Welcome, to a new age of teaching

Finally, what feels like an appropriate time to start a blog. This is definitely a year worth writing about, isn’t it? This blog will focus on education, which I am most passionate about, and I will try my best to post my thoughts and share my lessons as frequently as I can. 

For now, I will begin my first post by introducing myself and my setting. In brief, I am a Bangladeshi, brought up in an international bubble in Geneva, Switzerland. I have experience with education in the formal and charity sector. I am trained in primary education and am currently teaching in London as a Year 1 teacher in a state school. I am embarking on a Masters in Education and I have a lot of feelings to express:

I love my job.

I love children.

I love how education has the power to change the world. 

I love my parents for showing me the importance of education.

But because I do not love some of the political systems I have worked in, nor their ideologies, my job becomes a bit difficult. 

I hope much of that frustration will be alleviated through learning alternative paths to create educational change within our confinements. I am fortunate to have a tutor who listens to your needs, to which she suggested: 

Focus on what you can do, not what you cannot

Simple.

In the past, I have found that the best tutors I have had can give one small advice that can make the biggest difference to your practice. 

Some other words of wisdom from previous tutors include:

Give yourself permission to say ‘no’

Whatever needs to be done, will be done

Say ‘yes’ only to the best ‘yes’

My first reading in my Masters course is based on a paper written by Andy Hargreaves, who identifies 4 stages of professional progression in teaching (2010): 

1. The pre-professional age (~1920s)

2. The age of the autonomous individual (~1960s)

3. The collegiate professional (~1980s)

4. The post-modern professional (~2000)

Each stage highlights a major shift in socio-political factors that have affected the nature of teaching. Each phase offered new values and mindsets to what teaching means and gave way to reflect on how far teaching has come now… in “COVID-19 world”.

I see each phase as layers of thought added to the previous one, where the centre represents when mass teaching began. Sort of like seeing the rings inside a tree trunk, and with each age dawns a new ring of thought. I can’t help but wonder, whilst new generations of teachers come with new ideas, do the old ones ever go away?

(St)ages of teacher professionalism: 

In every school, you will find all sorts of characters and professionals who emphasize the different mindsets of teaching. I thought about where I worked, and how members in the school really can reveal their teaching mindsets based on which ‘age’ they were brought up in.

 

Those from the pre-professional age hold strong traditional views of education, including Skinner's classic conditional behaviour tactics coupled with simple methods of delivering content.  These people fall back to old ways of managing behaviour and find changes difficult to accept. 

One staff member shared a story that she got a message from her son’s secondary school principal that said: “the first class to complete their homework will get sweeties all week.” Seriously? And to secondary children? We were laughing at how these methods are even acceptable anymore, especially coming from leadership! Surely we all know extrinsic rewards have been overruled by intrinsic motivation, no?

And what about the leadership we have here in the U.K.? Children can play with each other in their bubbles but in the same bubble are forced to learn in classrooms with forward facing tables, and the added stress of testing and curriculum coverage? Could this look more like education in the industrial times?

Here's a picture of a classroom in the 1920s

Here is a picture of my friend's classroom in 2020!

I know we have COVID measures to follow, but is that really the best solution? Real progressive. Well, it’s pretty clear which age those policy-makers come from… 

Food for thought:

My current headteacher on the other hand is hugely passionate about creating a culture of research and shared practice, which I can see comes more from the collegiate professional age. 

Personally, I identify with the post-modern phase, which is all of the above plus a lot more. I find a lot of my mental effort goes to the individual well-being of the children, creating strong support links with families, tailoring lessons to their personal needs whilst catering to everyone else. Oh right, and then there’s a curriculum to teach too. No wonder teachers are exhausted. 

Teachers are constantly forced to re-assess who they are and what their beliefs are in the educational context they have been brought up in. Which is proving to be more difficult than ever now. What age of professionalism are we in now? The 5th? 6th? Have we skipped ages and jumped to the 10th?

I like to think of this as the new 'digital age' of teaching. Whilst previous stages were somewhat predictable based on the socio-economic state of the world, no one could have predicted this change. A worldwide lockdown at this scale, forcing everyone to adapt and apply so quickly to a new environment. It has been and still is extraordinary.

This COVID-19 burst has brought about immense new dialogue in the educational world, raising compelling questions that inherently make us reflect on our values:  what is education now? How should it be taught? How can it be accessible to everyone in an era with divided digital opportunities?  What are the essential skills or knowledge we really need to be teaching? What are we as teachers able to cope with? What are our expectations now?

I was lucky to experience the side of online teaching during lockdown, albeit for a private school, but this certainly brought to light many aspects to think about. One thought in particular, which was reinforced here, was that no matter the situation, children can really amaze you in showing what they are capable of, if you allow them to. 

Here is an example of what my team achieved during lockdown with online learning and teaching.

Whatever new age this is, we have to be providing children more opportunities of what they want and need to learn to survive even more unprecedented, possible tumultuous times ahead that rely more and more on technology and skills-based learning and less on simple forward-facing classroom content. 

Educators need a whole lot more than simply being equipped with subject knowledge and classroom management strategies to survive. No matter what ‘age’ you are from, we need each other. We need old and new ideas merged. We need collective strength and support. We need everyone in the community. We need a collective conscience. Now, more than ever before. 

What conscience do you choose?