It has been over a month since it was announced that the ICT curriculum faced review, and I still don’t feel like it is being done well. The overwhelming majority of press coverage, including articles where industry experts are being questioned, seems to offer only two options: keep the current curriculum, or replace it with computer science.

When the original review was released, I was concerned not by the language used – the expert panel report said the curriculum lacked coherence, not quality – but by how that would be interpreted by decision-makers in government to score some easy political capital by removing ICT (which had become something of an educational punching bag). As luck would have it, a passionate group of computing specialists had been campaigning for the reintroduction of computing to the curriculum for some time & had grown large enough to be heard. It couldn’t have been timed better for the good people of Computing At School.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am very much in favour of the reintroduction of computing to the curriculum, and like hundreds of other ICT teachers nationwide have been doing what Gove suggested as a novel & exciting idea (“we could have 11 year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch”), and more, for years. What concerns me is the way the question is being framed.

I recently discussed ‘coarsening’ of data with my A level students, whereby valuable detail is lost in the process of encoding it to fit with established norms, or to fit with desired outcomes. In framing the choice to be made as Boolean – either/or, ICT or computing – something will be lost from the curriculum, and it’ll take another decade to get it back.

There is value in content from both subjects, and a great deal of crossover between the two, which we should be embracing rather than shying away from. Gaming is often cited as one of the driving forces behind demand for competent graduate programmers, as the market has indeed exploded in recent years, however a team of competent programmers does not a good game make. Multimedia has fallen under the incoherent umbrella of ICT for some time now (at least in my schools), enabling me to teach graphic design, publishing & animation skills in ICT lessons that I would struggle to justify in a computing curriculum.

One of my year eight students presented me with a truly outstanding, multi-level Street Fighter-style game last week that had a training level where you learn the ropes, a levelling system where new skills are learnt as you progress, sound effects & multiplayer – truly testing Scratch to its limits – but the reason he came to me was he wanted the game to look better, so we set about replacing his stick men sprites with characters drawn in Photoshop, and the game is starting to feel more professional. By the time it’s finished, it will be a sight to behold, and far greater than the sum of its programming & design parts.

We should be embracing a depth & breadth of curriculum that we can better achieve through offering a combined approach to the two subjects, at least at Key Stage 3. I understand the zeal of members of the CAS movement to see their subject return to the curriculum, but fundamentally the kids will be better served by a blended approach rather than a drag & drop replacement of one subject with another.

Copying by rote doesn’t work. Hardly a revelation, but true nevertheless. In order to learn effectively we need summaries alongside the “big picture”, and as wide a variety of different methods of presenting information simply as possible & drawing connections between related ideas.

Crucial to the long-term learning process is revisiting material regularly, reassessing it in the light of further learning later on and consolidation that transforms it from “stuff we learned earlier” to a firm foundation upon which everything else is built.

There are many (many!) ways of achieving this, and all of us will be doing it to some degree, but the reason I like the Cornell method is it very easily provides a structure for students to express their ideas in whatever way they feel most comfortable.

Upon seeing the copies of the textbook my VI formers provided in my first weeks here, I placed an embargo on lined paper and made everyone use the Cornell layout. At first the students didn’t get it – “doesn’t it just mean we write less?” – but eventually, over time, it started to stick.

How it works

The left column

This is used for cues – vocabulary, key terms, diagrams, etc. This is often supporting material for the content of the main body.

Main body

This is used like your standard lined page, though the emphasis is on brevity. Keep it short, use abbreviations if they are helpful and it need not even be in full sentences. My students couldn’t quite handle such a departure from the norm, so the majority of their main bodies are in full sentences, but they do at least .

Lower third

This is the real key – a summary of the topic. The standing homework since the start of the year has been to complete their summaries of the week’s notes by the following week. This establishes a review of material as part of the normal routine, and not done separately, to be lost or filed separately from the lesson it comes from, but right there on the same sheet of paper.

And beyond

I try to keep the amount of note-taking to a minimum, but it’s a necessary evil with such a densely-packed course as the A level. I realised more recently that the retention of understanding about subjects where I gave out handouts wasn’t quite up to the same standard, though, presumably as they hadn’t engaged with the information to quite the same degree.

Click to see PDF handout.

As a result, I now provide the majority of my handouts in Cornell format, with the content in the main body section, and sections there for cues & summaries just like with their own notes.

It’s not revolutionary, and it’s certainly not all we have to do to keep our students engaged & learning for the long-term, but it helps.

If you’d like to download templates, click the links below:

• Cornell handout template (Word 2007+)
• Cornell note pages (PDF)

That’s right, folks. It’s a typography joke.

There has been an understandably frenzied response to the initial findings of the National Curriculum Review expert panel report that was released earlier this month, particularly from ICT teachers who are facing the prospect of their subject being marginalised, or others who think it will be removed altogether.

While the implications are less immediate for me here on St Helena, a British overseas territory where the NC is non-compulsory (in the same company as academies and free schools…), there is still a part of me that worries whether my subject will exist when I eventually return to the UK. That same part of me is eyeing the history shelves on my bookcases and considering a spot of investment.

Though the effects of any National Curriculum changes will affect me just as much as colleagues in the UK, my position here in the middle of the Atlantic has given me a slightly different perspective which I’d like to share through a series of questions.

ICT’s ‘coherence’ is questioned. Are we surprised?

Despite their importance in balanced educational provision, we are not entirely persuaded of claims that design and technology, information and communication technology and citizenship have sufficient disciplinary coherence to be stated as discrete and separate National Curriculum ‘subjects’. We recommend that:  [...]

Information and communication technology is reclassified as part of the Basic Curriculum and requirements should be established so that it permeates all National Curriculum subjects. We have also noted the arguments, made by some respondents to the Call for Evidence,58 that there should be more widespread teaching of computer science in secondary schools. We recommend that this proposition is properly considered.

                Expert Panel Report, p24

One of the things I’ve been trying to work on as part of my role in teacher training here is the idea of firm foundations. When considering any kind of educational plan, from a lesson plan to a scheme of work to an entire programme of study, what do we consider to be bedrock? What is the unassailable, irrefutable foundation which we all agree upon, understand and feel confident that we can build everything else?

In the case of St Helena that lies in assessment, with wild disparities between levelling across the three primary schools and the high school from Key Stages 1 to 3 – a familiar problem for most teachers in the UK, though I’ve never seen such differences before. One of my year 8 students’ attainment record showed him to be a level 4a by the end of year 6, then seemingly as the result of one term’s teaching at high school he plummeted to a level 3c by Christmas of year 7.

This is part of the problem in the UK, but the wider issue here is the issue of what is ICT? I can’t argue with the lack of “disciplinary coherence” described in the report. In some schools ICT encompasses a large amount of graphic design, video editing or other multimedia work that might otherwise fall under Art & Design or be omitted from the curriculum entirely, while in others ICT lessons entail a great deal more in the way of computational thinking with a focus on data handling & programming, while many more consider ICT to involve understanding how to use computers in an office environment.

ICT is not ICT everywhere. It’s an issue at interview, as one candidate’s definition of the subject may be completely at odds with the interviewer’s understanding of the subject. The very best ICT departments cover all the bases, offering as rich and varied a curriculum as they can, but this relies partly on investment in software/hardware & in staff expertise.

The end result of this disparity in defining the subject is a huge variation in teaching content, and teaching quality. There are pockets of excellence, with individual schools, or sometimes individual teachers, enjoying enormous successes, but among many qualified to comment there is a grumbling, begrudging agreement with the findings – the value of the subject isn’t questioned, but its coherence is. That’s an important difference, in my mind.

The role of the expert panel members is to devise a curriculum that covers as many key areas as possible, while not imposing requirements on schools like “you’ll need £12,000 for the Adobe Creative Suite,” or “you’ll need a computer scientist and graphic designer in the department”. These things cannot be legislated as they would be setting most schools up to fail, but there remains nothing to preclude them from happening.

ICT teaching is poor. Can we fix it by removing ICT as a subject?

I have a few issues with this. The first lies in the uncharacteristically poor way the BBC announced a recent Ofsted review. The headline read “ICT ‘poor in secondary schools’, Ofsted says”. The subhead included the qualifier “in a fifth of secondary schools”. Add to that the pathetically small number of schools in the sample group mentioned (74, visited between 2008 and 2011) and the article crumbles into a poor lambasting of the subject with little actual substance… which is kind of irritating for those of us who don’t disagree with the main point. There is a lot of ICT teaching that is, in the words of Schools Minister Nick Gibb, “far too patchy”.

I do try not to get even the slightest bit worked up by the swathes of vitriol and drama that have become staples of the TES ICT forum over recent years, but this well-meaning post from a prospective PGCE trainee really annoyed me:

I have been offered an interview for the ICT PGCE I am not so much worried about the interview rather I am concerned that if get a place I will struggle due to weak subject knowledge.  I am quite a confident teacher in other subjects but did not have the relevant degree to get on the PGCE in those areas. I have been advised to get my foot through the door and then explore other possibilities. I also feel it is not fair on students if the teacher is not confident in their subject.

Any advise would be much appreciated.

Some replies included:

Not your fault that even the Universities see ICT as a subject that you can shoe-horn anyone into but you can easily get confident in the subject – just start background reading.

I’m surprised that Universities still offer the ICT option. The University I did mine at abandoned it, describing it as “worthless.” That description has permeated the Education system and I’ve heard it repeated quite a few times.

To which the original poster replied:

 I would have liked to teach primary but I was told that with a 2:2 and only a small amount of experice to go for ICT as it would be easier to get a place rather than apply for primary and potentially end up with nothing. [...] Many of my friends who teach IT say the same thing, be an expert in MS Office.

I hope it wasn’t just me digging my toes into the carpet while reading that. The first reply came from a subject leader I know & respect, and it certainly doesn’t reflect his own expertise, nor would the potential trainee be likely to land a job in his department upon qualifying unless he’d worked hard at becoming far more than “an expert in MS Office”, but such are the prevalent attitudes towards the subject at the moment.

The situation isn’t helped, of course, by jackassery from the likes of Toby Young, publishing three pathetically easy multiple choice questions from an exam paper in the Telegraph, and claiming that constitutes a representative view of the subject. A perfectly reasonable opinion piece on those questions, and others like it that exist in every subject’s exam papers now, would be in feeling the need to give throwaway marks early in GCSE exam papers, but no – it’s almost become fashionable to knock the subject.

To Toby Young, I’d invite him to join my A level students in their January exam to see whether his representation of the subject they have been working hard to master is representative. As for the rest…

Surely there’s no smoke without fire?

I don’t claim for a moment there aren’t problems in ICT teaching. When looked at country-wide, there are issues. Issues that stem from the widespread notion of “anyone can teach it”, that lead to claims of “but this is shocking… apparently it isn’t rigorous!”

However, there are problems too with the solutions being considered by policy-makers. Try two on for size:

Stop teaching ICT as a discrete subject

There is poor-quality teaching going on in ICT lessons. Remove ICT as a subject, and what do those teachers do? Go home? Some might, but others will be forced to find jobs in other subject areas that they are equally uncomfortable with.

Replace it with Computer Science!

This stemmed from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s speech in which he criticised the UK for ‘ignoring our programming heritage’. I’m not a computer scientist, but I firmly believe that some of the fundamentals would be hugely valuable to youngsters – I’ve settled on embedding computational thinking in our new curriculum down here.

As I said, however, I’m not a programmer. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking on an A level Computing class – but I’m open to learning. Give me the time to study on my own using the vast number of resources available online, or train me up, and I’m there… but if this is rolled out nationwide, who’ll foot the bill? There are precious few comp sci grads in teaching due to the disparity of pay between education & industry. Where will all the teachers come from? If they’re the existing ICT teachers, surely in a decade’s time we’ll be having the same discussion, substituting ICT for CS…

Computer Science would be an excellent addition to the curriculum, but I don’t see it as a replacement for ICT.

So what can we do?

The tone of this post so far has largely reflected the sources quoted, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Fundamentally, the pockets of excellence that existed across the UK prior to the recent media outpour will be no less excellent.

Rebranding

There is a stigma with our subject, but I don’t believe that can be changed by rebranding what is already a solid subject – there has been talk among several of my #ictcurric colleagues on Twitter about rebranding ICT to Digital Studies, but I just don’t see the virtue in it… I know for a fact the people considering the rebrand are committed to delivering a rigorous, challenging curriculum –shouldn’t that be enough? Will rebranding make it any more rigorous or challenging?

Focus on what’s important

We should do what we’ve always done – focus on what’s important. Establishing firm foundations for a subject on decidedly shaky ground is a challenge, for sure, but I don’t believe it’s impossible. There is some undeniably good stuff going on in ICT classrooms around the country & around the world – the first response to the NC review from the teachers in those classrooms should not be to change how they teach.

ICT is an application subject, and I’ve maintained for years that if we teach it isolated from other subjects, we aren’t doing it right. Marrying up discrete & cross-curricular ICT can be very difficult, but without it we’re teaching kids to make presentations about presentations, and spreadsheets about spreadsheets.

For my part here on St Helena, a significant part of the new ICT curriculum will involve thinking skills, independent working, communication & creating content. On January the 12^th I will be leading a working party that spans the three primary schools and the high school along with senior members of the Education Department to agree three things:

• What ICT on St Helena should be
• What we need to cover in order to achieve that
• How we intend to assess progress

Curriculum strategy 101 – start at the ground & build up. It may be easier here in isolation, with primary & secondary schools that work together, but I’d recommend at least asking these questions of your department/school to see whether you’re all on the same page, even if you know what you’re doing is working.

ICT, and those of us that teach it and believe in its value, is having a hard time at the moment. There may well be more cause to jump ship in the near future, but all is not lost – the review report sets out nothing that I’m truly worried about, my worry is in school leaders’ interpretations of it, and the implementation in the 2014 NC.

I’m not saying we won’t have cause to worry, but I don’t believe we do at the moment, so focus on the good stuff.

One reader echoed the feelings of Louise Handley, an intellectual property lawyer who gave an excellent presentation to students in my last school, that a career in law shouldn’t necessarily start with an A level in it:

Education used to be about mastery of content and the language(s) in which to express it. Instead of comparative law with Public and Private International Law heavily featured to broaden understanding of the context within which English law operates, today’s students go through a narrow training course designed to make them more employable. The results are the difference between a lawyer and a technician.

A generalisation I’m not sure I’d be happy with if I were a young barrister, but the point is a good one. A successful education is one that not only produces employable students, but ones that have that mastery of content, and language skills needed to express it.

I’m coming to the realisation in my time here that St Helena is a microcosmic representation of Britain. Learners here are extremely passive (more so than in the UK), rarely question received wisdom, and as a result don’t truly understand it. There are the same claims made in the staff room here as they are in every staff room I’ve ever known, that students need “spoon feeding” – not a helpful observation, in my opinion. There is no shortage of intelligence among the students here, but independence is a different skill, and one that stems from the culture of learning students experience from an early age.

I am teaching Enterprise here, with the tacit understanding that entrepreneurial spirit is a key focus of the school. Due to the islands geographical isolation, youngsters are being encouraged to set up their own businesses with funding from the St Helena Development Agency. This is an incredible opportunity for young entrepreneurs – one few get in the UK – but at the moment students do not have the independence to be at the top of the tree, running their own business. It almost feels like the aim of many is to be middle management.

As a result of this, one of the fundamental questions I find myself asking in my curriculum review is ‘how do we get the kids to think?’ – students will rarely question received wisdom. They instead accept it and want to move on to what’s next. There is a real lack of critical thinking across the curriculum.

Progress of a kind

On Friday of this week I had the best lesson thus far in terms of behaviour with my year ten IGCSE set. It was a theory lesson introducing network topologies, and my computer room had been double-booked by English. I took the class down to the English room and proceeded to conduct the lesson in the traditional chalk & talk fashion. Up until this point in theory lessons I had introduced the topic with the class together, then encouraging them to find out the rest, with the result being low-level disruption throughout combined with rampant copying & pasting from websites. Suffice it to say results in my theory tests rarely got higher than 80%, as the final 20% came from questions requiring a judgment based on their understanding of the topic. The ones who had done the work could recite facts, figures and some definitions back to me, but few could explain their value, think laterally or suggest alternatives.

None of this is particularly surprising – I hadn’t gauged the activity properly, so not everyone was progressing in line with their ability, which had a knock-on effect on behaviour. In last Friday’s lesson, behaviour was universally excellent. The class was attentive, hung on my every word, and wrote a comprehensive series of notes on networking. It felt like a win.

 Image from an interesting post on rating teaching by UPD Consulting: For whom the bell curves

The issue is that I have another test scheduled for next Friday, and I don’t expect the top results to be any better than those from previous weeks, if I use the same model of 80% lower order, recall-based questions & 20% higher order, judgement-based questions. I feel confident that the bell curve of results will be skewed to the right and be a little thinner as the lowest results will be a few notches higher, but students who should be working towards an A* will still plateau at a B due to the lack of being able to think critically. Gifted & talented students are not benefiting from the more traditional teaching method I employed last week.

So what do I do?

It strikes me that there is no quick fix. Teasing out intellectual curiosity & critical thinking takes significant amounts of time & effort. I’m not going to see any massive change in that bell curve by Christmas, but I’m determined to see some by the time my year 10 students sit their exams next year.

What I want to get across to these students is that without being critical of something’s value, you cannot truly understand its value.

I stumbled upon this wonderful animation of Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which he posits the idea of prisoners being chained in a cave facing a wall. Behind them is a fire, and between that fire and the prisoners is a walkway which people & animals cross every day, casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The shadows & echoing noises of the people shuffling across the walkway are as close as the prisoners can get to viewing reality. A prisoner released from the cave would not recognise the things that had cast the shadows, and may believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he now sees. After time, however, the prisoner would acclimate to the light beyond the cave, and eventually see more and more things. He would come to understand that his understanding of reality in the cave was limited, and, eager to share this revelation with his friends he would return to the cave & shout this new-found truth from the walkway, but his friends having only ever seen & heard him up close would not recognise his shadow or the strange echo cast by his voice from the walkway, and they would remain unaware of the reality their friend had experienced.

While I don’t necessarily believe every young person needs to read The Republic, they should be critical of what they are told. As one of the commenters from the Guardian article earlier said of people who say subjects like Classics & Philosophy are useless:

I reply that such people are rather like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave: they reject something not because they have weighed it up and found it to have no value, but because they don’t have the conceptual resources to understand what its value is to begin with.

It will come as a surprise to no-one that I believe strongly in the value of subjects like Classics, and that it belongs at the core of any curriculum designed to encourage curiosity, but if as some argue it is outdated, and unpopular for a reason, is the void left in thinking skills filled by other subjects, or even outside the classroom? Perhaps it is in your school, but in mine it isn’t.

ICT to the rescue?

I had quite a few funny looks from assembled subject leaders at an SSAT conference last year when I put forth the idea of ICT going some way to filling this role by blurring the lines between it and other subjects. There was considerable scepticism, and rightly so – suggesting ICT is the new Classics isn’t quite what I’m getting at… but there are opportunities open to us in the ICT room that we ought to capitalise upon. I discussed this idea almost a year ago to the day, that at least a part of the role of ICT in the curriculum should be as the setting for other subjects to be brought together; the resulting work is likelier to be of a higher standard than if it had been completed in isolated chunks in separate lessons.

I don’t believe creativity, independence & criticality can be crowbarred in. You cannot be taught how to tap your creativity, you have to discover it for yourself – but you can be helped along the way to making that discovery. A couple of thoughts I’ve had in order to encourage these things are:

• Buying half a dozen Minecraft licenses, have a server set up on the school network, provide the kids with two or three introductory videos, then leave them alone to play in order to figure out the rest, then sharing their understanding of the way the game works with others.
• Setting up blogs for the three primary schools, establishing quadblog links with other schools around the world to widen students’ views of the world, and provide them with a wider audience to appreciate the quality of their work.
• No modern languages are taught here, which isn’t hugely surprising when you consider the isolation of the island, but as Goethe said, “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” With the impending influx of South African contractors to work on the airport, Afrikaans would be a possible (tough!) option.
• My teacher training programme is going to focus on non-traditional teaching methods, with very few lectures & more reflective activities to consider how to improve their practice.

I’ve spent a good deal of my time teaching ICT asking myself why I picked it as a specialism, and whether or not it’s valuable. Only by considering the answers to these questions can I consider myself suitably informed to give a decent answer. “It’s important because it’s everywhere” doesn’t cut it… that’s merely acceptance of a norm. You need to dig a little deeper in order to get to the real crux.

Steve Wheeler said in an excellent blog post on Thursday that he thinks the teacher’s worst enemy is bad theory:

Bad theory, when accepted without challenge, can lead to bad practice. It’s insidious, because bad theory that is accepted as fact without a full understanding of its implications, results in bad teaching, and ultimately, learners will suffer.

If I could lay out my plan for what I want to leave behind me whenever I leave this spectacular place, it would be for imparted wisdom in all its forms to be questioned, scrutinised and challenged by students and staff.

That would be a far longer-lasting legacy than a revamped scheme of work.

• Teaching ICT & Enterprise across key stages 3 to 5
• Leading the ICT department
• One day’s outreach per week in the primary schools to advise on ICT curriculum
• Training & mentoring for trainee teachers
• Teaching & learning coaching for colleagues

Anyone who knows me will understand when reading that list just how much of a ball I’m having here, but this is just context for the crux of this blog post. ICT on St Helena is focused entirely on computer skills, with little focus beyond that on application, evaluation (or any other higher-order thinking skills) until students reach A level. The primary school curriculum is outdated, isolates ICT rather than encouraging cross-curricular links, and doesn’t make assessing progress easy. There are no ICT specialists in the primary schools, but those teaching ICT are keen to improve the subject.

At Key Stage 3, we follow the traditional model of a unit on spreadsheets, followed by one on databases, followed by another on Scratch, yet APP has been introduced as a method of assessment. This is a nigh on impossible fit when entire terms can be spent in one Assessment Focus, and has led to some peculiar blips on tracking spreadsheets, where in term 1 a student achieved a level 4b, then in term 2 the student achieved a level 3a – he happened to be very comfortable with the desktop publishing unit in term 1, but struggled with the database unit in term 2. As a result, I’m going to be leading a curriculum review from Key Stage 1 right the way through to introducing new qualifications at GCSE & A level, where currently the only options are IGCSE ICT and AQA A level ICT – both tough options for students with low literacy, as many have. So at the moment I have a blank sheet of paper and a mountain of background reading, including the fine work of people like Brian Sharland & Chris Leach.

Having sat down with the department we decided we like APP, and will likely use that format as our rubric for assessment, but I like others in the #ictcurric movement feel the three existing strands don’t encourage creation of content, rather than mere consumption. Fundamentals of any curriculum are likely to be literacy and critical thinking, and these are desperately needed here on St Helena, as the students though exceptionally quick-witted struggle to work through a problem independently, or apply their own knowledge beyond the confines of that lesson in order to progress.

I recently enjoyed reading Computing At School’s computing curriculum, and fully intend to apply some of the concepts in the primary schools, eventually working up through to KS3. Anything we develop here hasto be a curriculum that fits for St Helena – dropping in the National Curriculum and expecting it to work has been tried before, and I feel confident in saying part of the failure was a complete lack of ownership on the part of the teachers then asked to deliver it. I hope through a series of INSET sessions with the high school and primary staff to develop our own assessment rubric – tentatively with the four strands being:

1. Finding
2. Using
3. Presenting
4. Creating

Heavy emphasis will be placed on critical thinking throughout, not just from level 4 up (being wary of bias in strand 1, considering target audience in strand 3, etc). Projects will be designed around a central theme with enough breadth to cover 3 strands on average, with each project having a selection of level descriptors included in the teaching materials to allow for easy assessment & negating the need for baseline testing in year 7 as we will feel far more confident in levels given at primary school.

Transition should not be an exercise that straddles years 6 & 7, but should start in year 1 with sights set firmly on year 11.

Stay tuned for more updates!

They may not be as good as previous sets, but they’re good discussion-starters & easily-printed A4-size. I used the excellent free font Quicksand to create them, and some simple vectors combined with facts & figures gathered online and from Wired Magazine’s Wired Index segment. I tried to steer clear of predictions & easily-outdated figures where possible.

26 A4-sized posters in PNG format. Download the collection in a .zip archive here.

Check out my second blog, On My Way.

I tend not to leave required reading to take in one of my posts, but this LA Times article by teacher Ellie Herman had me nodding my head and scratching it in equal measure. While the settings of our respective classrooms are very different, there are many things in Ellie’s classroom that we will all have experienced – the keen student with additional needs so significant that they preclude him understanding the notes he so dutifully takes down, the students suffering as a result of poverty, the angry ADD-fuelled (or Ritalin-addled) kid… they’re in my classroom too.

The general feeling in my former staff room was that the incredible melting pots that are modern classrooms are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to the huge amount of variety in our students that was either not present, or not identified, in decades past. Teaching is becoming harder, and there seem to be no signs of it stopping.

A couple of months ago, we had an excellent bit of INSET training on the topic of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome – well worth reading up on for anyone who hasn’t heard of it, but here are the Cliffs Notes:

• When a woman drinks during pregnancy it can cause significant problems in the development of the baby.
• The amount of alcohol does not matter, nor does the point during the term of pregnancy.
• As a result, some women are unaware they are pregnant and continue drinking.
• The main effect of FAS is damage to the central nervous system – especially the brain.

This isn’t a particularly new condition, but only in the last ten years have significant numbers of children with the condition survived early infancy. As a result these children are now filtering through into our high schools, adding to the already simmering pot mentioned above. The issues caused by FAS can manifest as lack of impulse control, retention of memory, and inability to focus, and like autism, FAS is a spectrum disorder that can range from mild to serious.

We live in complex times, with few simple problems, and yet we as the professional at the front of the classroom are expected to be the ones with the answers. Armed only with a data sheet that may (though may not) have more detail than the occasional scant word or acronym – SA, SA+, STAT, EAL, BEH – isn’t hugely helpful.Also, FAS and other developmental syndromes including autism, Asperger’s and others do sometimes go undiagnosed, so we are also to be on the look out for students with problems that haven’t yet been identified.

Okay, so I realise I started out with reference to an article entitled “the myth of the extraordinary teacher”, and now I’m talking about special educational needs, but my point is twofold:

1. Teaching is hard. Anyone who claims anything different either doesn’t know enough to form that kind of opinion, or aren’t particularly good at it. It’s a constant balancing act, rarely with fewer than 25 variables sat before you, plus pressure from different sides when it comes to measuring outcomes of whatever stripe.
2. In answer to the original article, I don’t believe these settings do preclude excellence. We perhaps have to alter our definition of the word – academic excellence is not the only kind, after all.

Measuring time, by aussiegall on Flickr

Quantifying success

In order to gauge the relative success or failure of anything – a movie, a car, or a school – the first step is to select an appropriate yardstick. None of these three examples can be definitively compared with other movies, cars or schools using one criteria alone. Using box office takings alone would place Avatar comfortably at the top of the list, while The Shawshank Redemption & The Godfather share the top spot on IMDb’s Top 250 chart (Avatar rolls in a little later at #184). Low fuel consumption may be a perfectly reasonable criteria in the desirability of a family car, but is unlikely to be at the top of the list of priorities for a Formula 1 team. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on the idea that quantifying & measuring the relative success or failure of a school, or a teacher, is any simpler than either of these examples.

I used to teach a truly exceptional boy with Asperger’s syndrome whose fixation was politics, but for him at that time the sum total of politics was contained in the history of the Labour party from the 1960s onwards. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert when it comes to politics, but I knew enough to have some incredibly entertaining arguments with this young man who put every bit of his highly-specialised knowledge to good use. After a few conversations I wanted to see how well he could write, so I asked him once to write me an op ed piece on anything he liked. Approximately 500 words, on any topic provided he cared enough about it to form a compelling argument.

He came back to me a couple of days later with a short essay on the unfair system of education in the UK entitled “An argument in favour of abolishing British grammar schools”. As the benefactor of a grammar school education myself, I was delighted with the topic. I went off to read it, scrawling notes in the margins ready to lock horns with him when we next met. In this extremely well-written but entirely one-sided diatribe, he explained that wealth was no basis of selection for an education, and that rather than having a selection of centres for academic excellence scattered around the country, the focus of the government should be on encouraging the same standard throughout.

We talked at some length about how his argument had some flaws, not least of which was the fact he himself went to a highly successful academically-focused high school (a former grammar school itself) based largely on his postcode, which just happened to be located well within the leafy suburb of the catchment area – a postcode his parents secured through buying a house well beyond the means of many others, while I secured a spot in a grammar school not based on the personal wealth of my parents but my performance in an entrance exam, but the point is this: the government, both national and local, is measuring the success of schools in the same terms as a then-15-year-old boy talking only from his personal experience of education.

When I compare him to our current Secretary of State for Education, I at least feel confident that the boy has expanded upon his ideas since leaving school. With Michael Gove, I’m not so sure…

A good friend of mine works in a Pupil Referral Unit, the success of which is measured using exactly the same measure as my former school – the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades at GCSE. To provide some context, the students at this PRU have been permanently excluded from at least two high schools. The traditional educational system hasn’t worked for them – twice. So why then is the last resort being expected to operate in the same way as these schools? Last year, of the 11 final year leavers, every single one of them is now either attending college or in employment.

That is a huge achievement, and a testament to the hard work going on there – they take persistent non-attenders, students with alcohol and drug problems, and often histories of violence, and educate them. Not merely walk them through qualifications and present them with a handful of certificates at the end, but teach them how to function in a world they haven’t yet managed to be a part of.

Success like this rarely happens in education. Ramparts should be added to the school building purely to allow the staff and students to trumpet their extraordinary success from them. However, the staff of this unit, and many like it around the country, have been repeatedly told that under the new Ofsted criteria they cannot be graded as anything other than satisfactory. Adequate. Passable.

Talk about a vote of confidence.

How can we be great when we don’t know what great is?

I was recently asked to be host to two enthusiastic trainee teachers who were in school for a taste of what teaching is all about, and by the end of the day I feel fairly confident that they had had as comprehensive an experience as could be expected – they were whisked from lesson to lesson with barely chance to catch their breath, they had an undue burden placed upon them by an assistant head (to corral year 7 students at the sports day in the afternoon,) had just enough time over coffee in the staffroom to complain that that wasn’t what they were here for, and were saved from it by a colleague who due to his new job no longer cared about annoying SLT. Cough.

At the end of the day, we sat for a couple of hours discussing what it was to be a good teacher. I was surprised to hear that while mine wasn’t their first placement school, they hadn’t yet seen an enthusiastic teacher – the teaching they had seen thus far had been largely “Right, carry on with coursework,” with very little further input. That wasn’t quite the experience they had with me, though I don’t usually end my lessons with a Lady Gaga song. Honest.

I remember Googling to find answers to the question “what are the qualities of a great teacher?” when I was training for part of an assignment. There are so many bullet-point lists, PowerPoint presentations and webpages on the topic, but none of them can sufficiently answer the question because of that difficult quantifier – Great. Extraordinary. Exceptional. Outstanding.

Okay, maybe not the last one, but the others are incredibly difficult to quantify, describe or explain by using anything other than excessive hand actions and descriptive terms like je ne sais quoi. For any new teachers looking for advice, I can’t help you beyond this:

A great teacher is first a good teacher, and a good teacher is first an adequate teacher. Look at the standards for an exhaustive list of the kinds of things you should be aiming for, but I’d boil it down to knowledge, communication, relationships, versatility & resilience.

Everyone has to have the first two under their belt, but the standards only go so far as to describe subject knowledge. You absolutely need to know your subject, but don’t be confined by it. The best experiences I’ve had in the classroom and out of hours in teaching students have been about all manner of far-flung things, not just ICT – my Classics Club has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my career, but you’re never going to see “Is able to teach Ancient Greek” on the specification for an ICT teaching post. If you want to be a great teacher, know as much as you can about as many different things as you can. If you don’t love to learn, how can you expect to get others to?

Communication is a big deal. Not just being able to, but being able to tweak whatever needs changing when talking to different audiences. Differentiation is all about communication – if your favoured method of imparting information isn’t working, what else do you have in your arsenal to fall back on? Discount nothing – glove puppetry, mime or interpretive dance are just as welcome in my classroom as chalk & talk.

For me, the final three are where the real differences lie for me between okay, good and great.

Relationships are the cornerstone. The first thing to realise is you’re teaching kids, and you’re going to get some fooling around from time to time. A solid teacher-student relationship based on mutual respect is a sure-fire way to sort them out easily, but forging that relationship isn’t easy – it takes time, consistency, and interest on your part. You can’t fake it, so don’t try – I had plenty of teachers who taught me very well indeed but could scarcely remember my face once I’d left. It’s not a problem.

Versatility is also a big deal. Delivering an assembly is very different to delivering a lesson, and it never fails to get me hot under the collar… having my colleagues lining the sides of the hall, spectating, has always put me off kilter, but it gets better with practice. I’m also no gifted athlete, but that doesn’t stop the PE cover lessons coming in… roll with the punches or they’ll knock you on your arse.

Resilience is needed to get yourself back up when you inevitably do get knocked down. Whether it’s because of a truly awful lesson where the kids just didn’t get it (we all have them), a bollocking from one of the higher-ups, or just the mounting pressure, you need to bounce back from it. Teaching kicks the shit out of you sometimes, and in my three short years I’ve come to understand why so many burn out. If you truly care about being a great teacher, the last thing you’ll let it effect is your teaching, but letting the pressure take its toll on everything else – social life, friends, family – isn’t a long-term solution.

To conclude…

One final caveat I’d add to all of the advice above is that it works for me. Not all of it will work for you, but some if it will. I’d also add I’m neither the voice of sage experience nor do I consider myself a great teacher, but some of my students do, and compliments like that don’t come along often in teaching, so take them when you can.

To sum up what has been one of the most rambling posts I’ve ever written (I’d apologise, but I enjoyed writing it too much), assessing the quality of a teacher requires the same kinds of differentiation we assess in lesson observations – by outcome, by task & by input. This is unlikely to happen while the people at the very top are so feeble-minded that they can’t look beyond their own experiences as a universal, one-size-fits-all education, but 2015 isn’t all that far away… Surely they can’t do too much damage if we ignore as much as possible in the meantime?

The idea that extraordinary teachers are a myth is bullshit. Yes, we have a lot to manage in the classroom, and nobody can do it all, all of the time. But the truth is that even the best of us have bad lessons, bad days, bad years…

When you have the respect of your students & your colleagues, you’re doing a good job. The best teachers I’ve come across don’t need to keep looking up for any further affirmation than that.

I’m currently presenting at an SSAT seminar entitled ‘How to make ICT the most popular subject in your school’, having been very kindly invited by Nick Jackson. I’m hoping to expand on this post tonight after the event, but wanted to post my presentation for anyone following on Twitter, or anyone with an interest in pushing the envelope when it comes to content in ICT lessons.

My presentation is entitled “The History of War… in ICT”, and looks to discuss how technological discoveries have often been fuelled by military research & development.

Watch the presentation online, or download it as a .zip file – needs Adobe Flash Player in order to play.

The mouseion was multidisciplinary; physicists had rooms alongside astronomers and poets, and so for the first time in history we see the divisions between academic disciplines being blurred. The major extant work of the poet Aratus is called the Phaenomena, in which he marries science with literature, combining an astronomical description of constellations with the mythology the Greeks ascribed to them. He applied his skills to turn a piece of dry, technical prose into a work of art. It was immensely popular in antiquity – translated into Latin and Arabic, and read by Cicero, Ovid and even St. Paul, who quotes a line in Acts 17:28. ^[1]

Not everyone thought the mouseion was a good thing, however. Timon of Phlius referred to the scholars within as “scribbling endlessly and waging a constant war of words with each other in the Muses’ birdcage.” ^[2] By contrast, academic disciplines in schools are pigeonholed. Isolated. Separated from all others so as to better understand them. There are many good reasons for this – teachers are better equipped to educate students in their specialist field than in any other, so in an ideal world students would enjoy the benefits of an education at the hands of many different teachers who can enthuse & educate in enough breadth & depth to spark a deeper interest in the subject.

There is an exception, though. I’ve argued (not always successfully) that the greatest strength of my subject is that from day to day, lesson to lesson, I can be teaching anything from history to ethics, from geography to physics. The very nature of ICT as an application subject means unless I’m applying it to something, I’m not doing it right. ICT gives us, more than any other subject taught in UK schools, the opportunity to blur the lines between subjects where the learning would ordinarily stop at the classroom door.

Whether it’s in dealing with the effect technology has on the way we live our lives, potentially getting into some pretty heady sociological study, in developing logical thinking by programming, or even in looking at the history of war as I’m going to demo at an SSAT conference, we’re floating on an ocean of material when it comes to content. It’s not all good news, though. More and more ICT teachers are coming to terms with the fact that the people who write programmes of study & exam board specs seem to remain blissfully unaware of this, and instead cling to the old ideas of “make the spreadsheet about a theme park – that’s applying it”. I’ve been discussing the extraordinarily disappointing Edexcel GCSE coursework brief on Twitter recently – the focus is on “upcycling” (a form of recycling). Over the course of the project students are expected to represent this issue through creation of the usual KS3 suspects – a logo, posters, etc – and put it all into an e-portfolio. Thrilling.

By contrast, my year 11s are currently writing essays in which they’re examining civil liberties abuses in China, the increasing difficulty in policing computer laws and computer addiction, among many, many more topics. Unfortunately, they’re completing unit 8 of the OCR Nationals course – almost universally disregarded by VI form colleges in my area, and decried & railed against on the TES forums. How, when the level of thinking involved is so much deeper than even the theory content of the better-respected GCSE, can it be so poorly thought of? It is absolutely true that schools have pounced upon vocational qualifications as a means to climb up the league tables, and I do believe that there is a shred of validity in the proposals put forth in the recent government white paper, the myriad other worries in which Donna Hay discussed extremely well earlier today.

I’m not suggesting that everything that falls under the OCR Nationals umbrella is at the same heady heights as unit 8 (the overwhelming majority isn’t anywhere near – it was never intended to be), but the idea that the only two choices we as ICT teachers have are open-ended, vocational qualifications that carry with them the taint of trying to cheat the system, or patently unengaging, uninspired academic qualifications like the GCSEs, recently repackaged and rebranded as shiny and new for 2010. The major difference between the model exam paper provided for the 2010 Edexcel course and the AQA one I sat back in 2000 seems to be the change of font from Times New Roman to Myriad. As one of many people who believes in the potential power & substance of ICT as a subject, I’m not happy with the idea of these being our only choices.

Nick Jackson & the rest of the #ictcurric band have been making progress in developing exciting, deep, broad projects that students can really sink their teeth in to at Key Stage 3. I was recently asked by one of my year 9s who is now entering his third month of Key Stage 4 why ICT isn’t like it was last year, and my only response was “I’m doing the best I can with what the exam board let me teach.” Poor answer, but it’s all I’d got.

Earlier this evening, a group of teachers was gathered together by Drew Buddie to talk about the problems with girls’ involvement in ICT & computing courses – in itself a fascinating topic, but we ended up straying on to this issue of engagement across the board. Dr Sue Black of UCL agreed that in part due to adversity to change on the part of the curriculum-makers we’re switching too many kids off ICT & computing as subjects. Facing increasing competition from technologically-literate students from countries like China & India, we risk falling behind the times unless we shift the focus of ICT from “doing stuff” to providing students with the thinking skills they need to work through problems independently.

If we’re to avoid the death of the information industry in the UK as we’ve seen with manufacturing & industry, we need to encourage thinking skills & creativity as the cornerstones of ICT education. We do need a change in perceptions from the top, and for current ICT qualifications to be current, but the change also has to come from the classroom up – it’s all too easy to bullshit when there’s a computer in front of you… all too often it can feel like your students are achieving something when they’re really only passing the time with WordArt & Google Image Search.

In order for the subject to be seen as rigorous and important, it has to be taught as such. In order for it to become the modern day mouseion, it also needs to include the scope to encourage learners to bring with them what they learned in Science, French or English – and we as ICT teachers need to be ready for it. No mean feat.

Bibliography

Overduin, F. (2010), Review of Aratus: Phaenomena. Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Staikos, K. (2004). The History of the Library in Western Civilization, p166. Newcastle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.