ABSTRACT
Observing someone teach requires the observer, for better or worse, to play the role of assessor; and the very skilful and delicate art of sharing lesson feedback – or of asking sensitive professional questions concerning teamwork or individual teachers' views about the value system espoused by their school – demands the emotional intelligence of a practised counsellor or social worker. Indeed, Foucault regarded schools as one of the prime sites in which habits of '[h]ierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance' are acquired and internalised. Clearly, pupils are not the only members of the school community subjected to deficit models of education. A school – and indeed an English classroom – becomes a skhole when it creates a safe space in which pupils feel sufficiently relaxed and at leisure to concentrate on acquiring the civilising knowledge, understanding and behaviours essential to Maslow's 'good' society.
