I wrote this article after I ruptured my Achilles tendon in the middle of 2017. I was becoming more than a little stir-crazy; below is the result.
Philip Jeffreys
I’ve always enjoyed writing and my relatively recent foray into a Facebook page for our Scholarship English students has been a pleasurable experience. The page has become increasingly philosophical and this, coupled with my recent spell of enforced inactivity, has got me thinking more deeply than usual about a range of issues.
My other driver is that I’ve got a nagging feeling that we could do things so much better at FAHS. This is no criticism of an institution which has given me the twin benefits of a range of challenges and a regular income since 1976. However, we’re always so busy all the time that we seldom get time to sit back, grab a coffee or a low-alcohol beer and have a really good ponder about what we do and why and how we do it.
So, in the spirit of this post-modern world, I’m going to start with what I’ve learned about the education process since 1956 when I first became a factor in educational outcomes. Hopefully I will develop some ideas about some current policies and practices and conclude with a generalised point or two about what all this means for both teachers and students.
My first thought is that we teachers, above all else, teach ourselves. Students remember people to a much greater extent than they remember which river forms the border of France and Germany. I have vivid memories of virtually all my teachers, especially the ones who could tell a story, those with a dry sense of humour and those with a real passion for their subject. The Principal of Cathedral Grammar was a gentleman with the magnificent name of Lionel Slingsby Hart. He had fought WW2 as a tank commander in North Africa and he enthralled us with stories of how difficult it was to besiege a Crusader castle in the twelfth century. Beatrice Muir taught Latin and French and when she talked about someone enjoying something she would finish her story by commenting that “her smile went twice round her face and tied in a bow behind her left ear”. At Christ’s College, I spent four years with James “Jimmy” McBride, an Irishman with a flair for languages. One of his favourite phrases was, “You can’t scale 100 per cent” and we really did try to get everything right. According to popular rumour, Jimmy had at least nine children and supplemented his income by evening stints on national radio; his facility with languages ensured that European composers always had their names pronounced correctly.
The corollary of all this is that we ought to be rather less concerned with schemes and much more focussed on developing confidence in ourselves to be the people we really are. Sure, we need to avoid the temptation of trying to be stand-up comedians and we do have to teach the little darlings stuff that they need to know for the exams and, much more importantly, for life after school. However, if we use our brains we can do both because smart teachers teach their courses in such a way that they are their authentic selves at the same time. Trying to be something you’re not is helluva tiring. Been there, done that.
The second thing that I’ve figured out is that in an ideal world we would have a 1:1 student – teacher ratio. Both as teachers and students we know that taking someone aside and explaining why the Spanish Armada failed or the difference between pronouns and conjunctions or why a particular chemical formula operates the way it does (apologies for the lack of detail here) is far and away the best way of getting the concept across. However, if you have a class of 30 teenagers, you’ve got to be smart. You can differentiate until the cows come home (differentiate means that you teach different kids different stuff in different ways) but differentiation can easily develop into an Olympic quality shambles. What you need to do first is to develop a class culture, the keynote of which is that everyone matters equally and that therefore we need to work for each other. Being disruptive doesn’t cross our mind because we recognise that if someone else is being disruptive we can’t learn.
Recently FAHS welcomed Wesley Clarke onto our staff. Wesley is a highly successful rugby coach who specialises in insightful comments about how we humans influence each other and how we work effectively (or not) in groups. In a few short months this South African guru has had a bigger effect on my thinking about teaching than anyone I have ever come across. Even though FAHS currently has the strongest staff we have ever had, I reckon that there’s room for improvement in our culture. Just as developing a class culture is so important in helping students to succeed, so is developing a staff culture so that we all have an emotional investment in moving forward together. The problem is, of course, that teachers – especially the best ones – are highly individualistic by nature. If their way of doing things works, they certainly aren’t going to change it. However, I do think that there’s room for compromise here. Clearly a staff culture can’t be prescriptive. To give a personal example, I have no intention of using IT if it’s just another way of doing what I already do reasonably effectively; moreover, I will use all my inventiveness to get around any aspect of compulsion. Like most Kiwi males, I hate being told what to do; I’d rather go to Hell my way than travel to Heaven using an approved route…You get the picture. Anyway, a staff culture doesn’t have to be prescriptive. All we need is some sort of vague but meaningful mantra. Something as simple as “We do the best we can for each of our students.” No educational jargon – just something simple that we are free to interpret in our own way.
This unofficial mantra has already inspired me to try to make some major changes in what we do and how we do it. Firstly, it’s a truism that we think in words. If we haven’t got too many words at our disposal then our reasoning skills are going to be sorely limited. Reasoning skills are quite important things for fully functioning members of society to possess. Ergo, let’s make a real effort to increase our students’ effective vocabularies. We are currently trialling a variety of methods to achieve this necessary end. Needless to say, this is not all me and I’d like to formally recognise the foundation work of Trish Balmer and the ongoing skills and enthusiasm of Sarah Sisson and Kate Nielson, two staff members who have been crucial in getting the avalanche started. It’s also great to see Glenn Thomson utilising some literacy strategies in the Maths Faculty.
A side effect of our literacy initiative has been the sudden (if 40 years’ late) revelation that two teachers operating in one classroom can have a huge effect on student attitude and achievement. This year I spent a very enjoyable five weeks in SSN’s 11 Science Skills class. The 19 students were the lowest achieving group as identified by Year 10 testing and were widely expected to find NCEA Achievement Standards well beyond them. As there was no option except to have an attempt at Achievement Standards, off they went. SSN restructured their assessment on viruses and bacteria so that it was broken down into very small pieces and did all the teaching. I was employed in an assistant’s role, focussing on teaching key vocabulary in very short stints and checking that the students knew what these words meant and how they were used. I also helped by answering questions when I could. As an aside, I am sure that that my impressive level of ignorance about viruses and bacteria at the start of the unit was seen by the class as a positive factor. Ignorance was OK; it was something we needed to remedy together. Equally impressive as my level of scientific ignorance were the results. Of the 19 students, 16 gained Achieved, including all 15 boys. Now, on the face of it, we haven’t got the resources to double-team all low-band senior classes but I wonder whether these students’ success in Science is going to affect their achievement in other subjects. (Yes, I am going to be dropping in from time to time to see how they are getting on in all their subjects). I also wonder if we can go beyond the obvious and succeed in finding the staffing for something that works amazingly well and really has significant potential for changing students’ lives. After all, confidence is THE key component for success in any field of endeavour and if we can give these students the experience of success maybe they can achieve results none of us imagined.
One of the spin-offs of moving quietly around the Science Skills class was my observation that these young persons asked quite a lot of questions, an awful lot more questions than my super-talented 13ENAs, for example. What the…? What’s going on here? Clearly the Science Skills class had the confidence to ask me for help but the 13ENAs surely had confidence to burn. Didn’t they? Anyway, one evening I invited myself to our hostel prep time and spent a pleasant hour cruising around talking to students about why they did and didn’t ask questions. I’ve put together a (very brief) paper on my findings but I have no doubt that improving students’ real (as opposed to apparent) confidence to ask questions is one of the two most significant changes we can make to improve student achievement. The other, of course, is widening their vocabularies.
Another change I’m really keen on relates to time. You’ll recall that I made reference to this in my second paragraph. One of my mantras is that time is our best friend and our worst enemy (Not a bad way of teaching the concept of paradox). Over the last twelve months I’ve become increasingly aware that time is indeed an unforgiving enemy for many of us. We are running on empty: we’re trying to do too much in the school day and also in those pre- and post-school hours that make up the remainder of the allocated 24. There are two highly predictable results of this state of affairs: stuff isn’t done as well as it might be and teachers come to regard FAHS as a source of exhaustion rather than of inspiration. Fortunately, there’s a solution. We need to burn as many assessments as we possibly can. In the senior school, we offer at least 50% more credits than students actually need. At Levels 2 and 3 some students are entered for twice as many credits as they require. Surely it would be smart to design courses which maximise teaching and minimise assessment? Would that not be highly likely to produce better results, better informed students and less stressed staff?
Moreover, I reckon that there’s another way in which we can save our staff valuable time. When I was a HOF my key policy was a commitment not to waste people’s time and therefore I cancelled every meeting that had limited value. I did get some criticism from those colleagues who liked sitting around and airing their views but there are other ways of having professional discussions – and other venues for them. As a wise journalist once said, “Winners have parties; losers have meetings.” I’m a fan of voluntary meetings: the chairperson decides on the agenda and publishes it. If people feel they have something to contribute, they show up. If they’d rather do some essential family shopping or continue “War and Peace”, good luck to them. Furthermore, there are all sorts of ways of disseminating information; holding a meeting is the least effective way I have ever come across.
So what does all this prove? Well, I didn’t start writing this with the intention of proving anything in particular but possibly I have discovered a few gems worth the trouble of digging up and polishing. To begin with, I’d like to share a couple of aside comments which have occurred to me whilst writing the above comments. Firstly, age doesn’t really matter all that much in teaching; provided, of course, that one still has the faculties of breathing and being reasonably ambulatory. There are some students who do respond to teachers who are closer in age to them than we more venerable types are, but this phenomenon really does vary from student to student. Interestingly, there appears to be a strong correlation between students who relate best to younger teachers and those who reject the works of the long-dead, Shakespeare in particular. Interesting, but not surprising. Secondly, I have discovered that staying at the same school for one’s whole career is no bad thing. Certainly, promotion can be extraordinarily slow, but teaching and promotion don’t necessarily go together. The upside is the joy of teaching the children and grand-children of past pupils. Anyway, that’s enough of me.
To conclude, my key finding is that we can all inspire each other, provided that we are open to being inspired. That stroppy young bloke in the far corner can teach us how to do a better job, but we do need to be prepared to accept the feedback. Guest speakers can open young eyes to the world beyond school, if only because they look and sound different. They may be conveying exactly the same message as we do but packaging does make a difference in promoting a product. Finally, we all teach each other every day. That sounds terribly trite but it’s just so true. How we relate to each other – teachers, students, teacher-aides and ancillary staff – determines not only our job satisfaction but our personal growth as well.