It's Observation Time Again

Remind me


What's the point of classroom observations?

CraPD

It was as pointless as one feared!

We were asked to write a tag line for School Without Walls/5X5X5=Creativity as usual I thought of the perfect tag line after the event!

I should have gone with: Early Years Lite.

Training! What Training!

CPD – stands for continuous professional development – I refer to a recent e mail I have received. If you can find any professional development in it, I’ll be most impressed. (I apologise for the strange formatting but it was an e mail)

Subj: School Without Walls - CPD meeting Wed 8th October, the egg

Sharing our Glow Moments

Wed 8th October

4.15pm - 6.15pm (refreshments at 4pm)

the egg theatre

Hello all,

We look forward to welcoming all St Andrews' and St Michaels'

 teaching staff and Headteachers to the egg for a chance to reflect together on our individual Glow Moments of our School Without Walls experience.

We would like you all to bring in an object, quote, image which 

describes your SWW experience, or a moment in that experience for you which was 'illuminative and glows'.

We will be using this session to directly influence our meeting with 

the Right Hon. David Laws MP on 16th October, where a small group (including children from both St Michael's and St Andrew's) will have a short time with him to inspire him with our work and this holistic approach to learning.

I’m sorry but sharing ‘our glow moments’ really?  My ‘glow moments’?

OMFG as the young people say!

Extrovert V Introvert

Someone says (THE HEAD TEACHER) "We need to have a conversation."

Extrovert: "OH Great!'

Introvert: "OH God!!"

NUT Magazine

The NUT – National Union of Teachers (when I started teaching you had to be in a union – not sure with the rise of Free Schools and Academies whether that is still true?) of whom I am a member have sent me their new school year magazine with ‘a manifesto for our children’s education’.  I have had a quick read through and am shocked by the number of letters and articles and references to the apparent ‘culling of 50 plus teachers’ – that’s age not waist size!  Though the latter may well be vulnerable as well.  It looks like there’s a lot of it about.  Nobody wants us 50+ teachers, male or female! Apparently.

The main method of getting rid of them seems to be competency and lesson observations!  Hmm my last one was RI (which seems to be the acronym for ‘Requires Improvement” – like I have said before show me a lesson that doesn’t require some improvement – I digress!) and I hear ominous cello music in the background … There’s an encouraging letter, name and address supplied, from someone who managed to go to tribunal and get an unfair dismissal verdict and one hopes a good cash payout.  But it seems most just drift off quietly, like Scott’s Antartic explorers!  Feeling the chill, someone close that tent flap!

As was so kindly pointed out to me on our First INSET day – I am the oldest teacher in the school!  Oh there are ancient teaching assistants amongst the teachers I am the oldest. Actually the head is a year or two older than me but I am still in the classroom.  I think I should be treated like the leader of the house!  It was interesting in a recent staff meeting where we were tracking data that I was the only teacher who knew what the current year 6 children were like as infants (they were my second year one class after moving down from Year 6) and therefore the only person who knew where they had come from.  I think it’s important that a school has people who can do that, who know the children not just as data on a spreadsheet.  I do so love a spreadsheet.  It’s quite hard to type sarcastically!

Anyway it’s time for my nap.  Peace Out!

How Long?

I did wonder how long it’d be before the spectre of OFSTED (the inspection body not the cat! Long story) would be used as a threat/motivation.  Answer 3 weeks well 2 and a half as it was the third staff meeting!

I would like to make the point that 90% of staff meetings have nothing to do with EYFS and what we do!  And I might be being generous with the claim that 10% do have something to do with us!

The concern is that our 4b+ results for last year are not as good as the previous year and it’s apparently a worry that HMI or OFSTED might in a ‘desktop exercise’ notice this and despite our ‘good’ OFSTED rating come to the school and sack the governors (volunteers so can they be sacked?) and the headteacher and/or the senior management team.  Well as I’m none of the above can I just say ‘Bovvered!’ 

Anyway during the ‘discussion’ where the head took on the role of the OFSTED questioner someone, naively in my opinion, said that the results were down to cohort. To which the head replied ‘So you’re blaming the children?’ 

I have thought about this and I think my answer would be yes!  Then I thought I’d better qualify it.  If children were like say pizzas or cars then the difference between the performance between one year and the next would be a concern.  But children are not cars or pizzas!  They are human beings and therefore more like complex dynamic systems like the weather, where one little factor can change the outcomes.  It’s the butterfly in the rain forest, flooding in China analogy.  A little story, a few years ago there was a weather man, Michael Fish, who said that there would not be a hurricane striking the south of England and pedantically he was right there was no hurricane but an extreme wind event (as it was referred as) did take place and they had to rename SevenOaks!!   Apparently 3 of the 30 computer models of that 24 hours weather predicted high winds but 27 didn’t so the weather people went with the majority models! Oh how wrong they were!  But children are more like these complex chaos theory models there are so many variables many of which are outside of a teacher’s control.  So the same teacher can give the same input to a group of children and you may get varying results! Actually because of the small cohorts slight differences are skewed even more!  When a single child counts for 8% or more it doesn’t take much to make a mockery of statistics!  Interestingly the national statistics for all these tests vary very little from year to year it’s only at the micro level that you see the distortions – quantum theory anyone? Anyone?

Mark Twain – ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics.’

Peace Out

PS I am loving my new babies and looking forward to the new year – staff meetings not withstanding!

Home Truths

You think you know a person, yourself, and then find that you don’t!  Apparently though I have never seen it, but then I guess I wouldn’t, people tip toe around me.  Adults not children!  Children skip!!

Now I like to think of myself as fairly easy going.  I’m not good at small talk I know, mainly because I’m not sure if I really care.  Oops!  I do but …

But that is not how it is.  I am quite difficult to read.  I am a mystery wrapped in an enigma in a booby-trapped surprise box!  Can’t see it myself but I suppose I wouldn’t! Being difficult doesn’t stop people pinching my stuff!

The ironic (?) thing is that the harder I try to be helpful and make a positive contribution to, say, a staff meeting the more likely I am to mess up and end up offending people.  In fact the couple of times I have been censured for have been those times when I thought I’d really properly engaged and contributed.  How wrong was I?  I must have a very sarcastic voice or something.  If you can fake sincerity you have got it made!

The problem is I don’t know what to do about it. 

My dilemma is that if I contribute to a staff meeting I am seen to be subversive and if I keep my head down and stay quiet I am seen to be difficult.  Not sure there is a middle path?  I guess I could wait until I am asked to contribute and buy snowboarding gear for Satan or I could…?  See what I mean?

I remember a certain teacher at St Andrew’s nicknamed the boy wonder who once on a night out drinking asked drunk people what people really thought of him?  It did not end well!