Diary of an NQT A marking man


WHen I starting teaching I gave myself a few golden rules that I said I wouldn’t break. First, I would never have a teaching-related


Facebook/Twitter status; I saw too many tragic appeals for help during my training year to copy that mistake. Second, I would never work in


the holidays. What is the point in wasting one of the best perks of our job by carrying the stress through into the time off? Third, I wouldn’t whinge


about marking. I wouldn’t bring it up at dinner; I refused to discuss it with my friends and I promised to never let it intrude upon my social life. I was determined not to become the moaning cliché of a teacher sick of the sack of marking he carts home, endlessly griping about the glut of inane essays he has to trawl through instead of going to the cinema/pub/ football/gym etc. After all, marking can also


conveniently pile up unexpectedly at times of visits to the mother-in-law, when the washing up needs to be done, and also when your other half gets Gilbert and Sullivan tickets. However, I am officially, here and


now, breaking rule number 3. Marking is a constant pain. It is never-


ending. When you get a pile done, a new pile comes in. When you have a social occasion, you have a mound sitting on your desk that looks at you like an unloved puppy demanding attention. And apart from the rare, unusual, incredible moment when you spot that the hour you spent waffling has actually reached a child’s brain, it is mostly boring. I asked a more experienced teacher how is best


to deal with it and they simply replied “don’t set homework you have to mark”. I have tried peer- marking, self-marking and even marking in different colours to liven it up. For a small period, I found


listening to techno while I marked made it go faster, but I soon realised I was essentially just ticking to music. And it’s not as though they even look at your


bloody comments! It is so frustrating when you stay up until god knows what time, sifting through a pile of A level essays, scrawling comment after helpful comment across the page and then they skip the streams of sage advice and look at the big circled letter at the end. You pour your heart and soul into those comments to help them improve and all they care about is whether their shiny letter is of a higher value than that of the person next to them. You might as well just go


out and buy them all a scratchcard and enjoy yourself instead of marking their work. Having said this, and despite


all the drudgery, if I am honest the one thing I have really noticed this year is quite how important marking is – how crucial it is to creating good students, removing


mistakes, improving quality, and most of all improving teaching. It is no secret that, largely, the teachers who gain the best results do the most marking. When you notice a whole class has made a similar mistake, or more likely hasn’t done something you


thought you’d explained, you realise where and how you have to improve. One of my biggest developments this year


has been in providing more structure, especially for weaker students. So, who cares about the social life, the late nights and the constant red smudge on the thumb? Bring on the marking! In fact, that might make a good Facebook status...


• Tomas Duckling is a history NQT at Queens’ School in Hertfordshire. He returns in next week.


Outdoor education Once a teacher...


WHen I started teaching in the early 1970s, outdoor education was being introduced in a handful of progressive schools. One of them was edinburgh’s Craigroyston High School, led by the charismatic Hugh MacKenzie. MacKenzie was an advocate for outdoor


education, partly because of his own experience as a geographer. In these early days the scientists and the geographers were often the champions of ODe (as it became known) because they could see a direct link between it and their subject content. There were other reasons


why those committed to change in these early days of the comprehensive system, backed ODe. It offered practical, experiential learning rather than traditional book learning. In deprived communities


it often gave children their one opportunity to spend any sustained time in a rural environment. It was a wonderful means to build teamwork and co-operation. It also provided physical excitement and adventure to adolescents hungry for such experiences. Throughout the 1970s and


80s, ODe flourished in Scotland. Formal courses, providing a subject qualification, equivalent to that in any traditional subject, were developed, as were post-graduate Master’s courses. It is ironic therefore, at a time when


Curriculum for excellence should be embracing outdoor education and its wider methodologies, that it is in fact in decline. Many schools have either reduced or abandoned their specific outdoor education posts. Two factors have impelled schools in this


direction. The first is the unremitting drive for attainment and improved examination results. From every direction, including that of parents, comes the pressure to drop the “frills” and concentrate on the “essentials”. The second is finance. not for several decades have schools had to so tighten their belts. It is timely therefore that a counterblast should


be fired in support of learning outside the classroom. Simon Beames, Peter Higgins and Robbie nicol all lecture on outdoor and environmental education at edinburgh University. Their newly published book,


Learning Outside the Classroom (Routledge), puts the case for something much wider than the model of ODe developed in the 1970s and 80s. They argue that learning and teaching outside the


classroom brings curricula alive, provides a much- needed understanding of environmental issues, and develops health and wellbeing.nor do they limit such learning to the traditional outdoor subjects, but see its approach as consistent with both cross-curricular learning and almost all subject areas. The first assumption is that learning


should start local, rooted in the learner’s community and experience. It is by moving from the known to the unknown that real and meaningful learning occurs: start by measuring the playground and the journey from home to school before considering abstract distances, whether in maths or geography. The argument is for learning that is “situated”, that students coming to know “their place” is the starting point of meaningful learning and that


learning through local landscapes is the best introduction to community education. Again, in the areas of moral


and ethical education, it is asserted that outdoor learning forces the learner to confront and


understand the world in terms not merely of facts or statistics but of the interconnectedness between


people. Beames, Higgins and nicol have produced a blast against the dryly didactic methodology which still characterises too much teaching, and have advocated adventurous approaches which will enhance the pedagogy of even the best teachers. The one outstanding doubt is that the necessary emphasis on


improving methods again seems to deprioritise content. Beware, it is the Achilles’ heel of too much educational innovation.


• Alex Wood has been a teacher for 38 years. Prior to his recent retirement he was headteacher of Wester Hailes Education Centre in Edinburgh. He is currently an associate with the Scottish Centre for Studies in School Administration at Edinburgh University. He returns in two weeks.


BEHAVIOUR Attitudes a


Around 450,000 children are classed as persistent


absentees. Dr Glen Williams looks at how attitudinal surveys can help pinpoint the reasons pupils become disengaged and help schools to turn things around


england – or 450,000 – fell into the persistently absent category over the autumn term of 2010 and the spring term of 2011. These children missed 15 per cent of their lessons, the equivalent to a month’s worth of classes over a year. These attendance issues mirror a wider concern


I


within the teaching profession about pupil behaviour. A recent poll carried out by the Guardian Teacher network showed that 59 per cent of teachers believe student behaviour has deteriorated during their teaching career, and half of the 52 per cent who have considered leaving the profession cited student behaviour as one of the main reasons.


Consequences


The consequences of not addressing these issues can create serious and long-standing difficulties for the young person and in turn wider society. The number of young people not in education, employment or training (neeTs) has risen to nearly one million (more than 18 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds) despite the best efforts to turn this situation around. At a time when public service funding and resources


are diminishing, neeTs cost the taxpayer somewhere between £97,000 and £300,000 per neeT over their lifetime for the extra services and support they will need. The personal and social costs to the young person are


higher still, including a future of higher risk of teenage pregnancy, youth offending, serious drug use, long- term job instability at lower incomes, homelessness, and mental or physical health problems. These factors make their own distinct contribution to


the current gloomy national outlook on UK economics and wellbeing.


Answers?


Improving behaviour and tackling truancy are complicated and deep-seated issues, which successive governments have continued to strive to address. The new coalition government expert advisor on behaviour, Charlie Taylor, has recently issued a checklist for schools to help them remember to get the simple, but essential, basics in place. The new Ofsted framework from this month further


highlights behaviour as one of four key inspection criteria, and schools could be subject to “no warning”


couldn’t have guessed that the most disaffected and disruptive pupils have a strong belief in


‘ 8


their own ability to learn but a lack of belief in the system to help them


SecEd • January 12 2012 ’


visits if their pupils’ behaviour is not judged to be up to scratch. There are not always quick fixes or easy answers


to such deep-seated problems, particularly when most schools are already doing the best they can to track and monitor behaviour and attendance. However, going one step further and investigating


the underlying reasons as to why individual pupils or cohorts are behaving in a particular way could throw up some very interesting information. After all, what school would not like to pinpoint


which children were at risk of dropping out in the future? Or what could be done that would effectively raise children’s aspirations and achievements? And which teacher would not find it helpful to know why a child continues to disrupt a class and therefore be able to find an effective solution?


Issue, insight, intervention


Drilling down into the specific attitudinal issues, that act as barriers to pupils fulfilling their true potential, can help to fill in some gaps when it comes to preventing disengagement from education. Attitudes are formed by and affect how we feel,


what we do and how we think. In a school setting, a student’s attitude to learning can influence their whole experience of education and obviously affect their overall level of attainment. Attitudes in this context are not subject to weekly fads, they are a stable state that will only change if something major happens.


Many of the young people who scored poorly were already known to us, but we


TISwidely recognised that high rates of school attendance are associated with improving attainment success and life chances for young people, and yet the latest government figures came as a stark reminder of the growing problem of truancy. A total of 7.2 per cent of children in


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