Digital Lobotomy. Bearded tits and the exam system.

So, you get asked to do a presentation on something. Anything really. It could be the pollution of the seas by plastic, a history of theatrical stage design or an evaluation of the branding possibilities of paralympic sportspeople. Whatevs (as young people said a few years ago)

You go (or at least I do and reckon you probably do too) for the internet.

You start to research, looking for zippy phrases, interesting reading, nuggets of useful information, particularly striking photographs, maybe a whole series of youtube documentaries or even, if you are feeling particularly researchy and need hard serious sources quickly, an ebook.

You don't think twice. You're not cheating, you're living, you're planning, you're constructing something from the ether, the collective thought, surfing the wave of knowledge so to speak.

You're not cheating. Lets be very, very clear. You are not cheating. Perhaps, you could, if you wanted wait till you have a free Saturday, go down to your local library, order some books, wait another 2 weeks for them to arrive and then spend hours reading no doubt fascinating information, sifting the information for the salient points.

You'd probably be a wiser person, but I doubt your presentation would be ready on time.

The internet is basically brilliant. I can find out anything I want. Look, I'll go and find something new out now. t's 20:54. I'll be back in a minute...

20:56: There's such a bird as a bearded reedling. You can see them on the Norfolk coast. This is news to me

A Bearded Reedling (probably unaware of it's place at the heart of this polemic)

20:57: I wonder if Bearded Reedlings are rare? 

20:59: I'm not entirely sure how rare they are, but I do know now they are also found in Belarus and Azerbaijan

21:00: Still not sure how rare they are, but I've discovered they are sexually dimorphic. I've connected this to other things, like mallards and pheasants as it means difference in character/appearance beyond the sexual organs. This is a phrase I've either never heard of or have erased along with almost all of my GCSE biology. Exploring further and using my brain I've realised many things are sexually dimorphic and that sea mammals tend to display the biggest size differences between gender. I'm on a roll. 

21:03: I'm pretty certain they are what is also known as the Bearded Tit (insert hilarity here) and there's between 1/4 and 1/2 a million pairs of them in Europe. 

21:06: Ok, controversy hunters. It seems the reedling is a tit, but not a tit. It seems it was placed with the tit family before then being catagorised as a parrot bill but then (get this!) it wasn't one of those either and it was placed in it's own category entirely... called 'Panuridae'

21:08: Further research suggests that the 'Panuridae' family is an umbrella term which includes Parrotbills and the bearded tit. 

I could go on. I really could. But this blog started as a process of self reflection and a chance to air my thoughts in the hope somebody would respond and subject them to lavish praise and promote me to shadow education minister , critical rigour. I'm not sure further delving into the world of small birds will hasten this process. 

The point is, I can turn raw information into knowledge. I can research and find things at the drop of a hat. So can young people. It's quite a feature of my job role at work as I'm sure it is in yours. I've found it's had an effect on things like my short term memory. Who really needs one of those eh? I've learnt new ways to improvise round this. Google Keep is a godsend. Alarms on my phone. 

Sometimes I even wonder if I'd like to put the genie back in the bottle. It doesn't fit though. The genie got fat and used to living a free range live and me and the genie just need to learn to co-exist. 

The young people need to learn to live with him too. He's a scary genie sometimes. He can grant wishes and not all wishes are good. Some of the wishes are though. Some of the wishes are amazing. Some of the wishes could change the entire face of life and learning. 

Yet we send them into rows of drafty, echoing halls, year after year, armed with a pen and a piece of paper and then wonder why they are disconnected from education. We wonder why they roll their eyes and sigh at endless 'technique' classes and being drilled to remember stuff half of which is going to be outdated by the time they have picked up the exam certificate. 

We tell them 'it proves you can learn' or 'it's what employers want' as if the only reason to get an education is for someone else. It's not about teasing threads of enquiry or following a trail of curiosity. It's so 'you can get a sticker which proves you can learn' 

We chastise them for 'being bored' then rush to the staffroom to check social media and I think we're threatened. We're threatened by a world that doesn't need us to learn things. 

It does need us to learn to learn things though. We could do a such an incredible job if outside the idea of the 'connected classroom' we also had 'connected exams.' 

Lets start by introducing a new GCSE - we'll call it GCSE Information Synthesis. 

It's going be a 3 hour long exam. The question paper will be as follows: 

"Take a topic of your choice (or choose one from the list below) and present your learning on that topic in the form of an engaging presentation which demonstrates knowledge of the subject and of any debates or arguments surrounding it 

- You should use your own words and clearly cite the sources of any quotes you use in support of your argument or explanations

- You may link to webpages to support your work, alternative you may choose to screenshot any data, images or statistics you wish to use" 

We'll make the mark scheme up another day. I'm bored of writing the paper now. You get the idea though. You get a U for trying to hack into a VPN so you can look at porn. That much I've decided.  

There's no earthly reason in my mind that can excuse the failure of the exam system to even acknowledge the 21st century. It makes me angry. It shapes my lessons. That makes me angry. 

We don't even think of giving learners the chance to showcase the kind of skills they'll actually need to possess in the 21st century. 

 

Exam boards: Could do better?

A fairy routine workout tonight. In a way I'm writing for the sake of writing here. It's been good doing this and I don't want to lose the habit.

Ok.

Exam Boards. No one likes them, they don't care.

I've never met a teacher or a student who has said 'I really like OCR/WJEC/AQA/the other ones - I feel they really make the role of being an educator or learner as easy as possible'

So, here's a few thoughts about how they could be different.

1: Do we really need loads of them? I don't really understand why they exist when you could easily build variation into one national exam board by offering options in terms of which papers were sat. It all feels a bit like privatised busses - the choice for the actual consumer (the learner) is notional and they just catch whatever bus turns up at the bus stop/classroom they are sat in.

2: Why do they do so little? Specifically, why do they offer so little to learners? I can only go from the subjects I've taught and the discussions I've had with colleagues, but when you visit the exam board website, there is nothing especially helpful to learners. This is particularly galling when they write criticisms of the way teachers prepare learners but leave teachers guessing for the exact content the examiner has in mind or the depth required in a question. Try impression marking based on bands with a single assessment objective. 'A good knowledge of context...' - What context? 1940? Where to we begin/end? National, international, political, social, fashion, economic etc etc.

Exam boards could easily offer some useful resources online to help student build skills related to the exam or to help explain the nuances of exam criteria, but they don't. At best there's a few half arsed attempts at modelling an A grade and often these are in a 'secure area' for teachers where it takes 20 minutes to navigate through various documents just to find out what the criteria for different units actually are.

3: The criteria themselves. This one is the big one for me. As a reasonably educated adult, who has attempted to continue his education through reading, not watching X-factor and sometimes listening to programmes with Melvin Bragg in them, I would hope to be able to understand the criteria for exams for people more than half my age. The thing is, I sometimes don't. It's the way they are written. IT makes me yearn to be a science or Maths teacher. I sit with the criteria, thinking, 'what exactly do they want?' It's not that I don't understand the words, it's just like they've come out of the mouths of a lawyer or something.

If I can't understand them without reference to exemplar material, I really wonder if my students (who often have the added barrier of not understanding some of the individual words) have any chance at all.

The thing is, learners are pretty good at writing criteria. In a class, I'll say 'we're going to do a thing, how are we going to judge it?' and they'll come up with a perfectly serviceable definition of outstanding, acceptable, not good enough or 'gold/silver/bronze' or whatever labels we apply to the criteria for success.

If a group of young people can come up with some plain English definitions that often inspire really excellent work, why can't the exam board who presumably don't have the distractions of adolescence and more than 10 minutes in groups of 3 to do so?

- I'm not a teacher who tries to 'play the game' especially - I sometimes think I should push learners more to apply for remarks and enforce more B grade students to resit in the hope of boosting value added. God knows, the affluent do. However, having had a lousy set of grades on one exam unit I have harangued managers and students into shelling out cash that neither the learners or the institution has on a set of remarks. (hoping to trigger a full review of the paper.) What galls me is the learners don't really need the higher grades or extra UMS points. I do though. I do because my performance management is based on it. I do because my own planning is based on experience and evidence.

As it is, I am deeply baffled. With a similar set of learners our centre (which is me) destroyed the same unit last year. We (I) changed little, tweaked the bits we thought could make things even better, up the A's, get a few more A* etc. I had no days off, no particular issues with the groups felt reasonably confident based on in year performance of at least respectable results for the learners who broadly expressed that they felt well prepared for the exam and expressed gratitude that I'd been thorough and rigorous.

So - what do I do as a teacher in this situation? I have to be the translator of the criteria. If I trust previous years experience I understand what the language means and am capable of conveying a broadly accurate sense of what is required to achieve success. If I trust this years results for the unit I am not fully understanding their meaning and should be saying something different. Do I tear my course apart and remake it, or do I trust my previous judgement and stick with the broader structure and just do the usual updating/review of activities?

The answer is, in search of clarity I bung the exam board £40 a time for 15 minutes work. That really, really, really annoys me. I know if I throw a tantrum and demand to speak to someone they'll suggest 'why not be a marker again?' for which they'll pay me considerably less than £40 per script for the privilege of spending even less time doing anything of human value and I'll be expected to mark an insane number of essays in my spare time, whilst still teaching and writing CPD and making links with feeder schools and everything else, like it's the equivalent degree of importance as hanging out the washing or walking the dog or attending an introduction to mindfulness (aka - not thinking about the shit that is shit and makes you want to put you fist through a wall).

- Finally, how expensive is the photocopier at these exam boards? I thought all these papers were digitised and there was a revolution in online marking? Why is it £10 a go just to look at why the grades are what they are?

So - solutions?

1: Make them far more student facing. Teachers can spend more time on the subject material - teaching improves.

2: Make them update their student facing material every year based on their impression (they do mark all the papers for heaven's sake) of student's skills gaps. Again, helps guide teachers and gives them more time to motivate, engage, assess individually and all the good stuff.

3: Radically overhaul the exam marking system. If there was one exam boards, all teachers could be given inset at a point in the year and mark a much smaller sample of work. Everyone get's the CPD of examining, the exam board isn't crawling around desperately looking for anyone with a pulse and a passing interest in the subject. The exam boards could still employ outside markers to ensure the sample sizes small.

4: Don't send an entire centre to a single examiner. People's career's depend on this. People's mortgage payments. Really. I once got a paper back and discovered moderation by a team leader had altered the grade by five levels. That's the entire range of grades available for that particular exam. That's like going to a football match and mistaking a 5-0 win for a 5-0 defeat.

5: The criteria again. If they were so well written, how does this happen? If they were more clearly expressed, either more explicit or just expressed in plainer English then it couldn't be much worse.

This is the least invigorating or interesting blog I've done so far, but we live in an accountability culture and I have to be able to account for learner's performance in exams. If I could trust the exam board a bit more and if the learners could get a bit more clear info directly, I'd probably spend less time doing 'Easter exam camp' and more time teaching the actual stuff of life.

Incentives and collective will.

Sometimes things require collective effort.

It might not suit broken budget Britain where the nation's favourite pastime is watching competitive bun baking and trying to force confused people on zero hour contracts into making spurious insurance claims about PPI they didn't know they had but I do think it's fairly self evident.

Musicians don't really get very far if they all just decide to play their own thing. (Citing jazz at this point doesn't make you clever, it just shows you don't understand jazz.) Imagine the Apollo Missions had they been built by a team of people set against each other working on some kind of league table system as opposed to working for one common goal. Hell, even the England cricket team get to boot out Kevin Peterson for wanting to do his own thing and not being helpful enough around the house.

I think education is probably one of those things that works better if we help each other out.

Having got back in the swing of things I have already reached a point where writing this blog seems a work of effort as opposed to the natural channelling of thoughts swirling in the ether just waiting to be conducted directly to your brain via the conduit of my rhythmic typing fingers.

In short, I've got a lot to do. I'm battling with the desire to truly self reflect and try and work out my issues with my own practice and the system I work within and marking some diagnostics or in a dangerously self indulgent twist, go to sleep and have a normal night's sleep in the hope the cough goes away. I'm not going to recount to recount the many other tasks in some kind of competitive misery porn style but you get the idea I'm sure. Jesus loves you little martyr that you are.

Having covered for a colleague today at short notice and written a (moderately successful) lesson on the back of a metaphorical fag packet I was later faced with a second cover session with the same group. My other colleagues tried to convince me to 'give the kids something to do' and let one of them baby sit but I was conscious that I didn't have anything to give them other than what was in my head.

This led me to wonder why, in a world of such connectivity and creativity we haven't managed to make this job easier yet? Why we haven't yet created a national bank of resources, a central repository of lessons, objectives and resources? I'm grizzled and battle worn and I would use it. I can only imagine what a boon it would be for cover staff and N/RQT's.

There are various banks of resources on social media sites, on privately owned forums and some things produced on a national level for core skills but given the sheer number of teacher doing what I've spent the last few weeks doing (hammering on a keyboard, creating templates, writing ideas and plans down) it seems astonishing that I couldn't quickly find a useful resource to teach a fairly basic topic.

Here's my idea. A national bank of resources (publicly funded) which in which crowd sourced resources are placed. A rating system is employed and resources which are deemed successful and engaging are highlighted and perhaps somehow in a system I haven't quite worked out yet, the author of the resource is rewarded financially.

Resources which do not quite meet the standard are marked 'in need of some revision' and if they become successful resources then the proceeds are split between the various revisers and the original uploader.

We could call it 'wikipedia' (lol) - I'm tired, this isn't my best work clearly.

I think it's a thin end of the wedge to be honest. As a fairly experience but flawed practitioner I have much to share and much to learn. I know there are at least 5 or 6 other experienced practitioners in the exact same specialism in the immediate area around my workplace.

Do we meet, share ideas, compare approaches, swap battle stories, critique each others resources and observe each other's lessons to truly learn to master our specialisms and craft?

No, do we hell. We suspiciously eye each other, judging our achievements and struggles, not on their own merits but in the light of the relative outcomes. Their good results aren't a cause for celebration but a reason for melancholy. Yet we claim to 'serve the local community.' We all want to be top of the class, to brag about our pass rate, high grades or the progress of our learners to red brick universities. We spend half the time working out which learner will trigger the biggest improvement in our value added score and talking about the school down the road as 'a threat' like it's a dream and we're all market traders.

Just stop for a moment.

Reflect on the unknowable enormity of the universe.

Deep calms breaths.

Imagine a world of possibility. A world made of licorice allsorts, a whale swimming through the air, a glass of blue milk. Think about the sound of angels serenading you, the sound phasing back and forth, filling the air, filling forever like a reflection in two opposing mirrors.

Breathe again.

Imagine if that school down the road wasn't a threat but an opportunity.

Maybe you wouldn't feel so lonely. Maybe you wouldn't feel you had to work quite so hard. Maybe you'd feel like part of something bigger, something that meant more than the corporate mission statement and the shite logo that cost more than you'd ever spent on resources for actual learners in your entire career.

Perhaps the learners would benefit.

Just a thought.

Let's play 'spot the flaws in this idealistic vision'

As a teacher, I feel I’m faced with ever less resilient students. And I know why. We all know why. Since it was decreed that no student must ever fail anything increasingly teachers are placed under intolerable pressure to ensure that learners pass. Real skills go out the window, replaced by exam technique and remembering facts that will leave heads 5 minutes after the exam.

Coursework and vocational courses are ruined by the fact that all students must achieve the maximum possible outcome and all enjoyment or risk is sucked out of these courses as learners submit multiple drafts and teachers desperately over mark, over assist 'redrafting' and hope to get away with a forgiving coursework sample. Teachers are ‘in competition’ with other teachers, institutions ‘in competition’ with other schools. We don’t really care about anything, other than grades. Not really. If they aren’t good, then we lose our jobs. Sometimes, in between the cramming and the drilling we have time to care a bit, but not much and not really.

Learners are bullied into submission, threatened and told their coursework or exam grades matter more than life itself. Some cotton on to this being a con and do as little as possible, knowing the teachers will have to make up for the deficit and others become dangerously fearful and obsessive. Few retain a healthy perspective and for all the pressure and tensions, I’m deeply sceptical that we are producing better learners.

My solution is simple. Every school teaches a spectrum of subjects. Each pupil receives a grades at the end of the school year consisting of numeracy and literacy, creativity and general knowledge - that grade is formulated by assessment by teachers throughout the school and moderated by online assessment that can be taken at any point within the final 18 months of school and resat at will. The assessment is deliberately not drawn from the content of sylabus in order to prevent ‘teaching to the test’ - for example, assessing literacy by asking students to comment on stimulus material from a historical period which is NOT part of the history sylabus or solve a novel scientific problem via a range of clues and calculations.

We continue to teach subjects and skills in such a way that fosters interests in discrete disciplines - each is responsible for creating an interesting and stimulating range of assessment and content but shares equal responsibility with their peers for that child’s cognitive development. Teachers are working towards common assessment critera and can truly share good practice rather than a few tips which are often next to useless, given the differing demands of exams. We abandon the notion that high grades in 10 subjects tell us anything other than a pushy parent or a child dedicated to learning the hoops through which to jump. Instead, we create schools which have simple common goals.

Foster the child’s potential to think, teach them to express themselves and give them freedom to do so. Provoke them, feed them things they want to write about, shape their mind with exciting lessons and let them respond. Stop telling them exactly how to do it and let them work it out. As long as they are thinking and trying, praise them. Stop telling them useless things about Assessment objective 1 or 2 and actually engage with the coherence of their work. Stop filling their heads with KEY WORDS and actually just let them choose the right words. Let them make mistakes for god’s sake!

Let them learn from them.