Image from Jean Snyder under Creative Commons
I have spent some time chatting with colleagues from Secondary schools this week. Anyone who regularly converses with a Secondary teacher, (and probably primary as well), will be unsurprised to hear that time is endlessly fingered as the enemy of developing practice. I doubt that there are many people in the professions who don’t struggle with the enemy of time, and my first instinct is often to think “well, that’s life, we’re all busy”. During a coaching day yesterday, a much respected colleague volunteered to discuss the Curriculum for Excellence challenges in front of 80 people to illustrate the principles of coaching; he spoke eloquently of his desire to bring more active and co-operative learning into the departmental classrooms. The enemy as he saw it, was again the temporal fiend! The writing of 200 plus reports on young learners was the current manifestation of the temporal fiend.
On reflection, I am inclined to see this as an utterly impractical situation. Many will indulge in my first instinct of accepting that professional teachers should be really busy, but really, this is lazy thinking in my view. We want teachers to do a particularly important job for us, and that is to teach young people in ways that will prepare them for a complex and challenging world. Satisfaction that they are suitably busy is crazy, we require effectiveness from them, rather than business for its own sake. In the new curricular reality, we require teachers to innovate, and to transmit entrepreneurial zeal for learning to our future society, can they do this if they are unable to learn. The kind of learning I refer to is of course heavily time dependant. Teachers must talk to each other, watch each other, coach each other, talk with parents and learners as well as rewriting courses to include the methodologies that they believe will give young people a better learning experience. The excellent colleague from yesterday is focussed on co-operative learning and Dylan William’s and Paul Black’s formative assessment ideas. He needs some time to do this.
Schools need to be innovative in their organisational approaches. In my view this is something they find particularly difficult. Schools are “serious” environments that feel the weight of their public responsibility; the result is that any system that has acceptance with the public will become impossible to vary from due to public expectations. In essence, schools are scared to change anything that upsets stakeholders. The problem is that the system is clearly not delivering the learning time that teachers need at present. Making any changes will require courage, but also a framework of ideas and values that will drive the risk-taking that is necessary.
If we accept that teachers need to spend more time learning, then some creativity will be required around changing our working practices to make this possible. No changes in our organisational approaches will result in no changes in our teacher innovation and learning. I thought it might be fun to present some provocations, light heartedly presented as “temporal provocations” to get us thinking a little differently.
To get the ball rolling, I would like to start on the thorny issue of teachers writing reports. In Secondaries, a subject team may have to write a few hundred reports for a particular year group. It is a task that no-one disputes the purpose of; clearly parents need to know how their children are progressing and to be appraised of any issues in time to help with them. Equally, I know of no teachers who relish the task, and if I remember my own report writing days, frankly I found myself repeating stock phrases and writing clichés to fill the box on the reporting form. Perhaps it’s time to stop asking teachers to write reports. It’s interesting to draw a parallel with the Scottish new teacher arrangements in which all of the portfolio and “profile” of evidence is managed by the new teacher, with the supporting or mentoring teacher signing off on the process. I still find that teachers are surprised that the new teacher is in charge of what they traditionally see as their own reporting domain. Perhaps it is time to ask young people and parents to manage their own reporting process. In the secondary context this could free up massive amounts of time and give ownership of the reporting process to the people who have to act on it. In coaching, we believe strongly that people act on decisions they make about themselves, and indeed may actively push back against decisions that others try to make for them. Why does reporting then still follow what Professor John MacBeath once described as the “Just William” reporting approach where William carries home the report that he has had no stake in creating. McBeath described it as a “sword of Damocles” above his head, hardly then a formative experience. So current reporting formats might just be a waste of time that schools have become addicted to. Let’s insist that no teacher writes any more reports unless it’s to add some specific information that the young learner or parent needs.
They should write their own reports, no, really they should!