Diary of an NQT Worriers, blamers & dopeys


IT’S BEEN interesting to watch my students as their March GCSEs have approached. I’ve been hammering home the need to revise and practise questions so that they can do well (especially if they’re re-sitting again) and so that the summer will be easier for them. In almost every lesson, I’ve told


my students to attend the revision sessions that the heads of each science have kindly put on at lunchtimes and after school, but sadly most students had other ideas, so many of these sessions were empty. The experience has


got me thinking about my students and how they seem to fall into a few categories. First up are the “worriers”.


These were the first students to come to see me, or other members of the science staff, to ask for help because they were worried about their exams. Most of their panic, in my


opinion, wasn’t strictly necessary as they had come to get help early. However, even though they are well prepared, I suspect that they will have been panicking right up until the start of the exam. Next were the “blamers”. This lot


seem to find any excuse to avoid doing any revision, or work, blaming everyone and everything but themselves for this. “The revision sessions are at lunchtime, I can’t


go, it’s not fair, you should make it some other time, I don’t do work at lunchtime.” And: “Oh I can’t go after school, not tonight, you should have told me sooner.” And my personal favourite, which generally occurs straight after the exam: “It’s the teachers fault, they never taught us that.”


Teach it like Torno! The comprehensive debate


“WE CLASS schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.” Evelyn Waugh. And so, 40 years after Waugh’s death, the debate


rages on. The current “Big Conversation” is whether schools should convert to academy status. Only last week my daughter came home with a letter from her school stating that the governing body had passed a resolution to consider academy status. The reasons cited are that the school


will have greater independence over resources and the curriculum. They do state, however, that there will be no changes to the current admissions policy or the way they work with local schools. But will all schools that become academies be so scrupulous? I know of one school that, over the last couple of years, has flouted their admissions policy only to receive a rap on the knuckles. This latest government initiative


will be like manna from heaven to them. Indeed, as I write, many of these schools will be only two weeks away from becoming academies, and in doing so will be given complete control over the running of their schools, including admissions. You may be asking what


the problem is with this. The response lies in the gradual dismantling of the comprehensive system, which began under the last government. In fact 10 years ago, Tony Blair


announced the beginning of the “post-comprehensive era”. This was then followed by Alastair Campbell’s controversial comment that the days of the “bog-standard comprehensive” were over. But is the word “comprehensive” such a bad


thing? In Finland, educationally one of the highest performing countries, the fact that schools are uniform in their approach is seen as a strength. Surely the growth of academies will only continue to diversify our schools and lead to even greater gaps between those at the top and bottom of the spectrum. This has been echoed by Bernard Barker, who


was the first comprehensive pupil to become head of a comprehensive school. He says we are different to Finland in that “we have a deeply unequal, selfish and


less trusting society. The invention of these new types of school in England has allowed parents to achieve some kind of marketplace differentiation so they feel they are protecting their interests”. And that is precisely my point. We are now


approaching an era when market forces will begin to dominate our schools and the sole purpose of education will begin to dwindle. The fact remains that while schools need to exercise sound financial management they are not businesses and headteachers are not business managers. It is an indictment that the current


NPQH is open to bursars, who on gaining the qualification, will be able to operate as headteachers. Surely time spent in the classroom and understanding the developmental needs of both students and staff is much more valuable for running a school than controlling the budget. The growth of


academies coincides with the greater investment in the Teach First programme. Of course we want the best teachers we can get, but surely they should be people who want to teach in the first place, not those who


are lured in by financial incentives. Most teachers came into the profession in the first place because they believed in the comprehensive ideal. The belief that education was a way of equalising society and giving pupils the chance to succeed in life regardless of their background. In this sense business has no place in education and merely serves to get in the way of developing good


citizens and a caring society. The creation of academies can only serve to divide and deepen the social gap that already exists. No doubt over the coming months and


years many schools will opt to become academies because of short-term financial incentives that conversion will bring. But in doing so will this mark the beginning of the end for collaboration and co-operation? Have a good week.


• David Torn is a professional tutor at St Edward’s School in Essex. He is a former Teacher of the Year for London and co-author of Brilliant Secondary School Teacher. He is passionate that the purpose of education is to change lives. He returns in two weeks.


The age-old question of what makes a good teacher is still debated in staffrooms across the country. Trevor Yates reports on the Measures of Effective Teaching project, which


aims to help identify and support good teaching


one of the tools used in the US research is now to be introduced within schools in the UK. In most US schools, teachers are evaluated by


W 8


their principal or an administrator based on classroom visits. Unsurprisingly, nine out of 10 teachers get the highest marks. Morale-boosting but not very helpful for improving standards. The goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching


(MET) project has been to help educators and policy- makers identify and support good teaching, by pulling together evidence about teacher practice and what it really means for the achievement of pupils. It is a huge venture, funded by the Bill and Melinda


Gates Foundation, which has involved dozens of independent education researchers working together with 3,000 teachers, school districts and unions, in order to work out fair and reliable measures of what “effective teaching” really means. Work on MET began in 2009 by ranking teachers by


a model which calculates how much each teacher has helped students to learn based on changes in test scores from year-to-year. Research then looked at correlations between the


rankings and other measures of teacher effectiveness, including students’ perceptions under the “Tripod” project. Tripod is a national consortium of schools and districts with a shared interest in raising achievement for


ITH EDUCATION policy now focused squarely on the importance of the “good teacher”, the findings from a major $45 million project in the US have taken on more significance – particularly as


all students, while narrowing gaps among students from different racial, ethnic and economic class backgrounds. It is operated by UK education consultants Cambridge Education. The organisation has established itself in the US as


an expert on school improvement, partnering with over 2,500 schools in more than 200 districts across 25 states, leading large-scale projects on school transformation, teacher evaluation, and school and district quality reviews. Tripod takes its name from the idea that schools


can raise achievement while closing gaps by helping teachers improve in three essential and inter-related areas: content knowledge, pedagogy and relationships. Tripod participants use data from the project’s


surveys to analyse student engagement, classroom learning conditions, teaching practices, youth culture, and school climate. Young people know what good teaching is, what works for them, but this kind of information has yet to be taken seriously and used in a considered way. Around 100,000 students in the MET classrooms


were asked to report their perceptions of teaching. The Tripod survey instruments, developed by Harvard researcher Ronald Ferguson, assess the extent to which students experience the classroom environment as engaging, demanding, and supportive of their intellectual growth through questions which are phrased and targeted to be relevant to pupils. The statements are designed to measure seven teaching practices that the survey’s authors call the Seven Cs: • Caring about students (encouragement and support). For example: “The teacher in this class encourages me to do my best.”


SecEd • March 10 2011 The “dopey and disorganised”. Personally, this


lot are my favourite, as they often have no idea what day of the week it is so when they have to do an exam they follow everyone else and just have a go at the paper in a totally stress-free relaxed manner – and are happy with whatever grade they get. The final lot are the “hard-


workers”. They’ve secretly been revising for weeks, downloading papers and using revision guides and online questions to help them. If there are only a few of these in a class it makes whole-class revision activities difficult as they’ve already tried every question available unlike their peers. However, if the entire class is made up of “hard- workers”, revision sessions are awesome, you can do a few whole-class activities and then leave them to test one another and work on their own. I’ve only got one class like this, but it was amazing to watch them all bring out revision guides and genuinely test one another about the topic. They seemed to take pleasure in


trying to “out-know” one another. After the exam, most of the students remained true to type, some worrying, others blaming everyone else, some not even aware that they had just done a test, and others


attempting to work out their grade using their revision guides and asking their friends what they had put for the question!


• Our NQT diarist this year writes anonymously and is a teacher of science from a secondary school in the East of England. He returns next week.


What mak effective


GOOD PRACTICE


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