Your classroom is not just an environment in which you can show how clever you are

One of the best ways in which you can be an inspirational teacher is to give the children in your care the opportunity to be inspirational themselves. So says my Independent Thinking Associate and friend Will Ryan, pioneer of Inside Out Leadership – the idea that you lead a school from your own moral purpose, not from what the latest government directive tells you to do. How often, though, have I seen the classroom as the place not so much where children shine but where teachers perform. But, let me reiterate – in a learning school your job isn’t to teach the

stuff, your job is to ensure that your children learn the stuff. I was once working with – or at least trying to work with – a group of

A-level psychology students but every time I put a question to them, their class teacher answered it. And in great detail. Her classroom was her domain and no-one would know more, contribute more or speak more than she would. She taught A-level psychology but I’m not sure what her students learned. They certainly didn’t learn to find their own voice as independent learners. But, as Lord Chesterfield wrote in one of his famous letters to his son in the eighteenth century:

If, therefore, you would avoid the accusation of pedantry on one hand, or the suspicion of ignorance on the other, abstain from learned ostentation. Speak the language of the company that you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one. If you are asked what o’clock it is, tell it; but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.