Road to Glory - Marginal Gains

This Wednesday, we will be exploring the idea of marginal gains in our meeting.

First of all, we'll be looking at it in relation to our overall work - where can we make those little gains in a day which will allow us to mark an extra five books a day, or get that time to resource that lesson ever so slightly more creatively?

After that, we will start taking it into the classroom - how can year 9 start making those gains to nail that new skill, or how can that pupil in year 11 with the painstakingly slow approach to work grab the grade you know they're capable of?

Some of it will be about working more smartly, planning assessed work carefully - you have the freedom to do this with the schemes. They're malleable. Move them about. Assess S & L the week before reports. This is one area I'm seeking to make marginal gains - if I learn to use calendars and diaries effectively, I reckon I'll get the time to be more on top of my marking, which often slips away, and to adapt and personalise more lessons, making the work I mark work I REALLY want to mark.

To get you started, here's a blog from Alex Quigley, Head of English at Huntington School in York, which appeared on the Guardian teacher network. Have a look at that, or a quick watch of the three minute video below, to start getting a few ideas.

Marginal gains, working smarter as well as harder, could be just the thing we need to do what we want to do. Which is teach to the very best of our ability at all times.

Ours is to reason why.

You do a hard job. It's hard every day, in a different way. It's that class, that period six, that head of department. It's that new initiative, that new curriculum, that challenging pupil.

There's a reason you chose to do it. You may have made it recently. You may have made it slightly longer ago. But you made it. Sometimes the reason you made it may slip your mind. In the middle of a perfect storm of assessments and parents evenings, it may vanish.

Ours is to reason why. Education without purpose is meaningless.

Today I was at the Institute of Educations. Michael Gove spoke. Michael Wilshaw spoke. When I say spoke, I probably mean dictated. Gove expressed his admiration for the British Communists of the 1950s. Even I don't admire them.

I wasn't listening though. I was, along with poets, MCs, the head of English from Peter Hyman's free school, and a doctor of philosophy - all working teachers in their spare time - arguing, debating and discussing. We weren't being spoken down to. We were planning and plotting. We were listening.

They reminded me why I came into teaching; to do. Not for any other reason than it's the job where doing is most useful and most productive and most beneficial for society. It's never far from my mind, but their passion reinvigorated me.

Why do you do it? What's your reason?

Ours is to reason why.

Sustainability.

Sustainability has been a buzz word around environmental issues for some time now. Our dependence on oil is unsustainable, but maintained for profit. Renewable energy is sustainable but largely ignored or held back by Daily Mail reading nimbys.

Sustainability is important for what we do, too. There's no point in developing working habits which aren't sustainable. We will only crash and burn. There's no point making unsustainable progress with students, for example with crazed interventions and infinite pathways, as, like a house of cards, it will flutter down dramatically in the slightest breeze.

Our working habits and aims needs to be sustainable and future proof. This week's meeting will focus on the iGCSE and the work LS has done to set us up for this. It's yet another change of syllabus, which is unsustainable, but hopefully the last one, or one which readies us for the introduction of Gove levels in a couple of years.

A key element of sustainability is nailing progress early. This means highly effective and well judged wave one teaching. It means intervention is is early and focused. We're getting there with this, but there's more we can do.

Let's make sure our lessons are personalised, differentiated, engaging and based on our knowledge of the classes we teach. Mark little, often and formatively - try 10 pieces of quality marking a day. Get a dialogue going in the book, open discussion about progress and lots of how.

Do this regularly, and our work is sustainable. Fail in this, and things tumble.

It's your choice.

Slings and arrows

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Not sure who wrote that, but they were right. That is the question. Should we suffer nobly as aspersions are cast, or take arms against the sea of troubles?

My answer: both. We suffer the Natural shocks we know so we can help our charges achieve. We fight, by remodelling what is done and sticking to our principles, so that the dreams that come are our dreams, not the dreams of the corporate elite who seek to trap the minds of the future within their narrow paradigm.

Dare to Dream. Refuse to lose.