Chalkface Blog

You will no doubt have heard the claim that the average pupil only gets one minute a day of personal attention from a teacher. I’ve quoted it often enough, but have long-since lost touch with the original reference. Time to hit Google. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t find it. What I did find, however, was anecdotal but far more interesting.

The English Teachers Network in Israel has a fantastic page for its members called The Best Teacher Ever. It’s some 30-odd anecdotes, mainly from their members, about the teachers they recall as being the most important in their own education.

Some favourite quotes:

He was the one person who really understood me and he changed my life dramatically and i forever thank him for that.

He was respectful of us as pupils, he knew how to listen,

I felt most confortable in the environment he set up and it was fun every day. I had hated math up until that point, but he taught me to love it!

and one that I suspect may be from a current student:

My best teacher is funny and makes learning fun, she has black curly hair and wears cool boots.

While I was reading and enjoying these (do read them yourself!) it occurred to me that in any other service industry it is standard practise to follow-up former customers and solicit feedback. I’ve never before seen this done in Education.

A few themes leaped right out as I was reading. “Fun” is without doubt the most oft-cited criterion. There’s a more diffuse set of criteria around individual contact; ability to explain, to listen and to empathise all seemed to be highly valued. Notable by its absence was any mention of exam or test results, yet this is what the government insists on measuring teachers by.

Take a moment, if you will, to imagine how you might organise a school to maximise fun, listening, empathising and explaining so that students really understood. How about a clapometer in assemblies? Or rewarding teachers according to how much laughter is heard in their classrooms? Or polling parents about which subject their offspring talk most enthusiastically about?

All very well, I heasr you say, but to maximise one thing, you must first minimise another. On my hitlist are curriculum and marking.

I’d junk a good two-thirds of the curriculum. It’s fair that basic literacy and numeracy should be mandatory, but let’s allow the rest to arise from teachers’ desire to teach and students’ desire to learn. If the goal is to inspire, the choice of content is not critical, but personal commitment to it is.

Equally importantly, I would also ban or automate tasks that numb teachers’ minds like marking tests or filling in meaningless forms. You can’t be expected to exude fun and inspiration if your own brain is fogged by tedium.

And there would need to be a fair bit of retraining at Ofsted. What are the chances, do you think, of an Ofsted report praising a teacher for her cool boots?

Konrad Glogowski is my all-time favourite educational blogger. Partly this is because he posts so rarely that he’s easy to follow, but mainly it’s because he’s a teacher not a techie.

Konrad’s latest post is a real treat. He’s talking about how he responds to his students’ writing, and gives an example of a lengthy and encouraging response

This is probably one of your best essays, if not, in fact, your best ever. As soon as I saw the title I knew that this would be a great read. It was! I was thoroughly engaged in your work and often felt as if I were discovering this novel for the very first time…(read the rest)

So what’s this got to do with educational technology? Nothing. With leading-edge teaching practise? Nothing. With old-fashioned English teaching? Everything. This could have come straight out of Mr Chips. And therein lies its charm.

Therein also lies its (near-)fatal flaw. How does Konrad find the time to leave 345 word-long comments on every item his students write? Because he’s teaching in Canada, that’s how. There, he can legitimately trade-off frequency of marking for quality of comment. The Canadian system is geared far less to the production-line values foisted on us in the UK by a decade and a half of excessive political interference in education.

So – he can do it, but we can’t. Goodbye, Mr Chips.

Well, perhaps not. There are ways to free up teacher time.

We’ve been at work for years in Chalkface on ways to mark work automatically, specifically so that the dull stuff can be got out of the way and you can concentrate your attention where it will do most good. That’s one way.

And you can get more radical than that. For example, look at TutorVista. In a recent post to the Distance Learning list at Becta, they boasted “Our Tutors are based in India and are familiar with the UK Curriculum”. You see the possibility? Outsource all your marking to well-trained Indian professionals, thus helping to fund education in the third world and freeing up your own time into the bargain.

You may be feeling just a tad threatened at this point. Your job, and pension, outsourced to India? I don’t think so. Look at Konrad’s comment again. Do you really think that could have been made by somebody who did not know the student? More importantly, would it have had an impact on the student had there not already existed a close teacher-student bond?

Suddenly, we get to the heart of where Konrad, and you, add value. It’s not in the facts you teach, or the marks you give. You inspire and motivate young people to learn by who you are, and the relationship you build with them.

In my opinion, technology can and should help by freeing you up from other stuff that gets in the way of that relationship, but true teaching requires no more than a paper and pencil, and a kind word.

A review this morning from Ste for Formative Assessment in Applied Business for the Double Award GCSE says “Average, lose the dodgy animations”. What interests me isn’t the fact that it’s a negative review, but rather that it pretty obviously comes from a student.

When we put reviews on the site, I expected a certain amount of vandalism from students. It happens, we clean it off promptly, no big deal. But I didn’t expect this. This is a serious, succinct review, in which Ste clearly states what would make the resource work better for him.

Now I’m asking myself what would happen if more students were reviewing, and if teachers were making buying decisions based on students’ criteria and not their own. This review suggests that far from drowning in flashy trivia, school materials might actually become more serious. And just imagine how empowering it would be for the students.

But….please don’t send your students to the Chalkface site to write reviews just yet. Ste did it off his own bat. If you send them, they will write what they think you want to read. They’ll be nice reviews, of course, and we’ll get lots of stars so the authors will be happy, but they won’t be from the heart. And if they are not from the heart, you won’t trust them to inform your buying decisions.

It’s been a slow week for change on Yacapaca; just a couple of announcements:

• Membership is now past 3000 teachers and 85,000 students. I’m well chuffed with that!
• Miranda has revamped the Yacapaca Wiki. The authoring section in particular has been rewritten.

By the way, if you are looking at the wiki and don’t like the colour scheme, here’s a trick. Do you see at the end of the url it says “s=base4”? Change the number (1-4), and the colour scheme changes too.