Anyone got any opinions on the Michaela School?

[noblegiraffe]

My Twitter is currently full of talk about Michaela as the teachers there have released a book today and are holding a conference explaining what they do. It's a no-excuses school where kids walk the corridors either in silence or chanting Shakespeare, behaviour is expected to be perfect including no slouching. Everything possible is done to reduce workload of teachers - no marking in books, lessons are all joint planned and taught uniformly, no differentiation, they write their own textbooks.

Does anyone's kids go there? Anyone decide against sending their kids there? Does anyone know how it is viewed in the local community?

It is frustrating. My younger DS is very keen on science but hasn't been inspired so far at school. On the other hand, this is partly because he read a lot about it in his own time and most other children did little at primary. Our primary used to have a fantastic hands-on science week but for some reason dropped it. Obviously there are good science jobs and I do hope the situation in engineering is as good as stated! I remain positive about it! On the other hand the real crux seems to be maths ability - for example, there are great careers in computing. However, good software engineers are people who are good at maths. It requires particular skills. Luckily my son who loves programming has got the message about maths but I think some students come in for a shock when they realise how essential it is.

Thanks for the link, HPFA, very interesting.

While I understand the idea of focusing on numeracy till you've got it nailed, the idea just sounds dull. And as someone mentioned, doing a topic lots in one go isn't always the best idea, sometimes understanding is better if you come back to it next year. Students also become more mathematically mature as they grow up.

I saw the blog author give a talk at ResearchEd where she talked about learning to knit, and used the scarf she knotted as a visual representation of how students learn a new topic (hesitation, getting better, coming a cropper, learning new skills, confidence etc). It was very thoughtful and interesting, clearly the time they don't spend marking gives them brain space to consider what they actually do. I would love that. I don't believe that they could knock off at 5 and not work evenings unless their contact time is minimal.

There was a great article about this school in last weeks Sunday Times. I am fascinated by it.

ds and dd go to Grammar schools. One reason we chose that route was the classroom behaviour (to be fair our local schools are not great) I see in their schools that a high expectation in terms of behaviour has a massive knock on effect on learning.

According to the article they have a year 7 boot camp, for a week before school starts and that teaches the kids the Michaela way. Some things are really not that different to the Indie school I went to - the single file silent walking down the corridor, the eating one meal together at a table with one serving and a teacher at the head. (we didn't have subjects for discussion though)

One of the things that did impress me was their admission policy. They select by lottery. So they have no control over the children they get, anyone can apply and they draw the number needed out of a hat. They have had some amazing successes with kids coming to them with behavioural issues too. But She also says that some parents don't like it and remove their kids.
There is a massive emphasis on parental support and she is happy to tell the parent that their parenting is crap if they don't get their child to school with correct uniform and homework done. You have to sign up to agree with all her rules.

So there seems to be a difference of opinion about how to teach science and how to inspire people to sticks with the sciences sufficiently to go into STEM careers.

Focusing solely on developing a knowledge base runs the risk of being " just pages of writing notes" especially if the lessons are dull. People talk frequently about "hands on science" being a way of inspiring/maintaining interest.

Yet on the other hand we have a detailed explanation of why prioritising the gaining of a knowledge base before undertaking experimentation may be a good thing.

My sense is much more of a middle ground- unlike say times tables, where just learning them in an efficient way is a good thing, as they are just a basic tool; developing a love for science/engineering (to make you want to spend your career in it) requires building in some experiential and practical, problem solving elements throughout the period at school. I dont think you can leave it until A level.

Noblegiraffe, you mentioned the blogger using knitting as a example for the different stages of learning a skill. One thing about knitting is mastering it requires doing, not just learning theoretically about and writing about. So, where at this school are the science-equivalents to knitting built in?

I was particularly interested in the MFL approach. The blog post specifically says they don't 'do' grammar, which was why I wondered what they did do and how they mastered it:

All classes use past, reasons, opinions, future, subjonctive all the time. We don’t ‘do’ the perfect tense or ‘do’ the subjunctive. We don’t ‘do’ grammar. And yet grammar is all we do. It’s everywhere.

The typo in subjonctive is his.

As an adult learner of new languages, and indeed as an MFL graduate, I like to undestand the grammatical structure of something so I can generalise from it. And it's not clear from the blog post what they do to embed that. I'm not knocking it; I'm genuinely interested.

Hmm - I'm very sceptical about the claim that they don't 'do' grammar. As far as I'm concerned, there are two ways to learn grammar. One is by actually teaching the structures. The other is just by modelling them (i.e. how native speakers learn or how people learn if they move to a foreign country and just learn by immersion). But the latter would take too long. You just wouldn't get enough exposure in a few lessons a week.

I agree. And in fact immersion is a risky approach in anyone over the age of about 10, as evidenced by the large number of people who never learn to speak their adopted language grammatically correctly.

From the examples of pupils' work on the website it looks like they teach lots of grammar. I think the point they're trying to make is that grammar is absolutely central to their approach, not a separate add-on as at some schools.

I find it hard to believe it's a separate add-on at any school though. It certainly hasn't been in any of the many schools where I've taught MFL. Nobody says "Right kids, today we are learning a funny thing called the Perfect Tense and then we aren't going to bother using it in any of our spoken or written French". You teach each new grammar point and get them to practise assimilating it into what they already know. I've been doing that today in fact!

But that's not at all what that blog post says. So you may be right but it's a shame they can't express themselves more clearly. The thing that puts me off - though I am fascinated and am sure there will be great success - is that most of their blog posts talk about how brilliant what they are doing is in a rather simplistic way.

Ontop though I am fascinated and am sure there will be great success - is that most of their blog posts talk about how brilliant what they are doing is in a rather simplistic way.

I think perhaps the problem may be that what they are doing is so different, that it takes a large word count (i.e. book size) to explain it fully. My copy of the book arrived today, and while I've not done much more than glance at it, it does talk about mistakes they have made, and how they are constantly reviewing what they are doing.

But that rarely comes across in blog posts or twitter. I have seen some references to making mistakes, but usually there seems to be a lack of objective reflection. I think it's going to be very difficult to pick out which bits are contributing towards improving attainment, which bits aren't and which things are just smoke and mirrors.

Suspect there might be a lot of stuff they can drop and it won't make much difference.

Rafals But that rarely comes across in blog posts and twitter.

I suppose another possibility is that, considering how much hostility they have faced, and are still facing, they prefer to not to give the enraged any openings. Barry Smith, the deputy head involved in lunchgate, apparently even received death threats , and has made his personal blog private. When twitter users are calling you fascist and totalitarian (despite the fact that they haven't visited the school and know little about it), it might make you more circumspect about what you say....dunno.

I think it's going to be very difficult to pick out which bits are contributing towards improving attainment, which bits aren't

Agreed, but that's always a problem in education and education research, isn't it. It makes me really depressed at how much money has been wasted over the years on badly-designed education research.

Not sure what you mean by "smoke and mirrors"?

I like the zero tolerance on bad behaviour, the drilling of routines to minimise time-wasting and mucking about and the sitting with a teacher for lunch and having civilised conversations. The latter in particular is a good example of something that many mc and private school kids will often take for granted and many other kids miss out on in their home lives.

Hot off the press - have a look at the sample of a Year 9 essay on Oliver Twist.

twitter.com/Samfr/status/803666553619312640

Trouble for me is it reads like someone has been drilled very hard - there's no hint of any personal enjoyment or involvement with the literature at all. Is this what we want from a Year 9? What's the point?

HPFA -- there's no hint of any personal enjoyment or involvement with the literature at all.

I'm not sure you can how you can really make that judgment from just the first 9 lines of an essay? (I'm assuming that's what you're looking at?)

I teach year 9. My class spends half an hour reading during my lesson. One boy is struggling through The BFG. A second is tackling The Diary of A Wimpy Kid. I'm not sure that Michaela could magically improve their literacy. There are complex reasons - some social, some SEN for their low attainment. What does Michaela do for children like that? Genuine question - does anyone know?

Interesting. The essay draft is definitely impressive in many ways for a child of that age. My main caveat is that it sounds as if it has been very heavily modelled - almost as if the children have learned a list of words and definitions to do with Dickens in their 'knowledge planners' or whatever they're called and have shoehorned them in. What for example does ' how toxic a paradigm of physiognomy and judgement truly is' mean? There is a primary school near me that produces very impressive writing but the modelling is very intensive, so that when you read three or four of the children's stories they are all almost identical.

I was thinking of the parents that didn't like the school and left and the school's PR really.

The huge amount of publicity that they put out about the school' approach will appeal to certain types of parents. I suspect their cohort might be more selective than the stats would suggest. It works if you are the only school in the area with that ethos because anyone not supporting it can choose to go elsewhere. It might be a totally different story if every school in the LA adopted the same system and parents had no choice but also completely refused to work with the school ad undermined their ethos.

You can tell parents you don't think their parenting is up to scratch, but there's not a lot you can do to make them change it if they don't want to.

These blogs by the SENCO at Michaela give some idea of what they're doing. I believe they take children who struggle with reading out of French lessons initially, to make time for intensive phonics.

tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/pleaseteach/

tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/reading/

tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/weakestcatchup/

If it's a decoding issue, then an good quality phonics catch up scheme will help there. And then a lot of practice to build fluency.

We do still have a big problem with the teaching of phonics and reading in primary. It's getting there, but there's a long way to go.

There are a number of schools doing very good things which seem to be getting results. With phonics it probably took about 10 years to get from the point where some schools were getting good results to the Rose Review requiring all schools to teach it, so we might still have a long way to go.

Rafals I agree that their approach won't work with parents who won't support them if the children aren't doing their work, or following school rules. But isn't that true of all schools, really? The difference is that the children won't be withdrawn from the school, and will just stay there disrupting everyone else's education while not learning very much.

If the school is claiming that their system will work for all children, then that's clearly wrong. (Although I haven't seen that.) Children who are seriously disadvantaged are unlikely to catch up unless they are prepared to work hard, whatever school they go to.

Ah so it's nothing to do with their actual approach just that anyone disruptive /without supportive parents/towing the line is removed?

You could have any philosophy and only work with supportive parents and probably do well....

The huge amount of publicity that they put out about the school' approach will appeal to certain types of parents. I suspect their cohort might be more selective than the stats would suggest.

Indeed. Parents who are willing to sign up and stick to the rules at this school are the same parents who would have been very supportive of their kids in all environments.