inset gobbledegook

[notknowledgeable]

I feel really wound up and upset by hours listening to expensive educational consultant talking totally impenetrable prose at us for hours for no apparent reason.

These consultant people always seem to be humanities graduates, and science and maths teachers just look at each other in bewilderment. Although in this case, judging by the talk on the way out of school, the English and humanities teachers were equally lost.

Why would you take advice on teaching from someone incapable of teaching a willing and intelligent audience like us?

What a waste of time, I missed out on other things I wanted to be doing. And are we going to have to act on this information? Cos I didn't understand a word of it. But worryingly, some of the phrases are familiar from the current trend in learning walk feedback, so maybe managers had a handy phrase book in advance. And how much did it cost the school?

I share your pain.

I was asked this week by an aspirational member of SLT if the presentations my y13 EPQ students had done so far were any good. I looked him straight in the eye and said "in 30+ years of teaching, I have sat through some utter dross from supposed experts on their subjects/pedagogy/some new bollocks made-up fad. These 17 & 18 years olds knock them out of the park." His mouth fell open, then he actually smiled and said "so they're pretty good then?" Durrrr - yes!

My school is currently lamenting a large budget shortfall. Didn't stop them spending a 4 figure sum on hiring a piece of kit for a showing-off event.

We are also being told that we have to teach in a certain way. One of the great things about the school used to be that teachers could adapt the way the content was delivered to suit their own teaching style. That seems to be going. Most of the work in my main subject should be practical; when I ask how it works in a practical context, the (largely Humanties/English teaching) SLT people shrug and dismiss it. Well sod them. Not sure I will be there in September.

Couldn’t agree more.
Planning a sickie for the next one.

O yes, we are always being told exactly what way to teach and it is always the exact opposite of the last way we were told to teach....

I just sit down, zone out and think of it as a full day's pay for doing nothing.

26 years of ignoring INSET day edubollocks has had no impact on my pipils so I intend to carry on for another 5 years and retire.

@Deepmore I salute you!

You could use the time to play inset bingo;
Flight path
High expectations
Positive gains
Sequencing
Mindset

Saying that I have sat through some good ones in my time, we had a nicely scientific guy talk about cognitive load once, and a lovely salt gave a talk about communicating with send students. So I think good inset is out there but it's too expensive to get it organised in a way that's tailored to each member of staff. Thus you get the generic edufad guy in a navy suit and brown shoes with a mahoosive PowerPoint and ideas that would only apply to schools with well motivated students, which most aren't.

I'm sure you are right about good inset, it is there. But the culture we have is that every manager has a target to change something in the school, so they change something. Normally back to how it was before the previous manager changed it. And so rather than learning anything, we just go round in circles

Oh we regularly get people in telling us we aren't allowed to enforce rules or the kids will be traumatised and taking home a hefty sum of money for their nonsense. It makes me so angry. Then SLT wonder why behaviour is going down the pan, and pay some new charlatan to come and ruin things a bit more.