20 years of educational fads

[Piggywaspushed]

This article on Teacher Toolkit is actually two years old so I am sure we could update it! (SLANT anyone??) but it appeared on my Twitter feed and I thought MN might find it diverting:

www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2016/07/10/education-fads/

loving that triple marking is declared a fad.

Send to all your SLTs! I dare you!!

And to call it a funky name - and expect to flip all lessons. It's just crackers. If some of these things could just be presented as "some things that work in my class sometimes" rather than "we all have to do this every lesson now and evidence it."

Yes Alevel English has always been 'flipped', and yes it is just a fancy name. It doesn't suit all subjects, but ones where there is a lot of content, as long as the students do it, it works really well. I give sanctions if they haven't done it and they soon come to realise that if they try to wing it, they are missing out. But then I had awesome groups of students who wanted to learn. It doesn't have to be them teaching themselves, or just reading. The work load is increased as you have to prepare two lessons really - the self driven one prior to the lesson and then the lesson but in the lesson they are doing a lot more work and are a lot less passive so as the teacher you work differently. I love it. Apart from the workload. It improves the second year. Provided the govt don't go and change the Alevels. Again.

Stick I agree. Different things work for different teachers at different times with different groups. Goes back to wanting a quick fix. Never works. Teachers need to be left alone to try things that work for them and get on with it.

I quite like a quick www and ebi, it marks the marking quicker and is to the point. It's what I've always done but with less writing.
Most of people the rest is bollocks. What I think is funny is that no one ever does an inset on how to explain things well!

Pink highlighter and green highlighter are going to look exactly the same to a lot of kids with colourblindness. Just sayin'

‘Knowledge-based curriculum’ is a new one I’ve seen on job ads recently. ‘Our School prides itself on its knowledge-based curriculum’ as if teaching kids stuff is somehow new or different to what normal schools do.

Ah but that one has fascist overtones : it's what the Michaela School thinks they have 'discovered'.

I'm colour blind! (well, colour deficient : can't differentiate shades or read anything which is colour coded). I had to confess this once at an interview when they presented me with a data sheet.

Reusing resources the next year? Are you mad?
I'm primary, have taught almost exclusively in one year group, in one school for 10 years and we have never been allowed to reuse planning or resources . Everything has to be done from scratch every year to accommodate the latest fad.
I remember:
Numeracy and Literacy Hour
Creative Learning Journeys (with about 20 objectives to tick for each child for each foundation subject)
Topic portfolios
The Hats of Learning
Building Learning Power
Power of Reading
Reciprocal Reading
WALT and WILF
Learning objectives, Learning Intention, Success Criteria
Learning Styles
Wake Up Shake Up
Philosophy For Learning (P4C)
Waves of learning
5 Rs of learning skills or something like that: resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness etc
Differentiating 5 ways every lesson plus challenge

What are we doing now? Mastery worksheets in maths which the SEN children can't access but we have to keep the class together 😞

10 years ago everything had to be linked to everything in topics. We weren't allowed to use any maths worksheets if they didn't have a pirate picture on if we were currently doing pirates as our topic. All word problems had to be about boxes of treasure, how many gold coins etc.

We are still doing Building Learning Power at my current school.

So every half term we have a learning skill focus with an object to represent the skill displayed on the wall.

It's pants.

Trying to explain the concept of 'distilling' or 'absorption' to class of deaf children with very limited vocabularies is a bundle of laughs too.

And we have to assess them all in an APP style about how well they have achieved skills in all areas.

More pointless paperwork...

Oh - and I trained during the literacy and numeracy hour days, which then moved onto the maths thing where they were all taught the same units at the same time for exactly 5 lessons before moving on...

That was shite too and didn't last 5 minutes.

It's all so depressing.

Why am I still doing this job?!

Pray tell what are the 'hats of learning'? They sound fun.

The hats are actually quite good fun. All I remember is being a black hat thinker. But there are yellow hats and green hats and I presume blue : all with different ways of looking at things.

I used it for group work occasionally. No idea who would ever have taken it very seriously. I think it was Edward de Bono's theory.

We had to take it very seriously. With displays in every classroom. www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php
Yes I remember the numeracy strategy- 12 classes all wanting to use the plastic coins at once because we were all supposed to be teaching money at the same time

Blimey I'd forgotten about APP! Photocopying loads of work for a 'collection' which was supposed to represent the progress of every child in that 'ability group'. Thank goodness we just look at the books now!
I do like assessment for learning, flexible grouping, pullbacks etc. Good common sense approach.

I also like colour coded marking. But ito one thing we've been doing for a few years so we've had a chance to embed it properly and it does help the children. We have super duper 4 colour pens to mark with 😊

We still have to do the bloody hats! And have to have a set of glittery ones displayed on the wall somewhere

Hats of learning was covered in TEEP training too. I never, ever went there.

Does anyone know what ‘Mantle of the Expert’ is? I’ve seen loads of mention of it over the years but have never been sufficiently arsed to find out what it means.

I’d forgotten about APP-that was horrendous! Came in just after PPA-its backward acronym-not to be confused with each other!!

Literacy and numeracy hour were terrible ideas as well. Monumental levels of photocopying for little or no gain!

I had Mantle of the Expert training! If I recall, you set up a fake scenario and did loads of work based around it as an "expert". For example, in my KS2 class we pretended we were setting up a health and fitness club for kids. We created a menu and wrote instructions for the recipes, explanations of different exercise activities and their effects on our bodies (linked to our science topic), wrote an advertisement for the camp, did the exercises in PE and took pulse rates, made graphs etc. It was just a convoluted cross-curricular topic really. We were supposed to give all the children a role and whenever they were doing Mantle of the Expert work they were supposed to put on a special badge related to the project that showed their role as expert. I think we all did the training then each class managed to do about one Mantle of the Expert scenario before it died a death!

Yes-we did Mantle of the Expert too.

It was sort of a drama thing, where you’d have a class company theme, etc you’d be a train company and then you’d all go into ‘role’ and allocate jobs to people-so, you’d have a PR department and engineers and publishers etc. You’d be design a logo and company name etc

Then suddenly...a letter would come through the post asking the company to take on a job for them and you’d all have to spring into action and reply and decided how you were going to do the job. Different departments in the class would all have their roles to do. At random moments, a member of SMT would burst into the room saying, ‘right, 4B-I have just taken a phone call from Mr Train company-you have urgent work to do!’

Yes, it was as shite as it sounds.

I have to say APP for maths and reading were rubbish but I quite liked the writing ones! Better than the current set-up where other than Year 6 and Year 2, nobody really knows what an "expected" piece of writing is supposed to look like.