Photo by Ron Lach from Pexels

Sitting on the bed in my parents’ cold spare room, I’m surveying the hideously impressive ‘floordrobe’ which seems to come with being a a travelling international teacher – the ‘visiting relative’.  Since I left the UK in 2009 for a school (and boyfriend…) in Geneva, then moving further afield to Singapore in 2015, these visits – the airports, the jetlag, the catch-ups – have been a part of our (shudder) ‘expat lifestyle’, and one I’ve taken for granted, even grumbled about on more than one occasion.  Over the last two years of course all that has changed.  I’ve had to explain to relatives why, again, I cannot see them; explain, again, my anxiety at bringing two children from Singapore to the raging wave of Omicron in the UK; and ask myself guiltily whether a life split across two different sides of our ailing planet is one that I should be trying to sustain.

Still, for many of our teaching staff, this has been the first opportunity to leave our tiny island and see family in more than two years; it is certainly the first period that could be described as anything like time out for our school leaders since the pandemic began.  Many of our colleagues are still waiting for travel to open up with their home countries, and of course our non-academic staff have been working throughout, public holidays aside.  In all of these cases there are the possibilities for joy and celebration, alongside perhaps quite heavy emotional work; being apart from family, again – or perhaps being just a bit too close, all. of. the. time.  In my own case, I’ve returned to my family minus the Geneva boyfriend who become my (now ex-) husband, with two children 3 years older (and so much wiser and cooler…) than they were the last time their grandparents saw them.  There’s been so much grief, and relief – certainly a bittersweet reunion.

So how do we all come back together?  As we return to Singapore, and to school, how do we find the space (and the time, let’s be honest) to honour each others’ experiences?  How to we reconnect to, and strengthen, the relationships with colleagues that will sustain us through online learning, ongoing restrictions, and an oncoming wave of Covid?

Some time ago now, Priya Parker’s superb The Art of Gathering got many of our staff thinking different about how we intentionally come together in teams (thanks @tricia_fried!). Over the break, with time to do some reading, I’ve also been thinking about togetherness and relationships, thanks to Owen Eastwood’s Belonging, and most recently HeartSpace by Antonia Issa Lahera and Kendall Zoller.  These writers have me thinking more deeply about the need to prioritise (re)connection; to be deliberate in the spaces and language we construct to acknowledge key moments in the life of a team, such that these become symbols or rituals to which we can return, and remember who we are together.  As Eastwood reminds us in his chapter ‘Renewal’, “culture never stands still.  Every day it shifts.  How we deal with new situations redefines who we really are and how we really do things.” (127)

Practically then, what could this look like?  How could we make our return to school something of a ‘renewal’, and not a repetition of empty exchanges, so often laden with assumptions (“How was your break?” “Have a good Christmas?” ).

Lahera and Zoller tell us that we can’t afford to leave these things to chance – “a culture of care, trust, collaboration, and joy happens by design” (9)- and so intentionality is key: what is the exact nature then of the challenge we want to address?  Some of these are now familiar, adaptive challenges, existing against an unsettling backdrop of further changes as many families choose to leave Singapore:

• How do we build relationships, get to know and trust each other better, when we cannot all be together in person?
• How we collectively (re)define our identity and values in ways which include, rather than exclude?
• When there have been, and continue to be, so many technical challenges to address, how can we make sure that people come first?

Here are some initial ideas:

I am someone who finds it hard to ‘get into it all’ ((c) Logan Roy) and acknowledge, much less examine, All The Feelings when I’m in my professional space – so none of these ideas would come easily or comfortably to me.  But I think that it’s an important bridge to cross if we want to build authentic connections with our colleagues, especially heading into our third year of Covid, and that means needing to model a bit of vulnerability now and again.  As I look ahead to the journey back to Singapore, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone, and hope that, when the big machine of the school starts whirring again, I don’t take for granted where each of us is coming from.

References

Thank you to Jess Lifshitz (@Jess5th), whose tweet got me thinking!

Eastwood, O. (2021) Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness. Quercus Editions Ltd.

Lahera, A.I, and Zoller, K. (2020) HeartSpace: Practice and Rituals to Awaken, Emerge, Evolve, and Flourish At Work and In Life. Word and Deed Publishing.

Parker, P. (2018) The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Riverhead Books.

Yesterday, Friday 22nd May, would been the final day of IB exams for the Class of 2020, bringing to a close a big chunk of the work of the DPC, in my first year in the role.  Instead, we are looking forward to our first online graduation this evening, and looking back on a period that has brought our whole school community a good deal of confusion, disappointment, and grief.  Still in the midst of so many unknowns, it feels almost like tempting fate to pause for a moment to reflect on my own learning up to this point.  If one thing’s for sure it’s that we ain’t done yet, and who knows what the rest of this year might look like.  But, egotism aside, I want to quickly capture moments that have given rise to important learning for me, if only as a reminder of what I still need to work on!

Constants vs change

One of the few constants of our “new normal” (surely 2020’s most overused phrase?) has been the ever-presence of change and ambiguity.  There have been reversals and revisions at so many points, as the situation in Singapore has evolved, and our guidance from government and examinations bodies has changed.  For me, that has involved revisiting our approach to predicted grades, revising the EE timeline, and redrafting the IB assessment calendar all the time.  Sometimes, this has felt surprisingly ok: as someone new in the role, I didn’t have a ‘normal’ to compare it to, and so perhaps didn’t feel the same cognitive dissonance of someone used to things happening in a certain way year on year.  It was all new to me!  I’ve noticed, however, that when this has been harder when either 1) my ego steps in, and/or 2) the message is a hard one to deliver.  Meanwhile finding constants or commonalities has helped in particularly challenging moments.

• I’ve become conscious of an ‘ego-led’ response when I’ve felt uncomfortable at having to backtrack on something I’d previously said.  A good example of this was with the predicted grades, and what felt like a ‘climb down’ from having insisted that the IB would not use them to calculate final results (as was at this time the message).  It was a line I stuck by, even as colleagues started to question if this would change.  So when it did, I felt naive – but more than that, concerned that I had somehow disadvantaged students.  My ego – feeling like a wally – wanted to defensively explain everything, justify and exonerate myself.  But that was what my ego needed, not what people needed to hear in that moment, which was just honest and open communication based on the information we now had.
  • Knowing what I know now, I would have made my language in those earlier communications more tentative, or at least more explicitly contingent upon guidance from the IB.  I thought this was a ‘definite’, but it was one of the many ways we learned that they don’t really exist!

• Changes have been harder to weather when we’ve had to make a judgement, and that decision has not been easy to deliver.  Early on, this was around mock exams for G12s, knowing that any change would be unpopular with a number of teachers, students, and parents.  Even knowing this, it was hard to read the critical emails coming in, feeling our values and professionalism brought into question, with the implication that we hadn’t considered fairly common sense factors.  Questions around predicted grades, coursework timelines, and school re-opening have followed.  Each of these moments has brought up the ‘likeability’ problem: no one wants to piss-off the people they work with, and being liked as a woman in any kind of leadership position is a particular kind of challenge.
  • Knowing what I know now, I won’t be so quick to see disagreement as a problem that needs to be resolved or avoided.  A line I’ve found powerful is “I’m sorry we disagree on this.”  Sometimes a more respectful response is to allow people their view, without needing to persuade them of yours.  In each of these situations, there has been no clear right answer, only judgements – just being open about this, rather than staking out camps, has been useful.  It has also been important in allowing people their dignity in disagreement, and allowing space for this – rather than already painting them as wrong, or not sharing the same values.

• Once upon a time, I had the vague idea that school leaders possessed a perfect set of crystal clear principles – more than 2, fewer than 5 – that guided all decision-making.  And that you’d always know, as a leader, what to do, because your principles would show the way.  Ha!  Well, the last few weeks have shown both the truth and the nonsense of that.  It has far more often been the case that a situation has involved a (maybe irresolvable) tension between different – and worthy – values and concerns.  Rather than syllogistically applying pre-decided principles, it’s been far more valuable to instead think about sitting in amongst these tensions, asking a whole bunch of questions about our discomfort there, until our thinking converges on a narrative persuasive enough, kind enough, to show a way through.  This is far messier, and I’ve found myself being made aware of my tendency to want neatness in thinking; sometimes I’ve been reluctant to consider a contrary viewpoint or ‘inconvenient truth’, because I’d already got myself to a point which felt neat and final.  Knowing what I know now, this is something I need to guard against, and watch out for when ego is resistant to keeping thinking open: “when you know better, do better.”

• At other times, particularly with so many unknowns, it’s been important to find the hard lines or solid ground.  An example of this was when we were instructed by the IB to upload of all our IAs.  There was no way we could miss or mess around with deadlines here, and for most teachers it represented a considerable amount of work.  We didn’t really know at that point – and still don’t, really – how teachers’ comments and marks would be used, how grades would be awarded.  I was pleased with how I framed this as needing to let go some parts of this complex picture, and find the solid ground in the bigger picture: in this case, doing this final task for our students as best we knew how, regardless of other pressures and questions.  I was conscious of drawing on advice to try to move away from being only task-focused, and to motivate people by finding the ‘why’.

The Bigger Picture

Another thing I’ve learnt over the last few months has been to consider a much wider set of factors in any decision, beyond the educational.  Again, I think I had imagined that all decisions would pretty much come down to learning for our students, and in many ways they do, in the end.  By in conversations such as that we had across campuses with Dover showed me the importance of thinking beyond this: of the school, not just as a provider of education for its students, but as a community, as an employer, as a service, and party to an important contract with our families.  Quite unexpectedly, this has been a side of things that has fascinated and excited me – I have loved being a part of this kind of thinking, and learning about all the mechanics of a school community.  I know now that I can have the confidence to ask to be a part of these kinds of conversations, and am grateful to be surrounded by people I can learn  from:

• I liked how Rebecca started one of our meetings by acknowledging that it was an emotive topic; naming this made the conversation easier, and legitimised those feelings.
• I like how Nick always resists the neatness of binary thinking, and always makes this messy – in a good way!  I can be easily seduced by rhetoric and a nicely crafted argument, but Nick never is.
• From Ted I’ve learned the importance of detail, and know now that any issue or question I bring needs to be ready with the answers to: “but which classes?”  “how many students exactly?” “for how long?” “what does it say on CIMS?”  It made me realise that I am too often affected by impressions and opinions.

Targets

1. One part of the ‘bigger picture’ I’d to learn more about is being able to look for and narratives from data, eg around AGs and results.  I’m not really sure of the right questions to ask of the numbers to find interesting relationships, or to be able to spot what’s missing.  I’m also not sure how I get better at doing this!?
2. Being able to look ahead and anticipate has been a challenge this year, and sometimes impossible!  I’d like to look at how I can make things smoother next year by getting better at this, and we’ve started to do this in our conversations with scholars.
3. After the craziness of this year, I’d like to make sure I focus more next year on supporting the coordinators for the Core: Katie in particular, being new to the role, but also looking again at the TOK Arts days with Paul, and working with Uzay on EE comms and making best use of Managebac.
4. I have been blundering my way through with budgets, and I need to just sit down with someone in finance and ask them to explain everything to me.
5. CBTL – I’m want to be clearer on this process with departments, and how/ where I can add value.

Looking back at the start of this year,  I was totally preoccupied with how much I didn’t know, and the idea that people were questioning why I had been appointed.  Ironically, the events of the last few months – where nobody has had all the answers – have been freeing in this regard; there hasn’t really been time to worry so much about other people’s opinions of me!  I know that there are people – Kate, Nick, Ted – who will be honest with me when I need it, and so many others have gone out of their way to be supportive.  I hope I have been able to build a degree of trust with, for example, HODs; and recognise that I also need to presume positive intent more often in my colleagues…  Next year I want to focus on building those relationships so that I can work more effectively with people, rather than feeling all the time as though I have something to prove.

This summer was my first experience of learning at the PTC (Principals’ Training Centre), looking at assessment leadership in the international school.  The PTC had been recommended to me by a number of colleagues, and the experience did not disappoint – though it did challenge me in lots of ways!  Here are some initial takeaways from this week of learning from the final day:

The problem of teacher ambition

If you’ve read any previous post of mine – or witnessed me attempting to navigate any kind of social interaction – it will likely come as no surprise that the fact of being in a room full of school principals, assistant principals, and aspiring principals.  I am none of these things, as my name badge helpfully indicated, and so for the first 24 hours the familiar imposter syndrome had an absolute field day.  Nothing new or interesting there, and it was promptly stopped in its tracks with a sharp scolding from a friend and colleague.  But what I noticed following sense was the freeing sense of being in a room where nobody apologised for their ambition, and it occurred to me that these are perhaps spaces which teachers don’t often find themselves in.  I have certainly been in schools where teachers’ ambition has been treated with suspicion and cynicism – even implied as being at odds with the appropriate values and priorities of a teacher.  This necessary martyrdom of the teacher’s own goals and growth serves no one, and certainly doesn’t help the learning of the students in our care.  Why is it that we treat ambitious teachers with such suspicion?  I don’t think we would suspect of doctor aiming for a consultant position of not really caring for her patients; would our assumption about any other professional seeking a strategic or supervisory position be that they were overly egotistical, or self-serving?  I’m not sure it would be.  Teacher ambition feels like a unique problem.  I’m don’t think I want to be a school principal, but you better believe there is fire in my belly: I want to know more, do more, be better and better and better.  Ambition is the only word I have to describe this feeling, but it’s an uncomfortable one, and one I have heard used as a slight: “oh god, he’s so ambitious.”  So my first takeaway from my classmates at the PTC was to challenge this attitude, and give myself a sharp scolding: if ambition is a dirty word for teachers in your school, you need to pack that in.

Good leaders are made, not born

Some humbling moments of reflection for me here.  This course has helped me to see myself as someone with ideas and some academic understanding, but so much (SO MUCH) to learn about leadership behaviours and models. I have, in the not-so-distant past been impatient with processes and pace of change; this course has radically changed that for me.  I have so much to learn about managing change and relationships, and I’m taking away a new appreciation for the leaders I work with.

This course also made me re-examine a previous assumption that some of us just have these mysterious innate leadership qualities, and others (hi there) do not.  The story I’ve often told myself is that I’m not [X] enough for that role, and, having spent a week with a room full of inspiring leaders, reflecting and working on their practice, that now feels like an excuse.  The people in this room have been so open and generous with their experiences, their questions and their challenges, that it feels churlish now to dismiss all that hard work of learning and getting better.  As always, the fact that you can learn these things and shape your own path is both a bit intimidating, and utterly liberating.  It makes me think that, whilst I know myself well as a teacher, I really don’t know myself as a ‘leader’ yet at all.  And that’s an exciting thing 🙂

Most students continuing onto a postgrad degree immediately following their bachelors are probably used to the usual jokes about avoiding the real world, not wanting to get job.  In my case, this move was accompanied by homophobic ‘bants’, questions about my course of choice, my sexuality, and my family’s refusal to look over my dissertation.  Why?  Because I decided to follow my BA in English lit with an MSt in Women’s Studies; an embarrassingly archaic-sounding name for an exciting course which allowed me to focus on writing around gender and sexual identity.  I spent my last year at university exploring transgender identities, particularly transsexual agency, and my dissertation was on emergent lesbian identities in the 1920s, looking at the letters of Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis.  The question thrown my way most often was why, unless I identified as lesbian and/or trans, I would be at all interested in such ‘material’.  WELL, I’ll take you why!  Here are some of the things that have stuck with me from that course, some 15(!) years ago:

Bodies and blood: might seem like a bit of a gruesome start, but honestly it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think back to what that course showed me.  When I hear LGBTQ+ issues spoken about only in the abstract, or as though they exist just at the pedantic edges of political correctness, I’m reminded of the urgency of it all: that this is not theoretical, but real lives, bodies, blood, and skin.  I won’t ever forget the stories I read about violence, self-harm, suicide, and surgery, and I think of them whenever someone makes the *hilarious* joke about identifying as a unicorn/dolphin/frenchman….etc.

Performative gender:  one of the earliest and most powerful concepts I came across, thanks to Judith Butler.  It’s the idea that idea that gender is not something innate, but an effect brought about by the repeated ‘performance’ of a series of gendered acts.  This has new meaning to me now as the mother of boys, and I see my son navigate the narrow masculine performances available to him; how he mimics, tries them on for fit, and the awkwardness of that dissonance pains me hugely;  I see how he and his friends discipline each other at the boundaries of gender.  Again, I feel an urgency to this: he needs different models NOW, he and his classmates need difference books, different narratives, different ways to be RIGHT NOW.  I feel a sense of panic from the speed at which he learns what to call “normal”.  Disrupting heteronormativity at the earliest years of schooling is urgent.

Queering the classroom:  I came across so many writers I wouldn’t have otherwise, and still try to queer my reading lists.  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been a longstanding favourite, and a great point from which to discuss homophobia in sport, or consistency in homophobic narratives from the 1950s to today.  Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Conundrum, and Woman’s World are other great texts to explore from the standpoint of queer theory, and I’m looking forward to branching out now that our text choices on the IBDP are becoming much more flexible.

Tiny power moves:  One of my research interests was agency and transgender identity, and I looked a lot at whether/how power is removed from trans people as they are effectively made to repeat over and over a particular required narrative: to ‘prove’ themselves, often in order to access services such as medical or psychological support.  One line of theory likens this to the act of a confessional: and its never the confessor who holds the power, but he who silently listens.  This has stuck with me, and comes to mind when members of the LGBTQ+ community are expected to ‘explain’ themselves – particularly those for whom neat labels feel a poor fit.  When that explanation is expected or required before a conversation can be had, there’s power at play.

Bridging the gap:  I’ve had some interesting conversations recently about the ethics of knowing, and the moral imperative that comes with learning.  And I need to check myself on this, as I list that MSt on my CV: to know is not enough.  To know is not to understand, and to understand means f*** all if it doesn’t change your behaviours.  I have work to do here, I know, and often coming at these conversations with an academic mindset has been a hindrance, and left me humbled.  As a student reading and researching I could feel confident in my academic knowledge (and judging from a quick re-read of my dissertation, I felt embarrassingly confident, as only a 23 year old can).   As a friend and colleague and parent and ally, I am still learning.

Well, we’d known it was coming for a while: the end of the IBDP English Literature course as I’ve known and taught it since the start of my career, 13 years ago.  Sure, there were some tweaks and addition with the Lit syllabus changes brought in in 2013, but the framework of the course had remained largely unchanged

I cannot describe how much I have enjoyed sharing this course with students over the course: I’ve loved it’s neat structure and focused assessments; I’ve loved the breadth and depth; I’ve loved the nit-picking detail of the IOC, and the creative possibilities of the IOP.  I’ve made decisions about job applications based on whether I’d be able to teach IBDP Lit, and tears have been shed as the prospect of that not being possible – yes, I know #attachment issues.

So it’s fair to say that I’d been ‘looking forward’ to the sweeping changes of the curriculum review with a mixture of cynicism, stoicism, and plain grief.  Rumours circled about the loss of content and favourite assessments.  Was the future of the Literature course itself as risk??

Having spent the last few days learning about and planning for the new course, I now know the answer to that is a firm NO.  In fact, these are changes which I think give us the opportunity to reinvigorate the subject we love – giving it a refreshed and explicit relevance to global issues, whilst retaining the appreciation of the aesthetic.  It is, in a word, brilliant.

Here are a few of my immediate takeaways and favourite bits:

The removal of parts/units and texts attached to particular assessments.  The more time I spend thinking about this new course, the more I’m convinced that this one detail – at first seemingly just structural or organisation – is actually the single biggest change to the essence and experience of this course.

What are the implications of this?  With no texts tied to assessments, students have much greater choice, autonomy, and ownership over the direction of their learning.  There’s the opportunity here for a profound shift in how we and students think about their learning, where the Approaches to Learning and metacognitive strategies can be harnessed and realised.

Of course this brings with it challenges that for some students – and teachers – may feel overwhelming.  I love the neatness and clearly demarcated units of the new course, because it helps me in my planning.  But compared with the new course I can see now how this tight structure at the same serves to undermine our broader aims, working against conceptual understanding by separating texts into silos according to summative assessments.  I think my absolute favourite part of the new course it that if you were to ask students why they are studying a particular text, they will no longer be able to say “for the IOC” or “for the Written Assignment”, and instead be able to think in terms of concepts, connections, and global issues.

The learner portfolio.  At our school we’ve been exploring the potential of digital portfolios (blogs) and learning logs for a little while now.  What’s exciting about the learner portfolio is that it brings these two things together, along with a class notes or a reading journal.  I’m imagining it as a kind of sketchbook of learning – a place to try things out, reflect, make connections, practice and refine.  Its introduction brings up some important questions: what does deliberate practice look like in English?  What does learning look like, over time?  The value of the portfolio with regards formative assessment seems clear, enabled by its detachment from summative criteria.  In reality, however, what role might the portfolio play in supporting teachers’ judgements about students’ progress and approaches to learning?  How might it inform predicted grades or reporting to parents?  Will we need to develop in-house, informal rubrics for our expectations of the portfolio, and at what point might this compromise the ‘spirit’ of the course?

The centrality of concepts.  Linked to the above two highlights for me is the new emphasis on guiding concepts, ‘areas of exploration’ and global issues.  Finally, the course is catching up with universities in terms of moving away from the formalist beginnings of literature studies and the isolated, esoteric discussion of literary texts as static forms.  Commentaries are out, replaced by the Individual Oral on two extracts and global issue, and guided literary analysis on Paper 1.

The focus – across all three Areas of Exploration – is very much on the production of meaning as a dynamic process, where the text interacts with context(s), readers, other texts and traditions.  The possibilities here for grouping texts and building connections across the course are really exciting, while the learner portfolio provides a space for these kinds of reflections.  Though comparison is only an assessment requirement on Paper 2, it’s easy to see how students will have so many more opportunities to view a text through different lenses over time; texts will no longer be studied for an assessment and then set aside.

I’ll be documenting our discussions as a department as we go about planning for this new syllabus, and the challenges and changes along the way!

• What are you most looking forward to on the new syllabus?
• What single change do you think will have the biggest impact of how you teach the course?
• What challenges do you anticipate for students in your context?
• 

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live in fear of Being Found Out.

When I arrived at university, I spent the first year waiting to be hauled into the admin office to be told there had been a terrible mix up, and there’d be Emma Gelford stood there in the corner, snooty and sour, waiting to take up her rightful place.

Becoming a teacher, I think, only highlighted the feeling that I would – one day soon, surely – be discovered for the posturing charlatan I knew myself to me.  Because there were now so many more people to hide it from: students, parents, colleagues, leadership…  It could only be a matter of time before they’d catch on, and the jig would be up.  “I knew it”, they’d say.  “She didn’t fool me.”  And every lesson that didn’t go to plan, every activity that fell utterly flat, every missed deadline, was covered up as quickly as possible.

To make matters worse, while I dragged around my silent guilty baggage, generous, talented colleagues shared animated powerpoints!  Meticulously researched schemes of work!  Colour-coded clickable mark schemes!!  And the guilt grew.

Now *new and downloadable* sticks with which to beat oneself are available courtesy of Twitter, adding to the usual ohgodohgod a whole stack of research papers I’m not reading, blogs I’m not writing, conferences I’m not at.  The inevitable conclusion is that you are the weakest link: not only does everyone else have their shit together, but it’s colour-coded and has embedded hyperlinks.  Fuck.

What I hadn’t expected, then, was that the greatest gift would come just as all that inner narrative – I should be doing more, everyone is better qualified than me… – was projected up on the whiteboard for the whole High School staff to see.

It was during a session with our school counsellor and PSE coordinator on staff and student wellness.  Revealing a list of self-critical statements, we were asked to find 3 from a list of 10-12 that we felt resonated with us.  A few moments of silence as we all scanned the list, during which time I listened as an all-too-familiar voice sounded the all-too-familiar accusations.  And then, a surprise: laughter? A collective sigh?  Something like that.  And as I looked around the table at the face of my department – the most talented, generous, humble people I know – I knew that we all felt exactly the same: these are my thoughts, all of them; all of the time.  That feeling was echoed around the room, and we all felt a little bit freer, I think.

The good news is that the value of our teacher fk-ups – of owning them, holding them up to the light – seems to be echoed in other places too.  Maths teacher Craig Barton asks every guest on his podcast about a lesson that went really badly, and what they’d do differently now.  Dylan Wiliam, Daisy Christodoulou, Doug Lemov, and many others, own up to mistakes and misconceptions which shaped them as a teacher; Craig collected his insights from these conversations in his own book, How I Wish I’d Taught Maths: Lessons learned from research, conversations with experts, and 12 years of mistakes (2018).  Another guest of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast, Harry Fletcher-Wood, begins his latest book Responsive Teaching (2018) by describing the misconceptions that dominated his early years as a teacher.

I was delighted to then recently discover the concept of a ‘F*ck Up Night‘: events held across the globe, inviting professionals to share their greatest fk-ups with a room full of strangers.  Sounds like your worst nightmare?  I think it’s exactly what we need.

We know how important mistakes are for our students’ learning, but when it comes to our own fk-ups everything feels so high-stakes.

• What if we shared our flops and fk-ups as well as our triumphs?
• What if department meetings had time to share our mistakes and what we’ve learnt from them?
• What if we modelled this kind of reflection with our students, curating and valuing the messiness that makes us learn?

I’ve decided to wear my missteps with pride: I made them because I tried; I’ll own them because I’m learning from them, and I’ll share them because I know we’re all getting things wrong all the time.  And thank goodness.

It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I absolutely loved being a student at school: the hum of the classroom, the brain-ache of learning something new, and hop-skip-joy of feeling yourself able to run with an idea, or a newly acquired skill.  This, of course, won’t have been everyone’s experience of school, and I can assure you that anything outside of that bubble was an uphill struggle (the thick grey tights, acne, and introversion did me no favours there).  But then, as now, being in the classroom is just about the best darn thing I can think of.

Often the most powerful takeaways from professional learning opportunities are exactly those moments when I’m reminded what it’s like to be a learner.  I recently completed 8 days of training in Cognitive Coaching, a powerful tool for mediating thinking and supporting self-directness.  It’s been transformational for my thinking about coaching, and the different support functions we utilise in schools.  But after every session, I also came away clutching scribbled post-its full of ‘notes to self’ for my classroom.  These include loads of great protocols and other strategies, but I want to jot down here more of the thinking it’s begun.

Cognitive load & deliberate practice

The Cognitive Coaching course was carefully designed to step us through the language, concepts, and skills we’d need to master to become effective coaches, building towards bringing these all together in the final two days of training.  We had lots of practice framing questions and prompts, and practising dialogue with colleagues.  What these final two days highlighted for me, however, is how incredibly difficult it is to concentrate on improving more than one thing at a time, particularly when you’re trying to pick up something new (Harry Fletcher-Wood and Craig Barton spoke about this recently on a brilliant podcast).  If I tried to focus on language, I’d forget to pause; if I tried to focus on the States of Mind, I’d forget to paraphrase.  And in concentrating so hard on what I was doing, my poor coachee was an afterthought.  It was slow, it was frustrating, and I could feel my brain start to grind to a halt.

My understanding of this (thanks to Sweller) is the simple inability to hold much at all in working memory, and therefore being unable to get much traction, let alone improvement, because I was just trying to think about too many things at once.  How reasonable is it then, to imagine that students can, in the same task, work on embedding quotations, refining topic sentences, developing analysis of the setting, and checking for use of apostrophes?  Not very.  I need to remember that, to show real improvement, I should ask students to focus on just one aspect of their work at a time, model it, revise it, and practice it over and over.   I also need to take my own advice here and let go of the need to provide exhaustive feedback every time against a broad rubric.   Because how much of this can realistically be processed and actioned?

• Note to self (1) : always find ways to reduce extraneous cognitive load (and our trainers Stuart Macalpine and Gavin Grift were great at this).

Novices and Experts

Another idea highlighted for me as a result of my own learning on this course is the enormous gulf that exists between understanding and fluency, or automaticity.  I feel like I have a good understanding now of the concepts of Cognitive Coaching; I can explain them to you (albeit a little clumsily) and could probably demonstrate most of the key skills in my practice if you asked me to point to an example.  But I am such a long way from mastering those skills, and this is a challenge I now think I have really underestimated for my own students.  I have grossly underestimated the need for re-teaching, re-learning, overlearning, and practice, practice, practice.

• Note to self (2): Build in more opportunities for interleaved practice and modelled refinement.  Don’t let students ‘log’ learning and move on.  Don’t confuse performance with learning: seeing that a student can do it, can tell you how to do it, does not mean they have learnt it (if learning is a change in long term memory) and certainly does not mean they have achieved a level of fluency.  I need to re-think how what I consider ‘evidence’ of learning gains, and how I convey this to students.

Another reminder, in relation to this, is the difference between novices and experts – not just in terms of what they know, but how they think.  Daniel Willingham outlines this in Why Don’t Students Like School?

“It’s not just that there is a lot of information in an expert’s long-term memory; it’s also that the information in the memory is organised differently from the information in a novice’s long-term memory.  Experts don’t think in terms of surface features, as novices do; they think in terms of functions, or deep structure.” (133)

When I think about writing an essay or responding to a text, I can think in those kinds of deep structures or relationships: I can ‘feel’ my way through an argument, a narrative, a metaphor.  But in Cognitive Coaching, it’s all surface: I am acutely conscious of trying to follow the ‘map’ for the coaching conversation, and replicate the language, but I haven’t internalised those structures, nor do I have sufficient mental models to call on in order to respond nimbly and sensitively to the nuances of the dialogue.  When I’m really struggling, it’s hard to engage with the issue and person at the heart of the dialogue at all.

• Note to self (3): Don’t expect novices to think and learn like experts.  Model my thinking: a point emphasised in the recent EEF report on Metacognition and Self -Regulated Learning, and which I keep going back to.  Our trainers were expert at this, always modelling their thinking, and the strategies they use to find a way through challenges.  They were also open about how those strategies changed as they became more practised and confident. 

The Zeigarnik Effect

This final point was a new to me, (and one that does seem to be contested somewhat), but it does seem to have some interesting implications for how we talk about learning.  The Zeigarnik effect (after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik) describes the likelihood that we better remember incomplete tasks than those we consider ‘done’.  The effect Zeigarnik observed seems to be discussed mostly in the context of reducing stress by getting things done, but there can be positive implications to be harnessed if we consider our learning as work in progress, rather than done and dusted.  On the Cognitive Coaching course we were never asked what we had learnt, but what we were learning,  and that small change makes a world of difference.  We also learnt about the power of a ‘walkaway question’ at the end of a coaching conversation, again so as to move thinking forward beyond the end of the conversation.  Some takeaways for me then:

• Note to self (4): Use language that emphasises learning as something open-ended and unfinished.  Thinking carefully about how this might be used to prompt reflections, and for students to look out for opportunities to practise and refine English skills in other contexts.  A checklist?  A bookmark?  Something that keeps this learning in their minds once the lesson has ended.

And the final, FINAL, observation was just how bloody fantastic it is to learn something new, know that you have, and know that you have the space and support to get things wrong and get better.  That’s something I look forward to celebrating more often with students.

With thanks to Stuart Macalpine and Gavin Grift, our Cognitive Coaching trainers.

A big focus for me this year has been feedback for students: how we do it, why we do it, how often, how much, etc.

And a few weeks ago, it was my turn to be on the receiving end of the feedback, when our students were asked to feed back on the teaching in my class this year.

And.

I.

Choked.

Now this shouldn’t have been a big deal; I mean, I have only one class left in school (the others having recently graduated), and no reason to think that any of their feedback would be especially negative.  So why was I so nervous to hear what that had to say?  What happened next led to some powerful insights for me in terms of how I think about feedback – on both sides of that exchange.

I knew, having posted a link to the student survey form, that I was not in the right place to be able to read those responses and interpret them constructively.  I was tired, and in the middle of a funk lasting a good 5-6 weeks, during which I couldn’t tell you that I was doing a good enough job.  This is a familiar feeling for me, perhaps for you too, and a wave I know I can ride out.  But I also knew just how wounding it would be to see my failings in black and white at that particular moment.  A wimp?  Yes.  Grit and resilience?  A tough call when you’re gritting your teeth to see out the day.

I took down the link.

The first thought then, was what a luxury it was to have that choice.  I knew that I wasn’t in the right space for feedback, and so I chose to delay it.  Dylan Wiliam draws our attention to the reality that, not only does feedback sometimes have zero impact on learning, but sometimes that impact is negative.  How often do I consider whether students, individually, might be in the right place, this lesson, to have their work picked over, their ‘flaws’ and ‘failings’ held to the light?  Of course, we always aim for feedback that is ‘task-involving’, as Wiliam would say, rather than ‘ego-involving’, but even so: when it’s been one of those days (weeks, terms…) it all feels personal.  So could I, in future, check in with students first?  Do you want to hear feedback on this right now?  Is feedback today going to help you learn?

In the meantime, I tried to unpick my wimpishness.  I don’t recognise myself as someone who doesn’t seek to learn how to improve; who doesn’t want to be proven wrong, or admit to weaknesses.  And I came to the conclusion that that was where some of the trouble lay: I didn’t believe there was anything they could say that I hadn’t already thought of.  I am intensely critical of my own teaching, and I know when there are things I’m trying to push to the side or gloss over.  In this case, it felt important to me to have the chance to own those things by naming them myself, rather than having them reflected back at me.

So another couple of useful things came up for me here: one was to wonder how often students lack ownership of their learning because we jump in too quickly with the feedback.  How can I build in space and time for students to form their own reflections, before offering another perspective?  The other issue I found interesting here is that of the weight or value we give to those perspectives; I had inadvertently given more weight to mine than theirs: I didn’t believe there was anything they could say that I hadn’t already thought of.   I had already dismissed the possibility that they could have a different but equally valuable perspective.  And that’s a difficult thing to write, because again, it’s not a trait I recognise in myself as a teacher.  I needed to take back some control, and of course it would be foolish to deny theirs an element of pride and self-protection here: please, let me say it first;  I know, I know.

I sat with that for a couple of weeks, hoping no one would ask how my surveys were going, and then came across this fascinating article on Twitter which just resonated so powerfully: “Why Admitting You’re Wrong Should be the New Right.”  Henry Wismayer explores the political consequences of our “wrong-phobia”:

“A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her 2010 book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, “about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.”

Now I might be a narcissist and a wimp, but I also know that I am far from omniscient.  And I knew, as soon as I saw this article, that here was an opportunity to model something much more interesting and powerful for my students.

So before our next class, I put on my Big Girl Pants, and sat down with another article which I’ve often used with students, on four different types of mistakes.  And, as I’ve asked of them, I noted my ‘sloppy’ mistakes (I’m always late to class when I’ve had an activity at lunchtime; I’m bad at posting tasks on the OLP), and my ‘aha’ moments (I should have made them a part of the discussion about feedback, instead of fearing what they might say).  As for students, the most useful part for me was to consider the ‘stretch mistakes’: things I’m still working at, and don’t have the answers to yet.  For me this is feedback (still), mastering the concepts on the language side of the course, and building relationships with individual students in what is a fairly large IB class.

More than that, I was open with them about why I had taken down the link, and the thinking this had prompted.  As behavioural psychology tells us, even showing that kind of vulnerability, articulating that to them, I sensed shifted something in the dynamic almost immediately.

So then, finally, I asked them to complete the survey.  Armed with my assessment of myself, they were able to give me targetted, thoughtful feedback and suggestions for meeting my goals.  Out the other side of my confidence-wobble, I was ready to take onboard their feedback and know I could learn from it.  I could zoom in on the most useful things, not just the negative.  Having taken time to honestly reflect, I felt ownership over the process.  And (of course) they told me some things I hadn’t thought of, and need to consider.

I’m looking forward now to modelling with them how I use the feedback to refine my goals, and use deliberate practice and reflection to work towards them.

After the complex and insane mindgames I had to play with myself just to get that first blog post written and published, I know that I need to get this second one bashed out super-quick before I lose my nerve.  It turns out I’m the Chandler Bing of blogging: so long as I can kid myself that we’re in this fun, casual relationship, it’s all good.  As soon as it looks like it’s getting serious you’ll see a me-shaped hole through that door over there. (Can you ghost your own blog??)

Anyway, so here I am, casually setting out on my first blogging challenge, which involves writing three posts over three months with a bunch of keeno colleagues.  Easy, you say?  What a great bonding experience and professional learning opportunity, you say?  Ho ho, my friend.  Not so fast.  First up, I have blogging baggage, as we’ve discussed.  Secondly, I really want to use this as an opportunity to play around with some evidence-based teaching strategies, specifically drawing on the recent issue of Impact magazine from the Chartered College of Teaching.  And I’m not quite sure what this will look like, or how it will work yet, but I think that’s ok for now.  Maybe you can help me to work it out…

For the last year I’ve been reading a lot around assessment, and I’m really interested in the concept of positive washback: how can we make sure that our assessment tasks add value to learning, rather than just taking a kind of dipstick measurement of it?  I like this idea because it challenges the notion that assessment – particularly formal assessment – must almost by definition be a bad thing: a challenge, an obstacle, at best a necessary evil.  If I’m going to spend a hefty chunk of my classroom on a particular assessment, I want to be absolutely sure that I’m squeezing as much learning value from that task as I possibly can.   So how can I maximise positive rather than negative washback?

I’m also interested in this because it goes slightly against assumptions about my subject (English literature).  We’re so much more used to hearing about testing in maths or the sciences (and my husband is a science teacher so I hear a LOT about it) but it doesn’t seem to marry with thinking about English as a creative art, or a skills-based subject.  I’m thinking a lot more lately (thanks to Daisy Christodoulou et al) about the knowledge underpinning those skills and that creativity, so testing could be useful here too.

My Grade 11s are currently preparing for their Individual Oral Commentary (an assessment piece I actually love), so there’s a nice opportunity here to see if I can plan for some of that positive washback as we work towards the final exam.  In particular:

1.  How can we use retrieval practice to strengthen recall of the key learning?
2.  Can I use testing in a way which increases students’ metacognitive skills, giving them a greater sense of ownership on this one?

I’m off to read Impact and mull it over a bit.  I’ll let you know how it’s going.

This is not the first time I’ve written the first line of a blog post.  It’s not even the second or third.

On my last foray into the world of blogging, I stayed up half the night polishing a post which became an essay, only to delete it less than 12 hours later when thoughtful and generous comments from a couple of readers suggested that SOMEONE ELSE HAS SEEN THIS AND OMG.

Because even though I’m an English teacher – and I’ll happily write you an impersonal academic essay any day of the week – authentic writing like this, not hiding behind the formalities and conventions, is something I find utterly excruciating and, if I’m honest, mostly unnecessary.  Who needs to read my half-formed, ill-informed ramblings?

Well, actually, I do.

Every lesson, I’m asking students to take risks, to make mistakes, to be vulnerable.  Whether it’s in their own portfolios, or a tentative contribution to class discussion, I’m asking them to value the messiness of learning, to take a chance even when they know themselves to be far from proficient.  And all the while, I stay comfortably cocooned in my own expertise, not wanting to put my hand up unless I’ve read it all, know it all, and have all the answers.

But this *deep breath* will never happen, will it?  I will never, ever reach that point, because it doesn’t exist; if anything, it only seems further and further away.

In the early days of learning French when we lived in Switzerland, I didn’t want to utter a word until I had mastered it entirely.  I couldn’t stand to hear my estuary accent mangling it all up, ugly globs of franglais interrupting the musical, casual fluidity of conversation.  I cringed at colleagues who gave it a stab, plundering ahead making horrible errors, because who cares?  Well, I did.  I thought I was a sponge, soaking it all up, listening to everyone around me, hoping that I’d ‘pick it up.’  But you don’t learn to play an instrument by watching from the audience.

What I’ve come to realise is that I’ve been treating this whole blogging enterprise like it’s a high-performing orchestra; where I need to be polished, proficient, and have some unique contribution to make.  But it’s not, is it?  It’s a jam session in the garage.  Or not even: it’s practising scales, it’s a creaky bit of sight-reading; hell, sometimes it’s drunk karaoke (stay-tuned, reader).

So, I’m giving it another shot.  And this blog will be a record not just of my professional learning, but also my relationship with blogging, in all its up and downs.

*Cue anxious sweats in 3,2, 1……*