A letter to me: Your journey so far...

Dear Me

When you first started teaching 11 years ago, you were truly awful at it!  You were scared of everything – scared of the students, scared of LT, scared of failing, scared of not being good enough and, as a result, you really weren’t good enough.  Luckily you started teaching when education was different.  Competency must have existed but it wasn’t on your radar.  You were given lots of support – mentored by some of the best teachers in school, regular observations to help you to improve, heads of year who would sit in your classroom to support you with behaviour and other heads of year who just shouted at children who left you in tears.  Cleaners who cleaned up the mess and mopped up the tears, a reprographics department who always got your resources to you in time and a department who kept you going when you didn’t think you could.  People were kind and they were supportive and they fixed you.  Members of LT would check on you to see how you were doing and encourage you.  You were given words of support with just the right amount of tough love and most importantly you were given time.  Time to improve, to work on your teaching, to figure things out and you were given opportunities to learn from others and to participate in working groups where you could be successful.
Now, you are leaving to become a member of Leadership Team at an outstanding school.  You are a pretty good teacher now and you enjoy every second it.  You are passionate about learning and teaching and education and have worked hard to get the best from your students.  You have worked your way up through the ranks and changed a lot in terms of your educational philosophy as you have.  It seems worth just taking a few minutes to jot down your thoughts about the big things in education.

Curriculum:

There are a number of beliefs you hold about curriculum.  There will always be external forces trying to guide schools in one direction or another – EBACC, baskets, etc.  Therefore we have to make the right decisions for the students we teach.  You passionately believe that students should study PE and RE and ICT – healthy body, healthy mind and the ability to exist in a tech savvy world.  You also believe that we need to make space on the curriculum for PSHE so that we give time to SRE, mental health, well-being, politics, cultural diversity, tolerance, etc. You believe that students should have a say over what their curriculum looks like so that they can pursue their passions but they need high quality IAG to ensure that they make the right choices.  They also need a good solid grounding in the fundamentals of English, Maths and Science.
There is a lot of really interesting work going on with assessment without levels right now and the implication could be exceptional for curriculum development particularly at key stage 3.  You think assessment and curriculum need to be designed together to ensure that the curriculum is holistic and meaningful and you think that there need to be opportunities for students to experience different learning experiences and become immersed in them.  You are still open to the opportunities presented by PBL but don’t necessarily think it is the right approach for all schools – you do however think that we can adapt elements of PBL in standard teaching.  You think we should assess students less frequently when they are younger so that they actually have time to learn but you also believe that students need to sit formal exams yearly to get them used to the rigour and expectations of the education system.  You also think that literacy and numeracy are crucially important to the later success of students both in education and in life and if students arrive to high school without the basic skills then this should be their focus potentially for the first term – you have been wondering if it is possible to design a year 7 curriculum which in the first term/year is only assessed around their ability to read, write and communicate accurately and successfully in the discipline of different subjects.  

Learning and Teaching:

This one has been a real journey.  You have taught lessons for observations that had a paint by numbers feel (i.e. tick the following boxes and you will be a good teacher).  You have worked in a context where a dictatorial approach was taken and all teachers were told how to teach with everyone following the accelerated learning cycle, everyone having to include one example of assessment, one of differentiation and one active engagement strategy.  You have observed lessons using checklists, tick boxes, teachers standards and you have been an integral part of a team that observed people for 30 minutes and then placed them on improvement programmes.  You have worked with multiple people on competency procedures.  And now… Now you wonder how we all got it wrong for so long.  You wonder why you let Ofsted dictate to you what good learning and teaching looks like.  Now you believe in a different approach.  You believe that good learning means students making progress (and not ‘staged’ afl progress checkers every twenty minutes to showcase progress) but actual, real, meaningful progress.  More than that, you don’t mind how teachers achieve this.  You believe that in order for teachers to be successful, they need to teach in a style that feels natural to them.  The task of someone leading learning and teaching is to see the potential in the individual and coach them to improve their practice using methods that suit them as a professional.  Right now you are influenced by a number of theories and ideas… Growth mindset (specifically considering the impact of praise), marginal gains, coaching, the idea that ability is a myth, research based classroom practice, CPD book clubs, professional learning communities (or inquiry groups).  It will interesting to see how these develop as areas of interest.  

 

Student outcomes and progress:

You don’t have a lot to say on this except that if you get the curriculum, assessment and learning and teaching right then the progress and outcomes will take care of themselves.  The reliance on data in schools worries you.  Having been on the receiving end of ‘the stick’ when the data didn’t look right, you worry that school leaders use data as a weapon against teachers and that just seems dangerous.  You hold on to the idea that ‘in healthy schools, data is information not condemnation’ (Anthony Muhammad) and you hope you always remember that.

Leadership

In terms of leadership, you are learning.  In recent years, you have attended some amazing CPD with some headteachers that you consider to be inspirational.  Leaders like Tom Sherrington, John Tomsett and Paul Banks have made you feel as though some of the views that you hold, that you often thought too idealistic, are actually shared by some great leaders.  The difference is these guys make it work.  You have learned a lot from hearing them talk and reading their work.  It has made you realise that there are a number of things that you believe in as leader right now.  The first is regarding behaviour.  You don’t believe that teachers became subject experts so they could babysit children who disrupt learning.  A teacher is responsible for providing a safe classroom environment and being consistent with the rewards and sanctions they issue but you believe that teachers have enough to do without wasting hours on students who do not wish to work.  You think it is the job of a leadership team to set a school ethos where success is valued and those who steal learning from others are dealt with according to a very simple and straightforward set of rules.  You also believe that the teacher is right and that leaders should always back their staff and that teachers should be able to trust, that if they call on you, you will be there to support them.  If a teacher gets it wrong, then that conversation can be had a later date but in the moment, teachers have to feel supported because teaching is hard.  The second thing you think is so important is trusting your staff.  If you have the right people in place and you develop them right and you build an ethos of trust then the job of the leader is to protect teachers from the big bad world of government policy and Ofsted.  Their job is to teach and you have to trust them to do that by giving them the space they need to be successful, whilst being approachable enough that if things are going wrong, they will talk to you.  Your last headteacher told you when you first started on LT that it was okay for you to make mistakes as long as you told him about any issues.  You always did and he always backed you.  There was never a time when you went to him with a problem and he didn’t help you to fix it without criticism or judgement.  He trusted you and you hope that you always remember that leadership lesson from him.  Another thing that matters to you a lot right now is teacher well-being.  No one goes to work with the intention of being bad at their job but sometimes the job is too much, or life is too much and it is really important that we notice each other.  You want to know your staff so that when things aren’t okay for them, you can provide the support that they need in order to be successful.  Martyn Reah is doing some excellent work on this at the moment and this is something you want to become actively involved in developing.  Note to self – you must write a #teacher5aday blog.  The idea behind it is simple… happy teachers = happy students.  This just makes sense to you.   The final thing that matters to you and has done for a long time is your commitment to teacher training.  You believe that all schools have a responsibility to be involved in the training of the next generation of teachers and it has been the favourite part of your job for a long time.  You are interested in how resilience could be incorporated into teacher training to improve the likelihood of teachers remaining in the profession for a longer time – heck you even wrote an essay on it for your MA.   

So this is where you are right now and this is an incredibly different place to where you have been at various points over the last 10 years or so.  This post was written for you but you will put it on your blog because then it is out there.  It will be interesting to see how you change as you learn at your new school and if you continue with the MA.  One thing is clear, you feel strongly that a big part of being a successful leader is having a clear vision and philosophy.  Right now, you know what you believe in, the next step in seeing how that adapts to your new role.

Sincerely yours,

Me.