Grandpa has already learned these things, yet I have heard mummy say that Georgie is too young to eat meat and Grandpa is now too old for it.

Georgie must be treated with care and gentleness because his bones are weak through lack of age – Grandpa’s bones are weak from over-age.

The house must be quiet when Georgie sleeps because he wakes so easily. Grandpa always goes early to bed and otherwise spends much of his time dozing in his rocking chair.

Grandpa has outgrown the use of a comb and Georgie has not yet grown old enough to need one.

Georgie has not yet the need to a tooth-brush. Grandpa stopped cleaning his last tooth four years ago and cannot manage with the new-fangled ones.

Georgie is quite inactive having not yet the strength or ability to walk by himself. Similarly, Grandpa is unable to walk because he has “screws”!

Little Georgie is without understanding and wisdom and my grandfather is past the age of having to understand; his attitude to be wise, as he was a few years ago, is now gone with his memory.

Sounds mean nothing to either of them. Grandfather cannot hear them and Georgie is not yet interested in where they come from o what they mean.

Sometimes Grandpa utters little mumbling noises to himself which mean nothing to either himself or anybody else, unless little Georgie understands them because he also does the same thing; perhaps they are talking to each other in a language of their own!

Both need warmth and are well wrapped up in shawls. Grandpa sucks his pipe while Georgie sucks his thumb.
Perhaps that’s what adults mean when they say, “He is a chip of the old block!”

Oh, I forgot to say that Grandpa’s name is George…

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Image from Conrad Blakemore; review in the Chichester Observer

Currently running at Chichester, in the Minerva Theatre is a three-hander play by Michael Frayn, premiered in 1998, based on events from some 75 years ago, when two giants of theoretical physics, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Patricia Hodge as Margrethe Bohr, Charles Edwards as Werner Heisenberg and Paul Jesson as Neils Bohr kept the narrative tight, as was demanded from the script, ensuring that the audience was kept in thrall.

It was challenging, as much because it referenced many historical events and key people, so could be hard to keep up.

It was fascinating because it showed how ideas were being shared, formally through published works and meetings among this eminent group, where publication and talks were seen as opportunities to share current insights and to allow others to question and challenge.

In so doing, other individuals, such as Rudolf Peierls, Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrodinger and Max Born, to work on specific details and to take credit for each of their articulations. All of them were detailing parts of a whole that many actually feared; the potential for, and the impact of, splitting atoms. On their own, each part was benign.

Frighteningly, as some had postulated, combined as they ultimately were, with a number of expatriate nationalities, at Los Alamos, under Robert Oppenheimer, they created the atomic bomb.

The play demonstrated that the younger German scientist was mentored in his early career by Bohr, seeing him as a father figure and pre-eminent in their field. Heisenberg returned to Germany at the start of WW2 and oversaw elements of uranium enrichment, with the ultimate aim of securing a nuclear warhead. He knew the worth of Bohr and resulted in an abortive visit, in 1941, to see Bohr in Denmark, to try to elicit some information or his help in his project. Rebuffed, it isn’t clear if he was helpful in Bohr’s escape to the USA in 1942.

It was a play that brought the protagonists together in death, to reminisce about the earlier meeting and to seek to elicit the truth behind Heisenberg’s visit. Bohr adopted his mentor role and encouraged a number or iterations of the sequence of events, to help Heisenberg to clearly articulate his reasoning. This was interesting, as it demonstrated the potential of one person to help another to clarify their thinking, simply through encouraging them to talk through inconsistencies, or areas that are less clear.

This approach allowed Heisenberg to propose the Uncertainty Principle; asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables can be known. Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems, that is, without changing something in a system. Heisenberg and Bohr undertook “thought experiments”, where they sought to visualise the effect of what they were seeking to capture in mathematical formulae, often resorting to long walks in order to do so uninterrupted.

One key message that I took that would have resonance in education would be the importance of a “talk partner”, not just for the children, as can often be seen in day to day practice, but also for teachers at every stage. Coaching and mentoring, if sensitively handled, allows for clarity of thought and articulation, the process ultimately leading to increased understanding and sometimes new areas for consideration.

The second key message would be that collegiate thinking or thought experiment, enables expertise in specific areas to ultimately be combined to enhance the whole. Each of us sees the world in slightly different ways. We learn from and through each other; the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Education is not about creating the atomic bomb.

It is about one generation helping a new generation to learn to take in information, to think, to articulate their current thinking, enabling an engaged other to reflect back or question this thinking, to seek to help each child to continue on their journey, their own “thought experiments”, which ultimately is a contributor to how each of us develops as learners in our own right.
   

Let’s try to put some things in perspective. Schools, in England and Wales, will soon reopen, teachers will receive their classes for the next academic year and the annual diary will start and pan out, plus or minus a few hiccups.
There are four areas of SEN description in the 2014 framework

• Communication and Interaction
• Cognition and Learning
• Social, Emotional and Mental Health
• Sensory and/or Physical needs.

The vast majority of children will arrive with their past educational history well documented, showing their earlier achievements and some areas where there appear to be continuing concerns.

A very few will arrive with an Education Health and Care Plan, EHCP, in place, with specific needs identified and methodologies and support required for them to achieve the needs. This may, or may not, include some statement of dedicated teaching time or adult support.

Others will already be highlighted on the school SEN register, with earlier needs identified. That these last two groups are known ahead of time allows the receiving teacher to prepare and plan, anticipating their ongoing need within the class plans.

There may well be some children whose needs only become apparent during the new academic year. This could be as a result of external trauma, resulting in unexpected responses to learning situations, or it could be an unspotted earlier need that becomes apparent as challenges become harder to accommodate.

If, after a couple of weeks back in class, with new children, one or two are causing some unforeseen concern, it is important that every class teacher and additional adult recognises their place as front-line eyes and ears of T&L need.

Changes to the organisation of SEND provision have been in train for the past few years, during which time I have blogged, as I have come across useful information. These blogs are archived within my blog, see Contents but I will refer to aspects to provide an introduction.

In this post, I am not looking to describe the range of individual needs that might be encountered. There are many expert colleagues who are much more able to offer insights into the specifics of individualised SEN(D). I have focused on issues as they affect mainstream school teachers, which can be summarised as developing a coherent, investigative approach that can fit with normal classroom practice, which is premised on the need to look, to reflect and record concerns to inform deeper conversations.

SEN is an area of teaching and learning where teacher expertise can easily be challenged.

A feeling of vulnerability, identifying a personal need can create a tension. There is always the possibility of meeting a child whose needs fall outside previous experience; the truism that “you’ve met one child with autism, so you’ve met one child with autism” can exemplify many areas of SEN.

For known needs, it is essential that earlier information is available, read and planned to be actioned within the new class organisation, and where needed, specific advice sought, considered and planned.

With any new class, there is a period of what I would call “calibration or sometimes recalibration”, the teacher challenge in learning being more generic, based on earlier reading of records and possibly earlier experiences with that year group. Outcomes show greater detail “in the moment”, resulting in more tailored responses, questioning and feedback/guidance. Outcomes also enable finer tuning of challenge levels and responses, as individual needs become apparent.

On entry into the formal learning situation, the staff eyes and ears should be alert to issues, noting down things that are said and done, to ensure that future reflections can be based on pattern finding or evidence across a range of issues. Evidence finding is the bread and butter of teacher life, in terms of interactions, questioning, feedback, support and outcomes.

General statements like, “x cannot read”, are unhelpful to discussion.

Investigating and sharing specifically what a child can and cannot do can lead to focused intervention, rather than general approaches.  Leaving a child in a situation where they are clearly failing, are seen to be failing and knowing that this is the case, is destructive to the child and to the teacher. Acknowledging specific issues and seeking the specific means to address the issues demonstrates a positive, professional approach.

There is no doubt that, when a teacher encounters a child who does not fit the “normal mould” that they are used to, that they may experience unease. Once a child enters school, it is less likely that concerns about potential special needs will be unknown, raised by parents or professionals, which hopefully have been followed up and investigated, so that, by the time a teacher encounters the child there may already be records with substantial supportive information available.

The journey to SEN decisions is likely to be a phased affair, especially with regard to learning issues and possibly over an extended timescale for many children, much to the frustration of parents and teachers.

“Getting a handle” on the problem can be a case of more structured investigation that may eventually lead to diagnosis, prescription and deciding on courses of action.

It is really important that teachers and other adults in class note down their concerns, from their earliest awareness, so that timely discussion with professional colleagues can distil patterns, suggest alternative courses of action and also avoid delay should there be a need to refer to an external form of support, eg the school Educational Psychologist (EP). Unless there is a track record of concern, the EP may well request that the classteacher undertakes activities that have already been tried, but the outcomes not recorded. This can add to unnecessary delays in addressing key issues.

Action is also embedded in classroom relationships and these need to be carefully considered. All children need teacher time, as they are the key strategic decision maker.

Children seem to know where they are in comparison with their peers. They can judge for themselves those who can achieve in an area and can also highlight what they can’t achieve, across a wide range of subjects. This can lead to self-esteem issues, to go along with their understanding of a learning struggle. Children know when they are being given easier things to do, so presenting appropriately challenging activities, with commensurate scaffolded support is important. Allocating a teaching assistant to an issue can create a mutually dependent relationship, with a child’s independence and decision-making capacity being limited by constant adult support. It needs careful oversight and review.

The children with the greatest need, need the best teaching.

The class teacher must teach these groups or individuals, to ensure quality teaching is available to them and also to deepen their understanding of the child(ren)’s needs.

Where this is the case, reference to teachers of earlier years can provide pedagogical and practical advice. In many ways, teaching standard 2, progress and outcomes, is THE key standard to support teacher understanding. What is the anticipated learning journey of children from early years through to year 6? While we know that learning is never linear, concerns about a child’s learning is often judged against such an expectation.

This crib sheet at the header might support record collection and prepare the ground for discussion. The centre box suggests an approach.

Teacher judgement plays a significant part. If a teacher has never met an issue, or makes simplistic inappropriate judgements, then the subsequent learning journey for the child will become more complex, with the potential for regression, rather than progress, as the relationships can become strained.

So, from a classroom perspective, I’d offer the following:-

·         Start a RADIO* file on individuals who are raising worries. *Record of Actions, Discussions or Decisions, Interventions and Outcomes.
·         Annotate plans regularly with individual concerns.
·         Annotate exercise books with appropriate supportive commentary.
·         Make diary notes in the RADIO file to deduce any pattern arising.
·         All adults become “spotters”. Keep a post it note record of things that happen in the lesson, to add to the RADIO. Ask any support adults to do the same.
·         The record should allow the teacher to create a proper narrative, with action, outcome and judgements/decisions, refined actions. There should be a record of planning adaptation.

At this point, the class teacher can take the beginnings of a case study to the SENCo, thus avoiding the generic conversation that starts, “X has a problem with…” or “Y just doesn’t get it…” which then needs to go through the process outlined above. By adopting this approach early, and similar systems are embedded in many schools, valuable time for vulnerable learners is saved.

Neither the class teacher, nor the SENCo is not being asked to be a diagnostician, but an investigator and describer of learning, behaviours and outcomes. The TA or other adult support can provide additional insights into issues. The broadest view available will support decision making.

Stepping up a notch.

If the teacher has got to the point where the child’s needs exceed their expertise or experience, they may feel the need to involve another adult, an experienced colleague such as the SENCo, to seek advice and solutions. There is nothing wrong in saying that you need help with a specific child’s needs. By asking for advice, broader school awareness is raised.
This stage was previously called School Action (Plus), and may involve deeper exploration of the issues supported by a range of external expertise, all of which will be subject to reports to the school, enhancing the available evidence.

I’d expect some kind of agreed internal plan to be developed, with the focus on actions, from the teacher, to seek to effect specific change; to keep a further diary of interventions, and outcomes, over relatively short timescales. These Personal Action Plans need to be seen embedded in plans and visible in practice. They should be clear descriptors, accessible and shared with parents at each stage. The focus on classroom action is essential. Progress should be capable of being measured in some form. They were called Individual Education Plans, IEPs, but could sometimes appear to be disregarded in practice.

Regular reviews and refinements eventually build to a more substantial case study file, which is likely to be then supported with reports from a range of additional professionals.
These files start with the teacher spotting and recording needs over a time scale, investigating anomalies, so that the support systems around them can offer advice based on detail.
That’s teaching…
 
SEND is often linked to Inclusion practice
Inclusion can sometimes be seen as an add-on to “normal” teaching activity.
It is possible to argue that inclusion, far from being an add-on,
is an integral part of practice,
explicit in the detail of the standards for teachers.
Teachers will go to work each day to secure the best opportunities
for each and every child in their class.
Inclusion occurs in the best of teaching experiences.
 
Inclusion is not something that is done to people.
It is an aspect of ethos, a principle and, as such, exists or it doesn’t.
An inclusive environment is one where people matter,
their needs and aspirations are not only known but are also supported.
Therefore, it is a college of individuals which cares for each other,
the collegiate approach.
Inclusion is an ethos based on love and care,
with the opposite extreme leading to exclusion and a child being ostracised.
An inclusive ethos should allow individuals to express themselves
and, at times, to articulate different opinions.
Openness and articulacy can support the resolution of issues more easily.
Inclusive organisations often support discussion and resolution
through mediation and allowing advocacy for vulnerable members.
 
All school staff are the eyes and ears of the organisation.
In this approach, early identification of concerns,
such as behaviour change, physical hurt and absence
can lead to early intervention, by the most suitable means,
sometimes external to the school.
School staff have a responsibility to keep children safe.
Intervention can be testing for the adult,
but to ignore warning signs puts everyone at risk.
 
Every child is unique, demonstrably so, educationally,
physically, emotionally, socially, though heritage and life experience.
It is possible to perceive thirty different needs in a class of thirty children.
That puts a strain on a teacher’s organisational abilities
and their ability to engage with each individual.
However, differentially challenging activities can lead to deeper engagement
with small groups and individuals, where whole class teaching cannot.
 
Differentiation has been a significant challenge to teachers,
as it implies the need to plan for several layers of ability within groups.
Some schools organise in sets or streams, but it is arguable that even in sets there
is a continuum of ability, even if it is narrowed.
One only has to ask the simple question, “What’s the point in being bright in this classroom?”
to see that some may not be sufficiently challenged.
Challenge implies expectation,
where the teacher has analysed the child’s needs and can see what that the next
learning step is.
Expectation can lead to aspiration,
with targets being set slightly higher, but with support.
Teachers need to be aware that task
completion does not automatically mean success in learning,
but the combination of learning processes with positive outcomes is energising
to both the child and the teacher.
We all want the “light-bulb moment”.
 
Inclusion should imply personalised approaches to learning and teaching,
with individualised challenges for children
to enable them to become engaged learners and active producers,
rather than consumers.
 
Assessment, analysis and reflection are embedded within practice,
supporting individual and institutional progress.
The mantra for each school and each individual within a school should be,
 
“Inclusion is what we do.”


More reading?
​Practical SEN(D) Linking ideas into a coherent whole.
SEND 2014; possible class teacher Crib sheet.

If there is one word that I’d like to see feature more during the coming academic year, it would be challenge.

Challenge in itself holds together all the disparate elements that appear to make up the teaching lexicon, including resource and space need, differentiation, activity, thinking, talking, engagement, intervention, evaluation and assessment and resilience.

Challenge, in different forms, describes the purpose of action; trying to do something, which may be just a little harder or different to anything that has been tried before.

When faced with a problem, a difficult task, this can test earlier knowledge, by bringing to the fore earlier efforts and successes. The comparison between earlier and current needs can enable the practicalities of overcoming the perceived obstacle to become clearer, with a series of practical tasks to be accomplished. Problems can then become achievable. If, during the course of action, including dialogue, it becomes clear that the proposed solution, although initially decided as the best course of action, is going awry, the evaluation of the current need might lead to decisions to stall, to review, to seek additional information from external expertise, before continuing. These actions become useful life skills.

Working together, in itself, can be a challenge, in that collective decisions might be subject to disagreement, including opposition. The ability to negotiate through difficulty is another human need, occasionally requiring a moderating voice to be available.

There is a simple question that, to me, indicates the quality of challenge; what have they got to think about? This can vary from relatively simple recall of earlier facts through to dealing with an overarching challenge.

Activity may hold some challenges and there are some activities that have to be in place as practice tasks in order to undertake more significant challenges. In earlier incarnations of the Design Technology scheme in the National Curriculum, these were resource tasks. The principle can be applied across all curriculum areas. Of course, there is an easy way to ensure some level of concentration on these tasks. Simply ensure that children are aware of the purpose; we’re doing this SO THAT we can use it in the next challenge.

Resources, including space can be a challenge, but it’s feasible to consider challenge within the available resources. Tables can be moved to create different working spaces, covered, as needed for different activities. Resources availability, if planned ahead of time, in labelled boxes or drawers, can enable independence in retrieval and return.
I’d want to frame challenge over time, so that the timetable, in itself, does not become a limiting factor. Current timetables can appear to preclude continuity of challenge, ensuring that there’s enough available to fill the available hour. This can push some to discrete activities that might be less challenging. Quality outcomes can take a little longer, especially for some children. It might be better to have one finished piece of quality, as a baseline, rather than a series of unfinished pieces.

I said at the top that challenge incorporates other areas that make up teaching. Challenge is set by the teacher. In the early days with a class, the challenge may be generic, as a means of getting to know how each child thinks and reacts. Over time, this becomes more refined, as the teacher recalibrates expectations to the new group.  In so doing, the interactions are also likely to become more refined and meet the needs of each learner. In another blog, I propose that differentiation is informed dialogue.

The challenge of keeping going, in order to produce a piece of quality work, can require different levels of resilience, but might also require different layers of coaching intervention. This act, in itself, underpins assessment; how much could x do independently and in what areas did x need?

Ongoing challenge can be provided by low level sharing of developing outcomes; reading out loud an interesting fact or sentence; a child sharing how they have solved a maths problem. Visualisers or iPads linked to IWB can help to make this more overt.

Challenge can enhance dialogue, including the use of vocabulary appropriate to the task. Enabling different layers of planning and preparation provides the groundwork for taking first steps, including identifying the knowledge and skills that are likely to be needed.

At no point does a challenge curriculum divorce from the need to directly teach discrete elements. This has always been a need, it’s the simplest way to get information across to someone who needs it, and, in the context of learning, the knowledge and skills become “resources” in themselves. The challenge is to use and apply the knowledge and skills in the problem context, which, in itself, becomes the test.

Thinking a little further, I’d propose such things as Learning Objectives and Success Criteria are shared at the beginning of the challenge journey, as part of the overview of how the week, fortnight, half term will pan out. It will be the overview “so that”, sharing the eventual aim. Discrete pieces of resource tasking could have discrete LO/SC, eg how to set out a letter.

Children should be able to tell someone what they’re learning and why. That shouldn’t be the challenge.

Michael Palin, interviewed by the Guardian on 6th August, offered the following thoughts on the value of geography.

“The world is much more accessible, and I think it is hugely important that we understand the world and why countries are where they are, why they live how they do, what the climate is, what they produce,” he said.
“Geography is no longer just something which you learn from a book and a map and that’s it. It’s very much now a collaborative thing.

“The world is out there, you can go and see for yourself, very often now for very small amounts of money, what the world looks like, and I think that’s a great opportunity.

“I think it broadens the mind. That’s one obvious thing, but also I think it just helps us to understand how other countries are the way they are, and this is really very important in just helping us to realise that we all share the same planet and we should know more about what makes us different as well as what makes us similar.”

“I looked at books, I looked at maps, I looked at atlases, I enjoyed that, but the thing that inspired me most of all was being taken from the school into the local area to look at nature,” he said. “To look at the way the land looked, to understand the geography, to walk up little hills and streams and see how the ecological system worked, look at the environment.”
Getting outdoors was “where the magic appeal of geography lies,” he said. “It’s being out there, it’s being able to see and touch and feel what the land is like”.

I’m not quite as old as Michael Palin, but the article made me think about how I came to enjoy geographic knowledge, as a child, then as an adult.

My 1950s childhood was spent largely outdoors, in all weathers, playing in different places with friends, exploring together, without really thinking about it, making our own mental maps of our locality, to be able to meet up in the right place at the right time. These were the days before mobile phones and even a telephone in the house.

I was lucky to holiday with my Welsh miner family, with my Uncle taking us for long rambles after his shift, pointing out places of interest and also the local wildlife. These experiences instilled a life-long interest in the natural world.

Geography, at Primary school, was largely based on atlas work, learning the names of countries, their main cities, rivers and other significant features. Occasionally, this was supplemented by stories, songs or snippets of information about the country. We get oranges from Spain; we always had an orange at the bottom of our Christmas stocking.

Emigrating to Oz as a seven-year-old, the six-week boat journey, eventually each way, was enough to give an idea of the vastness of the world, especially the oceans, with stops on the way in places that created memories that are inevitably out of date. However, it piqued an interest in people and where they live, especially where housing and clothing were very different to our known world. As an 11-year-old, I returned to the UK having had a broadening experience.

Geography, at Secondary school, was in many ways, an extension of the Primary experience. Teachers who had learned facts about countries regurgitating their knowledge, with maps drawn, lists of products, other key facts. The days before easy access to TV programmes, or today’s interactive whiteboards meant that stimulus had to come via the teacher, and if they weren’t stimulating… small photographs don’t really hold a class attention.

As a NQT and early career teacher, teaching geography well before the National Curriculum was even a twinkle in a minister’s eye, the locality became a significant element, with exploratory forays into the village, highlighting essential landmarks, such as the church, the old manor house ruins, the play park, the river, finding the Roman tiles in the church tower, “meeting” the effigy of the local lord of the manor who had blocked the river, meaning that boats could no longer ply their trade. The history of the settlement linked to the geography.

Maps, obtained from the County Record Office, covering around three hundred years, allowed access to the idea of the settlement growth and change over time. Census material showed how households had changed, and, exploring the houses showed the timber framed 16/17th century houses had all been “modernised” between 1780 and 1810, with Georgian fronts covering the tenements behind. A local lady invited us into her house to see some original features.

Uncovering where we live allows access into broader themes, comparisons with other places and ways of life. A paucity of locality understanding could be seen as a dereliction in terms of safeguarding children. The better the understanding of an area, the safer a child can be, in my opinion, so I would want children to be walking their local streets, drawing sketch maps, putting on essential landmarks, able to give directions to get from one place to another; this can even be done within the school building, giving directions for how to get from the classroom to the office, hall etc.

As a relatively simple exercise, I once linked with a local Secondary school art department, whose lead teacher wanted to use the locality for photography. My need was orientation, with a junior class. We divided children into small groups, with a couple of year 10s and a parent to lead. The idea was that the Primary children would create an “I spy” trail along a walk, while the year 10s took photos to work on later. Swapping trails, different groups then had to follow the trail and identify the features drawn. Back on the classroom, sketch maps were drawn, incorporating the “I spy” features as landmarks. Exploration of road names enabled some exploration of locality history, supported by the local history society.

Geography opens the prospects of assuring a sense of place, our place in the world. Understanding our place in the world is a fundamental part of a broad education.

Geography is people, language, places, settlements, materials, buildings, clothing, food and transport among many other things and how each impacts on another, creating a unique culture with song and stories.

Geography is the stuff of narrative, settings, understanding where things take place and the nuances that the interplay between characters and their environment can have on (sometimes power) relationships.

With an Interactive Whiteboard in a classroom, it is possible to explore even distant parts of the world, bringing more life into a topic. Smaller artefacts/images can be made suitably large with a visualiser.

From that point of view, geography is central to any curriculum, if children have any chance of understanding how the world functions. And in today’s political world, it is even more vital, if connections are to be secured and the inter-related nature of geo-politics is to be maintained.

If you want children to have ideas to think, talk and write about, they need to develop and internalise these through a broad range of experiences.

It can all start from local walks, maps and atlases … home activities included? Where do I live?
​
Linked blog; on psychogeography
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/people-and-places-psychogeography

​

It’s the summer holidays 2018 and the EduTwittersphere is alight with two main topics; not as one might imagine, the future of the world order and whether we have food come March 2019. No, it is whether and why schools exclude (with some asking if it’s enough) and what appears to be a move by a Government minister to dictate further what is taught, and possibly how.

There is a regular mantra that is bandied about, that “anyone can teach”, and it has been in the back of my mind throughout, trying to differentiate between teaching and being a teacher. I would argue that knowledge is collegiate; the sharing of what one person knows enables others to enlarge their capacities. In teaching, there is both personal (knowledge) and professional (pedagogy) capacity.

Reflecting on a blog where I explored the teaching standards, entitled 24652, I separated out the personal aspects of “teaching” from the longer-term thinker about progressive development, making subtle changes to ongoing plans.

In different areas of interest, especially in nature conservation I have met a variety of people who can “teach”; stand in front of an audience (class) and speak about something that they know. This “expert” has a certain “something”, either in terms of their demeanour, their voice, their apparent knowledge or their manner of delivery. They can “hold” the audience, sometimes in rapt silence, especially if they can involve the audience with something to look at or hold or enabling interaction in some other way. Some of the best speakers, with children, bring artefacts to handle, or possibly even live animals, which they might be invited to hold.

These people have an important story to tell and can get it across. They help to pique an interest, to deepen involvement and to really engage children in the world of specific knowledge, much of which will be transient, but which, for some, might be the start of a life-long interest.

They are very useful in that regard, as they can offer an expertise that extends the audience experience, including the class teacher.

So, these people can teach, within their specific area of expertise, but, to my mind they are not yet teachers. There are much more nuanced decisions to be made that differentiate a “teach” from a teacher.

The “second level” of teacher thinking centres around the needs of the learners, rather than just the narrative being shared.

This is the 24652 dynamic. Know your children, plan effectively (over time), engage with their learning, tweak to needs, check if they understand; know them better, new baseline.

Teachers are judged on their children’s progress and outcomes (2). To know and understand he needs of children starts from a generalised understanding which is coloured-in through experience within classrooms, working with a wide range of children. This can also vary significantly between school contexts, where the demographic mix of the class and the community can create a very different dynamic. Even within a school, year groups differ, so even a teacher who may only have taught a narrow range of ages may not fully understand the needs of a different year group. I would argue that this may have an impact on thinking about SEN, particularly in the context of year-group based curricular expectations. A child who “doesn’t get it” might be a particular challenge to some, possibly less-experienced teachers.

Equally, Secondary colleagues may not understand Primaries and vice versa, but this can also be an issue within a Primary school, if the Infants and Juniors are ideologically separate.

Being ordered and organised, being able to plan (4), over time is an important aspect of being a teacher, creating medium term plans, based on a good understanding of the starting needs, but also adapting these to the developing needs as they manifest themselves, as they will, while the children are working on challenge within their tasks.

To me, the most significant parts of the teaching standards are probably standards 6 and 5, which, although articulated as “Assessment (6) and “Adaptation (5)”, which can be effected between lessons at a generalised level, “did they “get it”, what do I do next?”, but which, if interpreted as the teacher “thinking on their feet, looking for prompt signs of learner discomfort” (6), leads to an engagement with any issues arising, coaching and support, or in more extreme cases, in-lesson adaptation to individual needs (5).

We are at the stage of a school year where teachers will, in a few weeks, be working with new classes.

While Primary teachers will get to know their children quite well, quite quickly, in relation to other classes they have had, Secondary colleagues may only see some classes a couple of times, so the individuals who haven’t made their current learning needs obvious may still be names, rather than people.

It is in the nature of interactions that the more frequent they are, the better you get to know the person(alities).

Some colleagues will move schools and be(come) aware of the nuanced differences between their new experience and their previous school(s). It can be a shock to be seen as an outstanding teacher in one context, only to find yourself challenged in another. The context can be a significant factor in perceived “success” as a teacher. ITE students can find the second practice more challenging if they have had the first in an “easier/nicer” school, especially if they are carrying the “high” grade potential with them.

Which leads on to the idea of the “Teachest”. These are the teachers who have taught for a while, have had experience across a wide age range, in different contexts, which enable them to cope with change, occasional difficult children (or colleagues), and who can, at the drop of a hat, magic up a very solid, or even a very good lesson, when covering for another colleague.

They have sought, filtered and adapted the best of their experiences to provide a nuanced “performance”, probably make teaching look easy, but also, at times, be unable to explain every aspect of their actions, because teaching is them, they are intuitive, but as a result of practicing their art/craft with embedded and ongoing reflection. They are and possibly always have been, reflective life-long learners, with a real excitement for their specific areas of interest, which they share, day in and day out.

In other words, they put all eight teacher standards into practice with ease, day in, day out.

It is this last descriptor to which I’d hope all teachers aspire. To develop to this phase, though, teachers need to pass through the other two, the “teach” and the teacher, with the teacher phase being the essential good stage, which is required of all teachers.

The “teachest” comes over time, but also the interrogation of experience as a self-development tool. The best “teachests” are also collegiate in their willingness to share and unpick their capabilities, to the benefit of less-experienced colleagues. These people are the bread and butter of continuous professional development, at no cost to any organisation. They teach teachers as well as children.
 
The skill of self-evaluation is the significant skill which can be shared with developing teachers. Focusing on the processes of development, rather than just passing on simple tips and hints, enables the developer to reflect on their own practice, so that tips and hints can be explored within a development dynamic.

A pack of tips and hints and bright ideas does not make a teacher. A set of pre-prepared worksheets doesn't make a curriculum. These things only work of they have clear purpose and the teacher is aware of potential issues, in order to intervene appropriately with children. I have seen more fail lessons arising from colleague generosity in sharing a plan, than from a teacher preparing their own.
​
A teacher thinks for themselves.

To some extent, teachers and “teachests” grow themselves, by regularly reflecting on new information and “sloughing off” aspects of the old, so that they can move forward with greater ease.

Sharing is caring; a simple mantra.

Collegiality is the hallmark of a successful staffroom. Shared expertise benefits everyone, ensuring that the children receive the best that a school can offer, which, in reality, is the best that any school can do.

Where it identifies the need for external support, this should be carefully considered, if it is to have a developmental collegiate impact.

Communication is key and this takes time. School leaders are responsible for how time is “demanded” for specific needs. Time should simply be allocated for quality talk between colleagues. That way, current reading can be shared, discussed and, where necessary, embedded in practice.

Love the ones you’re with. Make the best of the available talent. Support every adult associated with the school, including parents, partners in children’s progress.

Humane education, in professional hands, anyone?

For some time, I have worried that we have been in danger of over-scientising, or over-systematising teaching. There is a case that neuroscience has added to our understanding and that has to be for the best, but, in many ways, teaching has not altered since I first walked into a classroom in 1971, but as each generation comes to the role, they offer new vocabulary for older constructs. Relabelling doesn’t alter the essentials of the job.

It is essentially thinking and analysing available information, planning for progression in learning, presenting appropriately challenging information and learning opportunities, thinking during and between lessons, adapting to evident needs, recording those bits and pieces that are worthy of record, as aides memoire.

Of course, around these central elements lie further lists of sub-tasks, any of which can be grown, through over-systematising, into over-demanding activities, just to double-check the system.
​
The essence is analyse, plan, do review, record. Each step is a thinking step… and anything that detracts from that is to the detriment of the children’s learning.

When you walk into a classroom and wait for your class to arrive, you have compiled some thoughts ahead of time. You may have had some oral or written records from a preceding teacher, together with any other important information or data about their prior performance.

You’ll have organise the classroom to provide the most efficient arrangement of tables, that enables ease of movement, as well as good sight lines from different areas of the classroom. You will have ordered and organised resources; some at each table and more in labelled drawers for easy access and return. Reading corners, maths equipment, display boards or working walls will be evident. Much more besides will have been labelled or arranged in a display.

In addition, you will have considered the curriculum organisation for the period of time that you are responsible for the class, with a specific focus on those areas that will form the initial topics in each subject. The best planning is longer term to focus on the interaction of knowledge and skills as they develop and are reuse during the year. Being ordered and organised is the hallmark of good teaching.

The sharing of information has always been a central feature of good teaching. The quality of information sharing can be a variable, in that all information exists in a narrative that draws from the children’s prior experience, sifting and adding the new information after challenge or reflection.

If you need to collate the relevant information to be shared, that seems like an excellent idea, but the narrative sharing abilities of the teacher, the security and depth of the information, together with the articulacy of the adult will determine whether imagery is conjured in the minds of the receivers. If images are shared, that support the narrative, children can utilise recall or perhaps indulge in abstraction to further their own imagination.

Classroom vocabulary is closely connected with contextual experiences; if children’s home experiences are limited, this will have an impact on their understanding, compounded if the linguistic experience is also limited. Teaching and learning rely on words, embedding worldly concepts. The teacher is the generator of words, through the breadth and depth of experiences that they offer, inside and outside the classroom. Words, in some form, are needed to be able to interact with the world.

The interactions between teacher, other adult or children are key. Quality of questions, responses to their answers, follow-up questions for clarification, providing feedback in timely fashion, subtle adjustments or specific coaching and modelling might be needed in some cases.

Pitch of challenge, interaction and feedback are the equivalent of tailoring; a piece of clothing might be approximately the right size, but for individuals might require taking in or loosening, depending on how it is perceived to fit.

Teacher standards 6&5 describe these detailed actions, within the 24652 continuum; know your children, plan efficiently, interact and adjust to need, make decisions about subsequent learning. If planning was broader, over a longer timescale, with teachers making notes on next needs, it might decrease some anxiety about workload. Much planning is, in effect, continuous, with additional information added to need.

• Standards 6 and 5 are the key to getting closer to individual, group and class needs. The judgemental aspects of standard 6, between and within lessons, are effected through adaptations between lessons or within a lesson. That nuance can be lost in a delivery model. It is often evident in ITE trainees, who are focused on getting through the lesson more than the actual learning and getting to know the needs of individuals.
• Assessment, to my mind, has always meant knowing your children. It also means knowing the generic progression in each of the subjects that make up the Primary curriculum. Marrying the two together is the essence of good planning that embeds appropriate challenge for different needs.
• Planning is, at heart, a(n) hypothesis, a general descriptor of what will happen if all your prior judgements have been accurate.
• All plans should be subject to adjustment within the lesson, if, on the balance of evidence and the teacher judgement, individuals, groups or the whole class seem to be finding aspects harder or easier than expected. In-lesson interactions and oral and written feedback are likely to be influenced by these judgements.
• Teacher Standards 6&5 together effectively mean spot and deal with learning issues in a lesson.
• Reflection after the lesson, or period of lessons allows for future plans to be adjusted to outcomes. This could be in the form of “interleaving” or adjusting future demands to cater for known needs.

Every teacher is adrift with a boat load of children. They deserve good maps and the ability to captain their own ships with certainty. They carry a valuable cargo, who should be enjoying time to look around and take in the experiences as they pass, rather than being kept too busy to look, or only allowed to see the world through a small port hole.

The teacher, as a good captain, should also be looking out for the well-being of her team.
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It’s not simple, it never has been simple and, given the complex nature of any group of humans, will never be a simple role; but it is still a great job and you get to be captain…!