ABSTRACT
Imagine if you could raise the test scores of young black people instantly and with barely any effort whatsoever. What if you could improve the performance of girls in a subject like maths where traditionally they have not done as well as boys? Well, research quoted in the New Scientist article ‘The Curse of Being Different’1 showed how to achieve just that. The researchers felt that something so simple as ticking a box to indicate your race or gender before an exam, as students were expected to do, could, at a subconscious level, serve to reinforce the negative views and stereotypes that society held about your race or gender, views such as ‘Black kids don’t do well at school’ or ‘Girls are no good at maths’. In one experiment, researchers staged a 15-minute session at the beginning of term with a group of African-American 12-and 13-year-olds, during which the students wrote about values that were important to them. This one simple activity reduced the achievement gap between the group and their white peers by an impressive 40 per cent. In another, one group of girls were asked to read a passage about the ‘fixed’ gender differences in numeracy ability just before they sat a maths test. A different group were given a passage to read that talked about how ability was modifiable, not fixed. This second group increased their achievement in the maths test by a staggering 50 per cent. Little things can make a big difference. Sometimes I see schools that have been classed as ‘good’ in Ofsted-
speak try to get to ‘outstanding’ by being, basically, ‘gooder’. They simply try and do more of whatever it was that Ofsted picked up on. Yet, outstanding isn’t about being ‘more good’. It often involves doing things that are totally different from those that were deemed ‘good’. But these things can be little things. What’s more, apart from bearing in mind that little things can have a huge impact as we have seen, it is important to remember this – you cannot fail. Your classroom is a laboratory, each lesson is an experiment and, as any good scientist knows, experiments can’t go wrong. You may not get the result you were expecting, or even wanted, but you
still come out with a result, some form of feedback that you can use to tweak things further in the next lesson. Gandhi entitled his autobiography,The Story ofMy Experiments with Truth,
so you could maybe take that as an inspiration for such a way of working. When I was a real teacher I used to plan lessons in great detail as per my
training and then, in the classroom, explain in precise detail what I expected the students to do. There would always be one student, though, who listened diligently and attentively and then totally misread the instructions and went off and did something completely different. The interesting thing was that often what they stumbled across was better than what I had planned anyway. I learned quite quickly to set tasks that were both vague and focused at the same time. A clarity of outcome – what was to be learned – but a haziness in the process – exactly how they did it was up to them – was a far more effective way of setting up an activity in the classroom. What’s more, working like this was much less stressful, as I didn’t spend the lesson trying to bend the class to my will, as it were; involved less work in the planning stages for me which has to be a good thing; and produced better results in the classroom anyway. If you approach a lesson, however, as ‘this must work well or else I will
have failed’ – and heaven knows there is enough pressure on you to think this way – then you are setting yourself up for a constant and all-consuming sense of failure. And that can’t be good for anyone. One teacher I worked with was determined to ‘get it right’ all the time.
He believed that he could ‘get the job done’ by the end of every day and go home with a clear conscience. But it is not that sort of job. Despite always being the first one in each morning and the last one to leave, he was never able to ‘get the job done’ and he was becoming a nervous wreck. What I realized at that point was that all teachers need a ‘Fu*k it! switch’. This is the point at the end of the day where, for the sake of their family, their health and their overall general well being, they say, ‘Fu*k it!’, pack their bags, switch off the lights and go home. Tomorrow is always another day. One of the greatest acts of kindness I have witnessed by a member of a leadership team was when I saw him suddenly spring up from his chair, open a window and yell at someone in the car park at the end of the day to go home. I thought it must be a student hanging around the teachers’ cars but it turned out to be an NQT who had a young family and was suffering the effects of balancing a first year in teaching with demands from home. The job will always be bigger than you are. You will never keep on top
of it and, like building a wall out of cats, just when you think you have it all sorted you will have to start again. It’s the same in your lessons themselves. No matter how well you plan, it will not always go well.
