Breaking the Rules
The lights are red but the two cars in front have gone through anyway. There’s a BMW behind practically shovelling you through the roadworks despite the traffic lights. You’re in a hurry and you know that the lights will still be on red at the other end once you get through, even if you got out and pushed the car with a spoon.
What do you do?
For those of you who have gone through the red light, you know how hard it is to break the rules that first time. And how easier it gets after that.
Some, however, never manage it. Yet breaking the rules in one form or another - and preferably in a way that is a whole lot safer than driving through a red light – is a necessary corollary to progress for any civilisation. Doing it the way we’ve always done it didn’t work for the Romans and won’t work for the science department or key stage two team either. Creative evolution needs creative mutation. People to think new thoughts. Think of creativity as a version of Darwin’s “descent with modification”. (Think of SER members as the X-Men of the education world!) Without them, we will not survive.
As one natural scientist put it “The only thing we understand about equilibrium in nature is that it is a precursor to death.”
For every five or so schools that I meet telling me that they would be so much more successful/creative/adventurous if it weren’t for the National Curriculum I meet one who declares itself to be successful because of the current climate. Teachers here are prepared to break the rules, to do it their way, to move us all forward.
A primary school in London declared that they didn’t ‘do’ the Literacy Hour, not because it wasn’t important but because they were going to do it ‘their way’. When I queried the legality of this the head simply replied, “Who checks?”. Another school claims barely to have looked at the government’s wishes and to have designed their own strategy for literacy. Both of these schools are now Beacon Schools. At a secondary school recently I overheard a deputy telling the Food Technology teacher not to bother with the elements of the National that didn’t fit in with what she felt was right for her students.
I have even heard the late unlamented Chris Woodhead telling headteachers that if they didn’t agree with what Ofsted were telling them to do they should ignore it.
And, in yet another primary school, once they had done things the “prescribed way” they then set about doing it “the All Souls way”. During a piece of research into the inclusive - or otherwise - nature of the Literacy Hour this school was identified as having the most fully inclusive practice of any of the primary schools that were playing it more “down the line”.
American business guru Tom Peters once said, “empowerment is a state of mind”. If this is true what state is your mind in? Are you prepared to move education forward with the creative professionalism with which all good teachers are imbued? If so, may I give you some suggestions as to a possible direction? You will find the route strangely familiar.
Why not start with Multiple Intelligence theory? Remember that time when we knew that children were all different and learned in different ways? Well, those ways now have a number – eight at the last count – and real names like “logical/mathematical”, “body/physical”, “visual/spatial” and even “naturalistic” intelligence. (Or if it helps think Carol Vordeman, David Beckham, Picasso and Charlie Dimmock, not to mention Princess Diana – interpersonal, Mother Teresa – intrapersonal, Mozart – musical, Dylan Thomas – verbal/linguistic.) Imagine these eight sitting in your class. Would your schemes of work guarantee that they got the chance to play to their strengths at least some of the time?
Or what about the way we take in information? Learning must pass through our senses and, working on the premise that taste and smell are best left to babies and year nine boys respectively, we are left with our eyes, our ears and our “muscle memory” or Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic learning. Use our preferred style and we will learn better. Use all three and we greatly improve our chances of learning and remembering it. After all, our memory for pictures is stored in different places to our memory for sounds and our memory for how to ride a bike seems to be stored in the actual process of doing it. As Oscar Wilde once wrote thanking a friend for a spot of cycling tuition:
“I have never forgotten the lesson you so kindly gave me: even my leg remembers it.”
What about memory strategies? There’s a question that haunts your classroom but is never there. “How shall I remember what you are asking me to remember?” I taught my bottom set students a system for memorising French vocabulary (developed at Swansea University no less) and they scored ten out of ten when they used it. Some had never scored so highly in anything before and felt great, a fact that moves us to another hugely important element of the whole learning how to learn arena.
Imagine a Jammie Dodger biscuit. Think of the biscuit around the edge as the techniques and strategies that can make such a huge difference to classroom achievement such as Multiple Intelligence theory, VAK strategies and even Learning Maps. (One teacher I met in the middle of Birmingham had a large number of students with A* at GCSE last year, many of them boys of African Caribbean origin, thanks to “visual/spatial” learning strategies that moved them away from what I call the “tyranny of syntax”. Without these strategies the teacher estimates the boys would have ended up with D grades.)
Strategies are important, however, a lot of biscuit does not a Jammie Dodger make.
The jammy heart in the middle is where we get to the real essence of learning with issues like self-esteem, beliefs, aspirations, expectations and emotional intelligence. Over the last few years technology has helped to democratise knowledge. What we, as professional educators, need to do now is to democratise learning. Are the children leaving your schools capable and competent learners who not only know how to learn (biscuit) but also have the desire, the commitment and the self-belief to be able to learn in the first place (jammy heart)?
Two little words will stop you from joining in the necessary revolution. They are the two words that stop you going through the red light yet they also stop you from attempting new things, opening up to new possibilities, living your own dreams. These soul-draining words? “Yes but…”. Well try these yes buts for size.
Yes but every child you are working with is capable of so much more. Yes but you can be an even better teacher. Yes but the world needs you to be the best you can be. Yes but we know so much about how to achieve all this. Yes but you may have to break the rules to get there. Yes but go ahead, live dangerously. You know you want to.
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