Don't Think of Me as a Teacher Part 1

Today's is a Guest Blog written by veteran educator Herbert Dunwitty, a progressive classroom teacher with over 15 year's experience in the classroom or (as he calls them) "Share-spaces".  Due to his teenage daughter being unavailable to show him how his laptop works, Herbert, who exists only in the minds of "realistic" MPs, Academy Chain board members and Peter Hitchens, has not previously published any of his wisdom online. Informutation is proud to be carrying this first in what will be a continuing series, provided his Union doesn't tell him we're all "Goveites".

Don't Think of Me as a Teacher, Think of Me as a teacher (with a lower case t): Reflections on Considerations of Approaches to """Education""". 

After a busy day lowering Standards I often find myself sitting back with a cup of Fair Trade tea and a digestive and thinking to myself, "Herbert, did you do everything you could for the precious young minds in your care today?"

The answer, of course, is yes.

And yet there are days when I ask myself what more than 100% would look like? Numbers have never really been my strong suit but I suppose it might look a bit like a picture of a butterfly. And butterflies are what I was busily shouting at my class to think about whilst they threw flick knives at each other yesterday.

Who are you to say this isn't learning?

Suddenly I felt a hand tugging at my arm,

"Sir, what's the exam going to be about in June?"

Of course I stopped everyone right there and drew their attention to the tragedy that was 

unfolding before us: a child wanted to pass an exam.

In the fifteen minutes or so it took for the class to be quiet, I had plenty of time to reflect on the miserable situation of this poor child who had been brainwashed to think that he future happiness depended on her passing an exam. I cast my mind back to my time at Oxford in the late 70s, when I was seeing this simply smashing girl with a Siouxsie Sioux haircut. Where would I have been if I had thought exams were important? I mean obviously I did think so otherwise I never would have got there in the first place but the point is I was wrong. 

And being able to admit that is what makes me right, right now.

Anyway, by this point 50% or so of them were quiet. I thought "close enough" and launched into an extensive diatribe against worldly success. I do believe that little Joolz was crying behind her blackberry, although that might have been because Shenay had just BBM'd her a particularly elaborate character assassination Brandon had just posted on Tumblr.

"Children!" I announced over the din, "Put down your phones and stop reenacting the struggle for civil rights by cussing each other and eating behind your hands, one of our colleagues wants to know some FACTS."

Some of the more conscious ones gawped in disbelief.

"Now who can remember rule one which we all agreed to?"

A hand shot up.

"Please sir, is it "If a man in a suit comes in just tell them you're a level five aiming at a level six and keep copying off the board?"

"Oh no, that's not it, that's rule ten, rule one? begins with "If..."

"If we all know nothing then nobody feels left out!" the ones who weren't dodging chairs or applying makeup chorused.

"Exactly!" I said, "Now go and stand in the Empathy Corner and forget things until you spontaneously realise how disadvantaged you made people in our environment feel!"

Duly chagrined, the wrongdoer withdrew to contemplate the error of their ways, and I had time for a quick fag out the window before the next swoop by SLT on a Learning Walk. They have them every fifteen minutes now.

That's what 110% looks like.

Next week: How these, plus a whole lot of heart, can absolutely wreak havoc with schoolwide behaviour policies in a double period last thing on a Friday.

Assessing Assessments

As I contemplate my title I am very conscious of the concerns of language reformers of the 18th century.  These esteemed gentlement believed that England's reputation abroad was endangered by the preponderence of "S"es in our language. Certainly they rarely ponder so prevariously as in the upper reaches of your screen now, gentle reader. TThe fear was that our merchants in their dealings abroad would find themselves mistrusted because it sounded so much as if our language was spoken by men with a "mouthful of snakes".

And it is here, with this vivid image, that I wish to draw your attention to a word, that sine qua non of contemporary education; the Assessment, or Exam in old money.

This resembles, I claim, a snake in the sense that any test really says two things whilst delivering one result. It speaks with profoundly forked tongue, and on its prongs is every teacher and student, wrigglingly impaled.

I wish to submit just one question, from the NGRT or "New Group reading Test", a test designed to nominate someone's reading age.

The question is this.  Insert the correct word:

1.  The removal van came for the ______________.

[  ] shopping
[  ] friend
[  ] house
[  ] furniture
[  ] children

Now, clearly the answer "furniture" is the intended one. However, as any moderately intelligent person will be able to point out, the tale of a Man with a Van helping out his wife with the shopping, or abducting unsuspecting children could also be correct, grammatically. 

What you are being asked to do here is to give the expected answer, in exchange for grades.  Another example in the same text asks you to say what Granny keeps on her sofa.  The noun "cushions" is obviously fine, but there are no marks for "plant pots". Now, I have known various people keep things far stranger than plan pots on their furniture from time to time. I simply cannot see why this is "Correct", other than being a test for a certain view of the world which, whilst well and good, is simply not a test of one's ability to read.

What is going on here is a case of Confirmation Bias. We are sure of what the correct answer must be, and so we teach children to be equally sure in the process of teaching them to pass such tests. However, Confirmation Bias is a disaster for learning: it teaches us not to test our propositions, in this case under threat of being found to be educationally subnormal.

The child who does test their suppositions about the world in this way can find themselves labelled and sorted out of the lottery of life with brutally efficiency in the name of "merit" and "natural aptitude".  How I would recover from a judgement that my reading age was subnormal at 12 I do not know. Possibly I never would. And as a reward for testing the limits of my world I would be left to consider my future as a "subnormal" in a world that rewards "merit".

And if that "merit" is the ability to jump through hoops, then reward it it does. However, we cannot very well say that we are encouraging innovation, engineering and critical thinking whilst embedding the training of confirmation bias into our very system of conditioning.

Did I say conditioning? Slip of the tongue.

Hiss.

Is it Possible To Stay Loyal to our Progressive Predecessors?

The ancients enjoying life are unlikely to have been entirely or even partially mistaken

-Aristotle

 It has been a bad week for Progressivism.  In a stunning loss of ground in the public discourse, progressive teachers and teacher educators are taking an unceremonious kicking from all sides.  

 Progressive or "child centred" education and its shibboleths of group work, mixed ability classrooms and learning by doing, looks like a Caesar bleeding out on the steps of the Forum.  "Et Tu, Brute"?  Aye, and brutal it is to watch.  I find myself increasingly full of pathos for what the current Education Secretary characterises as "The Blob" as it bleeds out with a pitiful moan, scarcely aware of what has happened to it.  Whether it making uncomfortable viewing makes it wrong, is an open question.

D'awww

Twitter has a collective multiple climax over Joe Kirby's quote-heavy assassination of Sir Ken Robinson's  educational philosophy.  Cuddly Sir Ken is the TED Talk favourite with the snazzy RSA animate which makes some school leaders well up and remember the good old days when they actually used to teach a child sometimes.  This is done through cozy pink lenses. His agenda of child-centred creativity and "Discovery" can cause by turns ire and awe.  In this case ire.

Kirby, meanwhile, is a "top graduate", recruited through Teach First, the pathway into teaching which skips the traditional bastions of progressive thought, the university training route, in favour of a managerial approach to the craft. His rejection of the progressive tradition, itself the dominant view of what teaching could be from the mid-50s until more recently, is telling.  

Here is somebody who is in place precisely to invigorate the profession pointing to the existing "dead flesh" and calling shenanigans.  It is the equivalent of a recent med school graduate claiming that the consultant heart surgeon he is observing is drunk.  And it is not an isolated setback.

The second PISA-shock of England's young people proving to have flunked life, as measured by literacy and numeracy, seems to confirm years of criticism over "dumbing down".

"The minister for skills and enterprise, Matthew Hancock, said: "This shocking report shows England has some of the least literate and numerate young adults in the developed world. These are Labour's children, educated under a Labour government and force-fed a diet of dumbing down and low expectations."

Dumbing down, irresistibly, is linked to the type of curriculum which emphasises the intrests of the child.  This can mean following "their interests" at the expense of "what is in their interests".  In paraphrasing R.S. Peters here, who wrote words to that effect in the 1960s I am hoping to show that this particular silver bullet was locked and loaded quite a long ago.

Finally, reliable barometer of the nightmare side of any debate, The Guardian's "Secret Teacher" is outspoken about the "Conspiracy" against older teachers.  I myself recently interviewed a colleague who told me how, as an Advanced Skills Teacher she watched a mentee she trained, and who was teaching lessons she had written with her resources, was appointed to her old job whilst she was encouraged to leave. A cynical mind might point to the vast savings which could be made if such a policy became widespread.  The World Bank, meanwhile, has been floating alterations to pay structures and tenure of staff for some time;

Contract teachers may accept lower salaries and insecure tenure because they are queuing for regular positions

- Making School Work page 227 

In the midst of this, and as someone trained and mentored by those within the progressive tradition, I begin to feel increasingly like the Boy in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.  In Hemingway's Story, the titular Old Man finds himself having gone eighty five days without catching a fish.  The Boy's parents demand he go "with another boat" as the Old Man is now finally "Salano, the worst kind of unlucky".  The Boy is instructed to go with another, luckier boat.  The young men in the bar laugh at the Old Man.  The older fishermen meanwhile view him with understandable concern.

Debra Kidd does her best to defend Sir Ken and what he represents here.  Her argument, that tradition and wisdom have their place is strong, but ideologically it is hard for progressives to hide behind this. Aristotle might have been right about the Ancients knowing their business , but the brave new world of the sixties had no time for that.  The proponents of post-Empire Britain have spent so long challenging arguments from authority as such, that "we have a lot of experience of " stinks from their very lips.  

However, the paradox is not one sided.  The shock troops of Neo-Traditionalism , like Mr Kirby, are not fighting back a rebellion, they ARE the rebellion. Progressivism has been so widespread, especially in Primary Schools, for so long that it is the de-facto establishment.  For the warriors of the evidence-based, Excel spreadsheet generation to claim they can even imagine what education prewar was like is just as hilarious.  They are in as much of a tangle about what they believe as we all are.  But this is not a simple case of a plague on both their houses.

From America, which is about 2 years down the Academy/Teacher First road (there they are called Charter Schools and Teach For America respectively), there is growing dissent.  It is even coming from ex-acolytes of what some of its UK intake freely call "the Teach First cult".

Catherine Michna, an academic and former TFA-er has revealed she "Does not write references" for students to join TFA because they do not know how to teach.  Her defence of the "lifers", unionized members of staff she encountered before getting out of school teaching for good, hinges on a belief that she would not have survived the process without borrowing their resources, ideas and, if I may presume to extend the point, their authority.  It is surely significant that the operation which moves us closest in the developed world to the World Bank "dog eat dog" employment model cannot control its own alumni.

Unlike the newspapers I use a picture of her school and not her face

Then we have the Strange Case of Annaliese Briggs.  When NUT conference heard from the podium this year that a PGCE teacher trainee had needed to be excused from her lectures to meet with Boris Johnson about the school she was opening up there were hoots of derision.  Not even six months later, Miss Briggs, the 27 year old Headteacher with no formal qualifications, has quit 5 weeks into the term, unable to cope. This is a major blow for the notion that new-old trumps old-new. That ideology which requires that such a person to be able to cope because she trumpets the notions of 'rigorous', 'knowledge based' learning cannot will such things into existence.

In short, it's a damn mess. But worst of all is the profound disloyalty to the older generation.  What we do with them, the Baby Boomers as they age and retire would be a constant psychic disturbance to any culture.  To one as narcissistic and obsessed with physical perfection as ours, it is a perfect storm of vanity and horror. The knowledge of how many of them there are, and of the enormous changes they have seen, haunts us in our inexperience and naivety.
  

In education, it is entirely possible that there will never be time for the experiment in child-centred learning to return to the mainstream.  At the same time, its techniques are now a permanent part of every teacher's repertoire.  The ability to split a class into groups, to mind-map and to have a student deliver a plenary in the form of a rap battle are now, for better or worse, part of the job.  Whether we use them or not is up to us, but there they are.

It might be easy, like Mr Kirby, to tear into everything that has been done for the last fifty years, and call for a return to an age which may or may not have ever existed.  I prefer, however, to think of Hemingway's old man, and his words to the boy when he asks if he will ever catch the big fish again,

"It is difficult," he says, "and I am not as strong as I was...but I am a strange old man, and there are many tricks."

Hegel Sends No Postcards

Preamble

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words.

As such, we often begin our lessons with an image. When I am starting to study a thinker, I usually look for one of the books in the "Introducing" series, or else for a diagram which sums up their ideas.  Usually many of these are available on line.  "RSA Animate" works this trick.  We believe that once we have seen and made real a concept, we will better be able to grasp it, that it will provide a "map" for the oncoming conceptual territory.  Are we right?

R. Appignanesi & O. Zarate, (2007), ‘Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide to the Father of Pyschoanalysis,‘ Icon Books

I do the same when beginning lessons (present pictures, not marry my mother).  Experience has shown that Literature classes like to see the writer, character or scenario they are studying beforehand.  It has the advantage of drawing to the surface all of their prejudices early.  There was much sniggering behind hands at a picture of tall, awkward looking Arthur Miller before Year 11 had read The Crucible (not to mention before they discovered which genius-IQ blonde he was married to).  Yet the Michael Gove is dismayed that students are drawing pictures of literary characters on paper plate masks and walking around making conversation.

Another teacher records a lesson for A-Level English students in which they were asked to depict literary characters on a paper plate – drawing a face on the plate - and then asked to use stickers to define the character’s principal traits - pinning the stickers on their clothes and mingling with other students, while they introduce themselves ‘in character’.

BUT!  To me it was important that my class thought they knew Miller before they discovered who he really was, and so I was quite happy to show them a picture of the man.  And don't textbooks have pictures?  Is that so wrong?

Good show

This is heuristics.  A heuristic is a mental shortcut which takes us more or less to where we want to be.  It seems no bad thing, in and of itself.  A quick scouting trip into the new country we intend to move to, prior to returning home and beginning the more difficult task of ringing ahead to work out a job and flat, before deciding which pieces of our existing wardrobe we can take with us, and which need to go on Ebay.  In this metaphor, the job is a problematic aspect, the flat is the method, and the wardrobe is one's ideology.  Some of it, if we are doing this correctly, is going on Ebay, and don't tell whoever buys it what a shoddy piece of tat it is.

Having worked on this assumption before, with (as I took it) some success, it was naturally enough the method I took when I began to study Hegel.  It was here that I encountered a crushing brick wall.  There are no pictorial representations of Hegel's system of thought.  I hope here to make it clearer why this was, by reference to Hegel's idea of Vorstellen and Derry's (2013) case for a kind of philosophical method called social epistemology.

1. - Epistemology - Hegel sends no postcards

He never remembers Mothers' Day either

Any enquiry into the way we see the world shouldn't start with what we see.  Instead it should start with what we think we see.  This is the justification for studying epistemology, sometimes called "theory of knowledge". 

Hegel was a philosopher whose work has been taken as a starting point for epistemological enquiry.  Students who encounter Hegel here are struck by his notorious difficulty, a topic he even writes of somewhat boastfully in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

The study of epistemology is not, at least in the first instance, the study of perceptions, but rather of the thought of perceptions.  Hegel calls this the Notion or the Concept.  Given that thoughts may be pictured better in words than in any other form, any study of representations can begin with the study of a manifesto of the ideology which leads us to mistake lines on a page for an idea.  We do not study the marks on the page but rather the type of mind which thinks those marks meaningful.  I think both sides in the above argument could make use of that assertion, so let us leave it there for now.

Get on with it

This seems to run against the grain.  A "Picture is worth 1,000 words".  But for how long?  All delights lose their lustre, and so by Season Six of Mad Men you are no longer drinking in the colours and cinematography but tapping your knees impatiently and making rather more cups of tea.  This is a television series which was sold precisely on its visual aspect, and yet the trick no longer works.  Perhaps then we had better say that a Picture is worth as many words as it replaces, and that this is subject to change.  I know, I'll work on the wording.



The upsetting thing for most of us is that although we have a visual sense and can achieve things with it, including mimesis - the staggering feat of fooling another consciousness into believing they are looking at what we believe we have seen.  It is problematic, then, that we have no real idea how it works.  When it comes to the mind we are all like a one of Arthur C Clarke's space tribes in the Foundation novels.

In these books, Clarke paints a picture of a future which has collapsed and where Science is soley preserved on one planet.  The others are doomed instead to spend their time working the few remaining pieces of "Old Empire" technology.  They do this with centuries old rituals, their original purpose long since forgotten.  So we too are working the levers of rituals which keep us in touch with Reality without understanding how they work.  We might know that what we are doing produces results, in terms of creating our worldview, but whoever dreamt it up is long gone. As was well said, "The half understood sayings of Aristotle became the laws of thought".

My confusion with Hegel came from the fact that I thought I should be able to see a picture of what he was talking about.  To me it made sense that a thinker's work should be open to pictorial abstraction, in order to take a Heuristic starting point.

However, any satisfactory representation of the Dialectic should also include the opposite of itself.  It is not, therefore logically possible to draw a picture of Hegel's system without subsequently erasing the entire picture.  A picture offers us a statement,  "This is that".  The negation of such a statement, "This is not that" it is not possible to represent.  We cannot paint a "not yellow" picture (Vitale), despite this being part of the truth.

The conclusion, that This is both That and Other (Subject and Object) cannot be shown and yet, for Hegel, this is all.  Thus in the "fluid system" (PoS - 327) which is Spirit (in which, for Hegel, Truth is entirely one), there is no abstraction for simplicity's sake but rather a continuing "sequence of movements" or steps. To picture to ourselves the very endlessness of this, as a continual process of revision and doubt, can be seen as a important moment in itself.  Continual 'fluid' revision, as in Heraclitus' "Other and other rivers run", applies here.

For precisely this reason, one cannot head speculatively into Hegel's writing, with a mind to moving there later.  Like a country which does not issue visitors' Visas, Hegel's thought demands we leave our old nations behind if we want to see what happens there; this is not to imply that we may not sit in antechambers and have conversations on the border, even for our entire lifetime if necessary.  However, we do not get to Holiday in Spirit.  We must inhabit it, or else be baffled by it.  One could say the same about Teaching - and indeed Hegel was a teacher for his entire adult life, first as a tutor and then in schools and universities.

Hegel has a word for the type of mistake which leads us to think that a picture is enough to satisfy.  He calls it Vorstellen, translated by A.V. Miller (no relation to Arthur) in his translation as "picture language".  Derry (2013)  following Brandom renders this as "representation".  In opposition to this Hegel places the Rational or the Actual.  The Actual, Phenomenal world is always represented as a system, because only a system can contain the various moves and countermoves which are relevant to reality.

The constantly shifting theatre of forms, then, is closest to being what Truth is, a constant process of revision and improvement.  This worldview is communicated, says Hegel, to render us "ready to do Science".

3.

For a teacher, this could well seem a long way from offering the kind of straightforward program which is teachable in a rainy INSET day.  How this relates to the classroom, however, is critical.

If a teacher chooses to relate a concept to Dizzy Rascal, it can of course overtake and dominate the entire lesson. One would hate to walk away thinking one had taught them about Verbs when actually the students think they just sat around and talked about Grime getting a "live" but not a "life" lesson.  On top of this, there's nothing sadder than a cool teacher - its like Dads dancing at weddings.  Many teachers with understandable concerns about this could find themselves swayed by demagogic talk of "the collapse of standards".  Recently, the Secretary of State for Education has made this point repeatedly and persuasively.

However, if Hegel is correct and Vorstellen is not interactive with the type of thing that mind is, then calls for Evidence of any teacher's effectiveness which repeat claims for "Data" will not hold water.  "Data" is nothing but another form of representation, it is still not good enough for our purposes, and never can be. Assessment, for example, cannot show what it appears to show. Rather, it must be used as part of an Inferential process which is related to spending time in an environment (and certainly not the requisite OFSTED 20 minutes) in which connections between knowers exist. If we do not stay somewhere with another knower long enough to form a connection, then we have not discovered anything. The challenge of Social Epistemology is levelled at everyone, from the minor damage to knowledge done by teachers who indulge the students a little too long in the picture starter to the potentially far more serious damage done by an educational establishment in thrall to graphs.

This is a picture of a graph.  It is therefore a picture of a picture.

The seductive thing about representations of Rationality, such as the "representationalist paradigm (of awareness understood in representational terms) inaugurated by Descartes and influential in Anglo-Saxon thought ever since" (Derry 2013) is that it appears not to suffer from the flaws of Vorstellen. By these lights and in their terms, this prevents the emergence of the epistemic state of knowing.

"For number is just that completely quiescent, lifeless and indifferent determinateness in which all movement and relation is extinguished, and which has broken the bridge to the living element of instincts, manner of life, and other aspects of sensuous existence."

- Hegel, PoS - 286

4. Conclusions

The objective here is not victory, it is not a zero sum game. What we are doing is in strict conflict with all systems that present simple competition as being universally relevant to the sort of thing Phenomena are. It's like basing your theory of mind on X Factor. These simple, spontaneous systems, especially those parts of them which are knowable, are necessarily known through a process of connection and inference between parties, and moves from one position to the other will always present us with unexpected pictures which explode or efface those preceeding.

However, I would also not wish to repeat the old joke and say that the path for improvement does not "start from here". This is why I say that if you read this on a Sunday night with a Powerpoint slide bursting with "Relevant" images ready to go, don't change a thing. On the other hand, it does indicate that thinking you have connected when there is a moment of recognition in the students' eyes is something of a fool's paradise.

Meanwhile, if you are still on the "other side", and still believe that such things as sides exist, then ask yourself whether the mask of numbers is really that different to a paper plate with a literary character's name on it and eyeholes punched through. Are you on Foundation, or are you a steam priest pulling Aristotelian levers, their meaning long forgotten? And how would you know?

What matters, however, is that all parties concerned have made an effort to connect the subject with the students, and to open up the space to one where Inferences of a conflicting nature about the the new concept can be made.  Of course we cannot doubt first principles and pass a class, and discussions of those kinds are rightly kept for detentions, parent meetings and home tuition at vast cost.   However, if we are not willing to discover what the first principles of others are before we rely on our own, more systematic pictures of Phenomena to explode or be exploded by them, we will educate nobody.

She has inferred incorrectly - that does not make her anti-knowledge

References

Derry, J. (2013) Can Inferentialism Contribute to Social Epistemology? in Journal of Philosophy of Education Volume 47, Issue 2, May 2013