The fourteenth republic - watching Scotland and ever changing DfE guidelines

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

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Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

If you are fed up with cakes and biscuits there is now a cheeseboard on offer

If you come with a stick to beat us with then please do so elsewhere and not in the staffroom

I had to ban - actually ban - one of our trainees from using PowerPoints and card sorts this year. She could not understand that teaching is not simply showing a 56 slide PowerPoint and that sorting cards is not learning. She kept arguing with me about it and ignoring me - it turned out that she thought planning a lesson and making a PowerPoint were the same thing. She should have failed, and likely would have had we been able to go past March. But she will have been passed and sent off to some unsuspecting school with her massive PowerPoints... It wasn't that she wasn't trying, but that she just didn't know or understand what teaching is.
I always tell the trainees that they need to be able to teach with just a dried up board pen and they look at me like I'm mad. But what do they do when the power goes and their PowerPoint evaporates?
I cannot bear knowledge organisers as a concept. Shakespeare did a pretty good job of organising his knowledge of the supernatural in Macbeth. They don't need me to repeat it on a side of A4 to be regurgitated like so many baby birds. If I tell them that James I wrote a book about witches and thought a boat he was on was bewitched, they'll make the connection when it comes up. What I don't want is everyone parroting the same sentence about it - used to drive me mad in the controlled assessment days when you could see the bones in every essay for every student in the centre.

The scary thing about the edu-Twitterati is that they now seem to be setting educational policy.

I think there are shiny academy chains with classrooms largely manned by cheap Teach First cannon fodder which enables them to fund a thick layer of upper-middle management who have lots of non-contact time. They spend it making themselves into 'somebody' on social media. John Hutchinson of REACH... I am looking directly at you.

What I hate about KOs in English is the plot spoilers! There is no joy of discovery or suspense with the KO lot!

I actually plan my lessons via ppt, I must say. That's mainly so I have the stuff again for next year and also because it helps me think. There is a big difference between a ppt with tasks and questions on it , an done that just 'tells'. There is also a big difference between one createdby the teacher themselves and one just uncritically taken form somewhere else.

All that said, though, there is a problem with workload in this country and part of that is teacher reinventing wheels all the time. But I don't think it is the biggest problem, since I have always created my own resources and my workload is huge compared to 20 years ago! I think it might be more that a 'resource' is expected for every lesson whereas it used to be a more sporadic thing. I remember the days of copying a load of teacher notes from a blackboard! I guess a ppt is only another version of that sometimes.

Thousands of schools up and down the country will no doubt adjust their curriculum to align with Oak next year to enable 'efficient switch to remote learning'. They must be rubbing their hands with glee! How long before there is a 'booklet' available to buy for every Oak lesson...

When I first started I wrote the entire A level scheme of work. There was no internet - I had to do it via books and proper research! Seems so long ago now. We had a stock cupboard where I placed all the resources in a filing cabinet for everyone to use. The staff in charge of GCSE did the same. A world away from the "pay for my resource" and glory grabbing of now.

I now plan and prepare the UKS2 curriculum. I try to encorage sharing of resources and my team is pretty good at it. My last team leader was notorious for grabbing any good idea for herself. She'd either hoard resources so she could show them off in meetings or take yours, tell you they were rubbish, then change the font and claim they were hers.

Totally agree about the sequencing in maths. I can spot within a week now when my new class has failed to "get" or be taught a chunk of the sequence. It's important in grammar too - I always end up having to go back and fill gaps because LKS2 haven't taught it with logical progression. I suppose the real issue though is that the year 6 grammar content is the old year 9 SATS I used to teach!

Frankly, some of the nqt we have had lately have not been very bright. Particularly the Scitt ones, although i'm sure some must copewith it ok. Thankfully my team nqt is wonderful and came up the traditional way with some rigourous academic content behind her. Our English lead is a mere child who has never been out of ks1. I strongly suspect she doesn't understand year 6 writing and grammar at all.

KOs started off as a quizzing tool and used for that they are decent. So many schools just print them, stick them in and never look at them again.

I don't have beef with oak. They've done a decent job on a frankly tiny budget when all is considered. There are issues with some of the content and some subjects are missing but as a tool to get people through its adequate. It also means that any school using it cannot be slated because it is literally government endorsed and recommended. It will save teacher time for feedback and student contact should we get another lockdown.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8608787/Pupils-pose-no-risk-spreading-Covid-says-study.html

Wow, the fail really are pushing this. Apologies for linking the scummy rag

I've just read the guardian article and it says children UNDER 10 pose less spread risk, although staff still seem to get it. So year 6 are a different risk category. The statistics are pretty awful all round and I feel for secondary staff. Then I read the zoe app today about how perimenopausal and menopausal women are at higher risk. Ffs. I'm going back to bed!

FFS. We'll find out soon enough when we go back anyway.

I don't have an issue with PowerPoint per se; I have an issue with the slides being the teaching, if you see what I mean.
Slide one: objective. Read it to them. Make them copy it. Why?
Slide 2: picture of thing and question. Discuss thing
Slide 3: slide 2 but with answers.
And on and on and on... and this was in a subject I loved but it was almost entirely passive. It was as if she thought the prep of the resource was the planning and the teaching was just advancing the slides. I did suggest that I was sure the dept had resources she could use and adapt - but we never got much further than that.
My resources tend to be me, and a copy of the text. Maybe a handout from time to time. That made lockdown teaching harder because I suddenly had to make worksheets, which I didn't like.
When I ran a SCITT, we had them in school for considerably more than 120 days and we spent time on pedagogy as past of teaching and learning. Really, I think most of their "pedagogy" comes from the reading for the essays they don't see as important, and from Twitter.

I've had some bloody good trainees and NQTs over the years, but this year's crop were the worst for a while. It'll actually be a relief not to have trainees this year so I can focus on our 3 NQTs and the struggling RQT.

@MrsHamlet

I had to ban - actually ban - one of our trainees from using PowerPoints and card sorts this year. She could not understand that teaching is not simply showing a 56 slide PowerPoint and that sorting cards is not learning. She kept arguing with me about it and ignoring me - it turned out that she thought planning a lesson and making a PowerPoint were the same thing. She should have failed, and likely would have had we been able to go past March. But she will have been passed and sent off to some unsuspecting school with her massive PowerPoints... It wasn't that she wasn't trying, but that she just didn't know or understand what teaching is. I always tell the trainees that they need to be able to teach with just a dried up board pen and they look at me like I'm mad. But what do they do when the power goes and their PowerPoint evaporates? I cannot bear knowledge organisers as a concept. Shakespeare did a pretty good job of organising his knowledge of the supernatural in Macbeth. They don't need me to repeat it on a side of A4 to be regurgitated like so many baby birds. If I tell them that James I wrote a book about witches and thought a boat he was on was bewitched, they'll make the connection when it comes up. What I don't want is everyone parroting the same sentence about it - used to drive me mad in the controlled assessment days when you could see the bones in every essay for every student in the centre.

Since SLT/SMT in schools have thought that ‘anyone can teach ICT’ since the early 2000s (and that has translated into the now ‘Computer Science’), I have had to use PowerPoints to structure a lesson, due to the cacophony of non specialists I am ‘given’ each year. From PE teachers, Economics teachers, French teachers, Drama teachers etc. who happen to be under timetabled. As they change every year, I ‘have’ to have lesson PowerPoints for them to pick up. It is only very recently that there have been actual text books for Key Stage 3 and GCSE as well. For nearly 15 years, there were none!

Currently, I am working in the holidays to transfer my current lessons to be non-Computer room lessons (as students are staying where they are and we are going to them to teach) in order to come up with new tasks that can be done without a computer (really easy when I am teaching them to program ) and I have to be mindful that this year, I have been given an SLT member who is picking up a class for the first time and is a non-specialist, so it cannot be too ‘off the cuff’. It is a real negative of the attitude many have towards the subject that it is treated this way in many schools up and down the country.
Rant over - sorry!

Kenneth Baker in The Times today calls for a scrapping of next year's exam : he seems to think this is a pay off for getting them back in. What he says is all very sensible, actually (but he annoyed me when he said poetry has been scrapped - no it bloody hasn't!)

I don't think we will be allowed to use Oak at my place, though , because it could be set without us being there, as it were. Someone else is doing the teaching : our school would view that as an extra. I can guarantee about three people in my school have even heard of it (me, and the other two people I have told...).

Ppts aren't the devil, using them crapily is!

We have non specialists who download utter shite from TES and 'teach' using it. (whoever made all those maths ppts with yellow backgrounds )

Apparently, the PM/DfE is going to check that schools are not being 'over zealous' in their applications of safety measures. Who knew there was such a thing as 'too safe'??

Our place was reluctant to use Oak as well. I have no idea why. It's there, it's endorsed, it's decent mostly. Let teachers spend time with feedback and student contact. Plus staff with kids at home are really struggling. Ease up on the workload. SLT are knobs without kids though so....

@ChloeDecker you might be our HoD computer science!! He's doing much the same this summer, sadly. At least (and it's not much comfort I know) you have some control of the diet your students are getting from the non specialists.
Like I say, I don't dislike PowerPoint as a resource at all. I use it at A level when I have to teach grammar.

Then I read the zoe app today about how perimenopausal and menopausal women are at higher risk. Ffs. I'm going back to bed!

Joy.

As if the crap with that isn't bad enough.

So asthma, autoimmune issue and peri menopause here, oh but it's ok! Schools are safe!

KOs can be really effective. But only if you use them properly. They should contain key terms, vocabulary, context. Not just the whole plot of a novel to learn.

We use ours as homework and they are referred to in every lesson. They’re also planned backwards from the end of Yr 11 so they build on each other.

It should take an entire department working together to build a curriculum. The ones being flashed about online are some individual’s idea of what works.

One of the best things to come out of recent education debates is debunking the myth of the ‘hero teacher’. No one person can hold a while department together. Those who try are effectively undermining the rest of the department.

The scary thing about the edu-Twitterati is that they now seem to be setting educational policy.

Yes Reef I've noticed this. Iirc you're Sen? I'm boggling at how knowledge organisers are effective for those working at P5 level. And yet I've had to spend ages on them. I'm not aware of them being ofsted mandatory. They're more for staff imo

(More for staff in my setting that is.)

Belle, when I got my head around them I thought that I could see how they could be great for more able pupils in ks2 (Sen). At the same time in art, the sketch book should become the KO.

I'm concerned that at sen level they've become far too wordy and another overload of off putting demoralising paper.

Yes MrsHamlet, I agree, it’s the main way I can try and ensure all pupils get the same content but I would love to have even a small team of knowledgeable teachers to adapt to the class in front of them and get more creativity in the lesson. One day, eh!?

KOs are a bit tricky for things where you want to hold back in things eg history. You want to get them to do some predicting etc. I haven't got my head around how you deal with that.