Heading towards the end of my first full year teaching Geography ‘A’ level since 2015, the post-Gove education world has thrown up a mixed bag of experiences. I turned 60 this year, and as I ponder how much fuel there is left in the tank, those experiences have thrown up some significant causes for reflection.
I have pondered this post long and hard, because to build a fully-evidenced position would involve committing indiscretions on a number of fronts that I have no wish to do in public. But the general point is still worth making, so please bear with me.
Thanks to my current roles, I have seen a wider range of teaching (both practitioners and subjects) over the past few years than in the rest of my career put together – and for context, this is in a college that has just been OFSTED rated outstanding on all fronts, including quality of teaching.
That speaks for itself – or it would, were it not that OFSTED is part of the problem, not the solution. Its criteria may derive from many places, but it is not necessarily true that the Bible of Objectively Effective Education is one of them; there are too many other agendas. But my intention is not to detract from the fantastic recognition of colleagues or an institution that have all been very good to me. Neither is this post a diatribe against OFSTED.
Yet my classroom experiences this year as much as ever, still seem to be speaking one truth to me, that became increasingly evident across the 35 years that I have now been actively teaching – but which still seems to be an Elephant in the Room so far as the wider educational sector is concerned. I am well aware of the risks of confirmation bias, but the uninvited (complimentary!) comments made to me by others would appear to validate this experience over a lengthy period and perspective.
It concerns what fundamentally makes education work. By that, I mean what successfully transmits a combination of skills, knowledge and attitudes to the up-coming generation, in a way that they can retain and hopefully use in their lives going forward. And by that I don’t mean solely “getting a good job” – for all that that is undoubtedly part of it.
What is it that best sustains students through the trials of rising through the educational ladder? What is it that best helps them to retain what they are being asked to learn? What provides the best hope for a context for those efforts going forward? The key to it all can be seen in the heading picture. It is something that at best is given passing recognition when it comes to teaching standards, and seemingly even less in what many teachers appear to be trying to pass on to their students.
It is passion.
The fire in one’s firebox. Passion for one’s subject, but also for learning – and indeed life itself. That need not (and probably does not) confine itself to what one actually covers in the classroom. It can extend well beyond one’s official teaching subject. Perhaps ‘enthusiasm’ is a better word for it – and ultimately it is a personal quality rather than a professional one; admittedly one that ‘events’ have been doing their best to quash in recent times, but that might only make the need all the greater.
I’m not sure how OFSTED (or anyone else) is supposed to assess enthusiasm objectively – but maybe that’s the problem, and it may well explain why such qualities seem to be almost ignored in current concepts of ‘good teaching’. Valuing the measurable – and all that….
Yet it is also the thing that has repeatedly been most often reflected back at me by others in their comments about my own approach. I have come to a gradual realisation that it, perhaps almost alone, is responsible for the high levels of engagement I repeatedly seem to gain from my students. I hope that does not sound hubristic, since it is simply what others have told me, and what my experience with students seems to support, even now after my enforced break and new start.
I would actually rather not have known this – for the problem with reflecting people’s qualities back at them is that they become self-conscious; the act of making such things known risks compromising them. I’m not sure whether it is possible to cultivate deep enthusiasm in someone, or whether it is actually a inherent quality. Some people seem to have it by the bucketload whereas others never seem to find any at all: the terminally incurious. But is that a cause or an effect of their life experiences? From both my own experience, and having witnessed many others’ teaching over the last few years, it seems that those who do have it are very able to pass it onto their students – and it does indeed seem to sustain and inspire those students to make headway. It can be the magic ingredient that makes all the difference to a lesson, in a way that nothing else can match. It can even make dull things seem much less so.
Why would it not? It has always been true that a sizeable part of learning has been repetitious and dull, the secret to getting through or past that is having some higher sense of purpose – and that is what enthusiasm can do. No matter how you achieve it, engagement is the key to all else. It makes the tough stuff worth doing, if your teacher clearly believes that themselves, if they practise what they preach, and if they are able infect you with it. Otherwise, the whole process risks turning to drudgery. Enthusiasm and inspiration are what most frequently drive people to great achievements. You have to get it from somewhere – and perhaps an ‘infectious’ teacher is not a bad place to start, if the many successful people who cite inspirational teachers in later life are anything to go by.
And yet…
…it seems to be in short supply. Infectious it may be, but it is also quicksilver – and impossible to legislate for. More of education than ever now seems to be presented as a humdrum process of ticking exam boxes. This is what I see most often, across a wide range of subjects and individuals: everything is only as useful as its place on the exam paper; there is no bigger picture. Any notion that education might be about something greater than passing an exam seems to be just a receding trace memory in the few who remember how it was Before Targets. The trend was evident even before my enforced break from the profession (2016-9) – but it seems only to have become more entrenched in the meantime. Evident passion seems to be widely absent from classrooms; much seems to be about humdrum ‘process’. Maybe the teachers still have it, but it is hiding. Or maybe they just don’t any more: killed off by the dead hand of assessment criteria, excessively technocratic definitions of ‘good teaching’ and a vast administrative burden.
But it also strikes me that we now have generations of new teachers who have largely only known that experience themselves, as pupils. It seems likely that their own embedded experience will still shape teachers’ perceptions and assumptions, no matter what other training they receive: I have certainly found that myself. Exam hoop-jumping has now been the order of the day for so long that it has become self-perpetuating. I suspect that many younger teachers today quite literally do not know any different.
During the 1990s and 2000s, when this outlook was establishing itself, I experienced full-on, the demotivating effect of turning education from a matter of enthusiasm to a matter of bureaucracy and box-ticking; where we are only required – or allowed – to know or consider something if it would serve a specific purpose on the exam paper; where the purpose of lessons is simply to prime young people for those few hours where they secure the school’s next set of Results. It turned intrinsic motivation into extrinsic – and there are plenty of books on the malign effects of doing that.
https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/Flow–The-Psychology-of-Happiness/26545801
Sadly, given his professed ambition to raise standards, Michael Gove’s reforms to ‘A’ Levels a few years ago only seem to have made the exam conveyor-belt worse. There is more fact-shovelling, question-spotting, box-ticking and cramming, than ever – I notice it keenly because of the time out I took in the interim. It is not just down to my change of institutional culture.
Not only does this outlook risk making lessons repetitive, but it also risks killing enthusiasm and high-mindedness, which in part is developed by allowing the mind to follow (within reason) where its curiosity dictates. This in turn risks limiting what people know (and what they can then be enthusiastic about) to that required to do a narrow job. It must make it harder to be passionate and inspirational. I can’t say I get the overwhelming impression that society todays is better educated than ever; better qualified maybe – but that is another thing entirely…. So much for the gut-busting effort of the last thirty years. In fact, the opposite more often seems to be the case. (I guess this risks being shouted down – but the problem is, you don’t know what you don’t know, so the indignation may be misplaced).
It’s not as though we lack other forces in society at the moment that are all too good at destroying genuine enthusiasm, and the expertise that can develop from pursuing it, without the greatest counter-influence of all – education – being forced to lower its sights to comply. But that is what I believe has happened over a period of several decades. When I ask students what they think the ‘purpose’ of education is, they seem to have even less idea than ever – in many cases, the question completely floors them.
This is not to deny the importance of exams. Ironically, it seems to me that all the technocratic attempts to drive up results have had limited effect when it comes to what those exams are supposed to measure: the residual effects on those it was supposed to benefit. Exams are important, even essential – but they should not be confused with the true purpose of education. Which is, err, to educate people.
I never set out to oppose the orthodoxy of my chosen profession in this or anything else – but I have found myself swimming against its current for much of my career – because that dead hand never ceased trying to extinguish the one really effective tool of my trade I have now realised I have: that internal fire.