Play the Game

"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."

Albert Einstein

As with anything in life, teaching is about knowing what needs to be done and doing it well. The very best teachers will prioritise what's most important - often this will be the teaching and learning - and put anything superfluous onto the back burner without feeling guilty about it. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean you should be intentionally lazy and ditch any activities which you don't feel like doing. What I'm suggesting is that a teacher's workload is often so massive that to do everything to the best of your ability would leave you broken and gently weeping in a corner.

At the centre of this need to "play the game" is the clear disparity between government and OFSTED expectations and what actually goes on in schools and classrooms. Take this NUT report on teacher workloads, which states:

"The last Government’s response to its workload challenge ignored the central point about reforming the high stakes system of accountability which is driving unnecessary workload for teachers and school leaders."

This highlights that the current obsession with “accountability” and making teachers justify their existence on a daily basis has led to an unsustainable situation where teacher workload often comes at the expense of the teaching and learning. It is, sadly, a very real case of the tail wagging the dog.

Another sad fact is that this will almost certainly not change any time soon. So, what can be done about it? This is where playing the game comes in. Take an example of homework setting at your school:

Your school has a clear policy (often based off OFSTED guidance) that homework should be set once every two weeks for key stage 3 and all homework needs to be logged on the school system. The problem is that you work in a school where student and parent engagement is low and there is no clear system of sanctions for students failing to complete their homework.Your options here are to a) set challenging homework every other week and give the kids hell whenever they don’t do it, maybe even make phone calls home or giving lunchtime detentions. Or, b) you can use homework instead as an opportunity for the higher ability students to do additional research and/or extension activities from the lesson. Those that don’t do their homework will get a verbal reprimand, some form of arbitrary sanction (I use ClassDojo to hand out “negatives”, more on that in another blog), and a threat of “three strikes and you’re out” (or similar). Those that do their homework receive positive praise and some form of reward (school-based system or otherwise).  In doing this you have saved yourself a great deal of time handing out lunchtime detentions, calling home etc. In terms of logging homework - be it in planners, or on an online system - this obviously needs to be done and is where the idea of “playing the game” comes in. Somebody will be checking planners and that online system, so something needs to be there. As previously mentioned though, this can simply be an extension task from the lesson, copied and pasted into the online homework system, or copied down by the students.

Another example is how to deal with the workload surrounding GCSE students and ensuring that they get their expected grades. This is something which teachers are being increasingly held accountable for: student outcomes. In some ways it makes sense, after all why shouldn't we be judged, to some extent, on what grades our students achieve. However, there is still far too much that a classroom teacher cannot account for. Number of absences, failure to engage in revision at home, other external issues in the student’s life to name a few. So, what’s the answer here? Again, it’s to a large extent about playing the game:

Your year 11 group are made up of 50% hardworking students who just need a stable working environment to achieve; 35% are varying degrees of lazy and will only do the work when pushed; 15% are poorly behaved and challenging in every way. In this scenario the first thing which needs to be done is get the “other” 50% of the class onside - that includes the lazies and the baddies. This will involve hard work (see next blog), but once you’ve done this you’re in a much stronger position. To get them onside you need to maintain consistently high expectations and mark the hell out of their work. This links to one of the first “shortcuts”, of a sort. Marking and feedback is an integral part of any classroom, but it shouldn’t just be “ticking and flicking”. Marking and feedback should be an exam-style question, followed by specific teacher feedback, and then student response to feedback. This should be done regularly and students should use this process to figure out where they are and how they can improve. To make this process clear to the students, and to anyone observing a lesson or looking at their books, I have an “assessment book” for my KS4 and KS5 classes - this is, as the name suggests, purely for assessments. This does three things: 1) It looks good - student work ---> teacher feedback ---> student response; just looks right to me. 2) It helps the student improve - they can clearly see what they have done before and what they need to do next time. 3) It saves time - I do not “tick and flick”. My students have folders for their classwork which are to all intents and purposes their responsibility and I only have to focus on their assessment books. I mark these regularly but it never feels like a chore - it feels worthwhile. Another aspect of this scenario is that those students who appear to be falling behind need to have some form of intervention in place. Two things here: 1) You need to have a good record of student grades as evidence of student progress over time. 2) If you intervene in any way for a student then log it on your school system - this means that come results day you can say “Look, I did A, B, C, and D, and still Bob didn’t achieve his grade”.

There are many, many more ways to “play the game”, save time, and do your job more effectively, but at the end of the day it is simply about not making work for yourself. Have to mark 60 year 8 assessments in two days? Why not create a marking crib sheet where you can simply highlight the targets? Whole year 10 class, but one, did shockingly on a mock? Why not use some of the answers from the student who actually did well as exemplars? There are so many ways to work efficiently and play the game, you just have to think logically and not feel guilty for not giving 110% to absolutely everything.

Why Teach?

“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”

Stephen King

I love teaching. Even on those cold, dark January days when neither you nor your kids can see the light at the end of the tunnel, or on a Sunday night when you still have lessons to plan. It is a profession, a calling, a raison d'etre; call it what you will. It keeps me guessing, makes me sweat, and keeps me up at night, but all the while I love it. That has to be part of it - it has to be a labour of love. Teachers who don't love it, or at least some part of it, don't succeed. Of course there are plenty of times when I have a moan, say to my fiancée that I really don't want to go to school tomorrow, and wish the holidays could be just a week longer. But whenever I stand in front of a class I get a rush; whenever a student who hasn't spoken for weeks pipes up with a great answer it feels amazing; whenever I see an "A" when they were predicted a "C" it makes me do literal fist-pumps. It's a great job.

So, if it's such a great job, why all the bad press? Whether it's schools purportedly failing to make the grade or a massive teacher shortage looming, it is rare that you read a positive new story about education these days. It is not my intention to get overly political here, so I will simply say that government and press interference with education is, more often than not, damaging. Teachers are trained to do their jobs and work hard for their students and the majority do just that. My advice would be to more or less ignore what you hear in the news about teaching because it has little to no bearing on what actually goes on in schools on a day to day basis.

If you are reading this now the chances are that you are already a teacher, training to be one, or considering joining the profession. You may already feel that it is the best job in the world, or you might have been doing it for decades and need a bit of inspiration to keep going with it. My intention in this blog is to provide something of a guide to life as a modern teacher, with all the good bits and the not so good bits laid bare. A lot of what I will say might be controversial or, in some people's opinions, just plain wrong, but I intend to be as honest as possible. I will also say that I do not claim to have all the answers or any magical secrets for teaching, nor have I been in this gig a very long time comparatively speaking. What I have got though are lots of practical tips and tricks, some sage advice, and, hopefully, some words to inspire and make those long days and weeks more bearable.

In answering the question "why teach?" I always thought I would start from the beginning of my story - when I originally started teaching. As I'm writing now though I actually intend to start with a conversation I had just last night. Over a pint with some friends, we started reminiscing about school - some discussing which teachers they fancied (which is odd to think about now as a teacher) - others relating specific stories about a lesson or what a teacher had once said to them. And it was then that I had one of those realisations (they come and go) that teachers really do have an effect of people's lives. As Stephen King suggests, we can never really know when that will be, who we might influence in some small way, or why, but it is almost certain that as a teacher it will happen at some stage. This is part of the magic for me and almost answers that question of "why teach?" by itself - the ability to affect and influence the lives of young people, hopefully in a positive way.

To trace my steps back a little further, the answer to the question came when I was volunteering in Uganda. I was teaching in a tiny rural school where the class sizes often had over one hundred students and each and every day I felt like I was doing something useful and worthwhile. I have done a few jobs in my life - cleaning, working in a shop, answering phones - but that was one of the first real occasions when I felt like I was really making a difference to other people's lives. That's obviously not to belittle other jobs and professions, but that sense of having a positive influence on other people was what drew me to teaching. It was after my time in Uganda that I came home and decided to train as a teacher. Since then I have been a mentor to trainees, led CPD (continuing professional development for those not in the know) sessions, been consistently judged "outstanding", and I'm now a head of department. It has been a very quick process for me and I have enjoyed almost every minute of it. I feel that the biggest reason I have succeeded in teaching so far is that I have a lot of enthusiasm for the profession and I work very hard for my students.

So, why teach? To make a difference. To do something that matters. To have a positive influence on the lives of young people. I get disheartened sometimes when I read that half of all teachers are thinking about leaving the profession, and it disheartens me further when I realise that I have on occasion thought about it too. But then I see things like this...

...and I remind myself that what I do every single day makes a difference.