Inspiration

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Drawing in of breath; inspiring; divine influence, esp. that under which books of Scripture are held to have been written, &c.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of current English, 1929.

I honestly can’t stand essays that begin with dictionary definitions, but if you can’t indulge in a spot of hypocrisy then there’s probably no point going into teaching.

“What makes a great school? Hard work, committed teachers, an inspiring head and parents who don’t think education stops at the school gate.”

David Cameron, writing in the Daily Telegraph, 13 November 2011

Inspiration is one of those concepts spoken of rather freely yet possessing a rather awesome meaning. It is commonplace to speak of one’s inspiring teachers at school – I can certainly call four to mind – but perhaps less common to consider what makes for this inspiration. All four of the teachers in my mind had, I was aware at the time, an equal and opposite effect on at least one of my classmates.

Ay, there’s the rub: all the ‘inspirational’ teachers that I’ve ever come across have had strong personalities and their individual stamp was impressed on lessons. I loved them (although more than one conjured just as much fear as love) and came to love their subjects. Such a love for the subject was unshakeable, even when faced with some rather more ordinary teaching later down the line.

Without wanting to go all Dead Poet’s Society, I wonder whether the constraints of a National Curriculum, minutely planned lessons, learning objectives and teaching targets and – most of all – standardised assessment can do anything to promote this kind of inspiration. Can school inspectors hope to discern inspiration? There isn’t a tick box for it on their observation forms.

An anecdote from a colleague – when his English department was inspected a few years ago the inspector said to him – “I just don’t understand how you get such good results with your methods”. He had already asked one student why – at the end of a lesson – he had taken no notes. “I will,” replied the boy, “when he says something worth noting.” The student wasn’t being disrespectful, arrogant or workshy; he had followed the lesson but was allowed to make his own mind up about what was committed to paper. I love the idea of generating such a rapport with students whereby they are analysing the content of lessons and making their own decisions about what to take away. Such engagement and thought  would surely represent a laudable objective, but it isn’t half hard to quantify and assess.

Are inspiration and inspector-friendly ‘good practice’ the same thing, diametrically opposed or simply coexistent in an educational world of infinite variables? I wonder.

When teaching meets pedagogy

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A French friend recently asked me what the English was for the French term ‘pédagogie’.

Well, I said, that’s easy and also difficult to answer. I wondered, and still do wonder, whether the English (do I mean British?) language really understands the concept of pedagogy. There is such a divide between the world of educational research and that of the teaching establishment that the two seldom inform each other in a way that they should.

I managed to go through some ten years of a teaching career before I had heard of Sir Ken Robinson – now I can barely meet people before I insist they watch him on youtube:

Changing paradigms

As with the observations of Freire in the last post, this inspires me but also is troubling. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, as I’m rapidly learning. From a little more googling of Sir Ken Robinson I found the marvellous community that is TED. Now that I have seen some of the presentations there, I am seriously confused as to why no one had shown me this before, or perhaps, to take a little more responsibility, why I hadn’t found it sooner.

So what does happen in terms of professional development? INSET stands for ‘in-service training’ and schools will hold inset days at the start of, or during, term time. On the face of it, this is a tremendous opportunity for staff to come together, share ideas and be exposed to challenging and innovative research from educationalists, who in turn can learn from the experiences of educators. These days should contain all the elements present in great lessons – they should be engaging, challenging, informative, relevant and pitched at an appropriate level.

All too often, though, the presentation is an exercise in death by PowerPoint, with unfathomable quantities of information delivered – presumably to ensure value for money in the eyes of the senior manager responsible for the booking – and in unbearable time slots of two hours or more. On the terribly rare occasion that good practice is followed and the audience is permitted to do something, the time allowed to work and discuss is frustratingly short. Teachers seem naturally disposed to be distrustful of anyone telling them how to do their job and these conditions have never yet, in my experience, led to success.

Professional development, rather than mere length of service, is at the heart of producing inspiring teachers and inspired students. At the moment, though, great potential is being wasted. Challenging the way things have always been done isn’t meddling: it’s refreshing.

What is education?

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Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Paolo Freire

 

I wonder: how true does the above statement seem to you? For me, it’s inspiring and troubling in equal measure. Freire saw at once both the potential and the limitations of education and had the ability to distil the conflict into one polarizing sentence. If education is really the either/or as suggested above, how many people can honestly claim to encourage an educational system based on the ‘practice of freedom’?

Don’t we as parents, adults, teachers seek to validate our own experiences by trying to teach children the same lessons we learned? Do we have to subscribe to the status quo, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, research and argumentation to its contrary? Is it laziness, fear of the unknown or just pure bloody-mindedness that makes us unthinkingly reward students for conforming to the normal and discourage those who innovate?

What is education? In terms of semantics, the Latin suggests that it is to ‘bring out’, that is, to lead to the surface that which lies within the student. I wonder how much trust we place in our children that they will have such innate quality.

Another from Freire:

‘Banking transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.’

It seems to me self-evident that such ‘banking’ exists in the educational world, that it is to the detriment of real learning and yet also that it has long since been accepted as the best way to achieve the best results in all-important examinations. English schools are littered with concepts that have no corollary in the wider world: grouping by age, compulsory curriculum, grades, league tables, individualism. They are so ingrained that to question them means questioning the entire fabric and purpose of education in this country. Yet is it really so radical to ask whether school should be so unlike real life, should reward such different character traits?

Is modern education relevant? I wonder.

IWonder

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Hello to you, and thank you for taking time to read this blog. I can claim some thirty years of being in education in one form or another, but it is only recently that I really began to wonder about what our students do when they take part in the British education system.  Why and how are our schools and colleges set up, and with what purpose in mind?

What seems most clear to me is how little these students are themselves encouraged, or even equipped, to wonder. Just take a moment now – if you please – to pick up something that will write, and something upon which you can scribble.

Good. Now – and I promise there will be very little of this sort of instruction – draw a stick person and a thought bubble, like this:

iWonderExcellent. Now fill in the bubble: “I wonder…[and see what it is that your mind wonders at this very moment].”

It really is extraordinarily rare that in schools – in my experience – children are given such undirected freedom to express themselves and there are likely to be two possible explanations for this:

  1. Every bit of the responsibility is placed upon teachers to orchestrate teaching and children learn very quickly to become entirely passive in the educational experience.
  2. Such activities are a waste of time.

I don’t, and won’t, pretend to have the answers on this blog, but it might just be worth posing some questions about the modern educational landscape to see what we do because it is good, and what we do simply because it has always been done. If, when all is said and done, it is to be concluded that the current system is the best way, then at least the system can be said to have passed a strict examination. After all, formal testing is the best way, isn’t it?

Back to the “I wonder…” activity. I tried this out – using valuable lesson time, mind – on a small sample of students aged between 10 and 13. The results are intriguing.

The majority of bubbles were focused on the author and in the present time or immediate future. We saw “I wonder what is for lunch”, “I wonder whether I’ll be picked for the rugby team tomorrow”, and “I wonder what I’ll get for Christmas” many times over. This itself should not be glossed over – after all, the students were sitting in a classroom at the time, with all sorts of visual displays and a teacher to remind them that this was a working environment.

In the minority, however, lay the elements which make working with people in general, and children in particular, so fascinating. A handful of dissidents opted for “I wonder what the point is of this exercise”, which was fair enough, but perhaps showed a reluctance to engage in such a reflective activity. One, not unconcerningly, pondered “I wonder what it is like to be dead” and another “I wonder why public schoolboys run our country”. Make of this what you will, but for me it was a reminder that there is a great deal going on in the mind of a schoolchild, with every moment of every day giving rise to different emotions and reactions that can have nothing to do with the immediate business of schoolwork. What was my lesson going to contain to rival such big questions about our own world and the next? My favourite of all, though, and it would be great to see how many children had to be asked before this question came up again, was as follows:
“I wonder whether I’ll be allowed to make a fire station in school.”

Is creativity valuable? Do schools promote it, or kill it? I wonder. What do you think?