Posted on by Dr James Shea · 2 Comments

Transposable habitus not disposable habitus

We discuss epistemology frequently here at the university and one thing we look at is whether knowledge is disposable or transposable. If you prioritise knowledge, you want to learn it. You make a conscious effort to recall it. If you don’t value the knowledge, you might comply with holding the knowledge within a context, but then throw it away once you leave the context. Quite simply, it becomes disposable knowledge.

I coined disposable knowledge in my book on technology-led learning. The premise is quite simple and still holds – some knowledge is disposable. E.g., if I want to do something on the computer, I don’t attend a ten week course on Microsoft Word. I google or YouTube some direct instruction, I learn just enough temporarily to undertake the task and then I throw this learning away. I deprioritise it and forget it. Why? Because if I really need it again, I’ll look up the direct instruction again. I perceive that it has little value for me in future unknown situations and therefore it does not get added to my store of highly valued transposable knowledge. There is also no escaping that some knowledge can become more disposable as time passes. Scientific and technological advancement can transfer knowledge from the science domain to the history domain. We once used to learn more about metallurgy than we do now!

We can now go further, if you are in a professional context where direct instructional coaching is used to ensure you have fidelity to a particular approach, unless you believe in the evidence behind this ‘knowledge’ then it again becomes liable to being disposed. For knowledge to be retained in the long term it has to be valued to prevent itself being disposed of. Perhaps even worse, it becomes defunct knowledge: knowledge we have, but deliberately desist in using.

Transposable knowledge, habits and skills combined equates to habitus, that term coined by Pierre Bourdieu – whose work has attracted more attention since Ofsted embraced the idea of cultural capital. These ideas all explore a central theme, the unknown future. We build up cultural capital and a transposable habitus that enables us to be successful in different, unknown future areas of our lives. We accept, always, that there are limitations to these concepts of Bourdieu, but this concept of transposable habitus does have a place in education.

We now turn to our teachers and teacher education – where we find trainees are building knowledge, habits and skills for future unknown schools – their transposable habitus which will equip them for a career in teaching and education. However, if they are in a school with a very fixed way of teaching and, even more, if it is a way of teaching that the trainee doesn’t believe in or feels is not evidenced, then it becomes a disposable way of teaching. No matter how much you use instructional coaching or practice based teacher development unless the trainee teacher sees the value in the knowledge being learned they will dispose of it. Instead of moving from one school to the next with a large transposable habitus, they throw portions of it away and enter their next school with a much smaller amount of transposable habitus about teaching. We are fortunate in that our partner schools and mentors understand this and help the trainees explore different ideas about teaching beyond that in their room, department or school. Even more, the mentors are aware of the contextual limitations of an approach and embrace this limitation rather than hide it. If the mentor doesn’t use a projector, they understand that another school might be passionate about dual coding and so ensure the trainee explores this approach as well as not using a projector. Group work is another example. A good mentor explores both teacher-led and student-led work with their trainee regardless of their personal opinions.

One assessment on our course is that the trainee has to design a sequence of learning (a scheme or unit of work) and accompany it with an essay written at Masters level justifying their designed sequence of learning. They will cite both subject-specific pedagogy, such as the teaching of inference, and they will cite non-subject specific theories of learning: such as cognitive science, constructivism and behaviourism. They will also draw on theories of knowledge and assessment – it’s a complex task. They can draw on their school placements, the pre-existing planning they have seen and their wider reading for this assessment and it helps them crystallise their professional and autonomous ideas about teaching their subject. The planned learning that makes it into this assessment is the planned learning that they believe in. We are, through this assessment, trying to create in the trainee, transposable habitus that they can take to any school in England.

In designing this sequence of learning they can draw in the ideas, teaching and planning they have undertaken in their school placements. They hold these ideas up to the robust criticality of writing at L7 and justify their personal choices. They begin to make evidence informed decisions about their design of a curriculum. This habitus is transposable. They will hold their future planning up to such standards.

When a recently qualified teacher arrives at your school to begin their early career you have to be careful not to be too judgemental. What if much of what they learned was not valued by them and thus not transposable? What if the ideas they have learned to value aren’t valued at your school? They could have a miserable first year which could end with them leaving the profession. They might write their training and first job off as evidence that they were not cut out for teaching and we might lose an otherwise excellent practitioner. This debate also shows the need for entrenching teacher autonomy. If we want to keep teachers in the profession then we need to think about how to utilise and develop transposable habitus.

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Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

Toxic teachers and toxic leaders

With a TeacherTapp poll showing two thirds of teachers have worked in a toxic school, the issue of toxicity and teacher retention is ever more important.

During the leadership and management workshops we run with the trainees, one of the concepts we introduce them to is that of toxic workers. The theory is quite simple: in an organisation there are people who work very hard and perform their jobs to an acceptable standard, but whose interactions with others are so toxic that they reduce the productivity of others. In short, their net contribution to the organisation and the profession overall is very poor compared to someone who perhaps does not work as hard, but is a pleasure to collaborate and work with.

When the trainees were invited to say if they’d met such people in their lives prior to entering the profession they all volunteered stories. These stories came from all kinds of professions, but also included schools. Toxic teachers, toxic leaders, toxic managers. And the theory says – toxic people can rise quite well through the systems. The system rewards people who are toxic. This can be from the martyred single person department who does 60 hour weeks with bitterness and moaning and who never collaborates right up to a school leader burning good teachers out of the whole profession in pursuit of an ofsted grade or a P8 score. The end result is the same – the net contribution to the organisation and profession overall is negative and easily outweighs any of the positives generated.

There is much toxicity in education. You see it on edutwitter: ‘edu-trolls’ – deeply criticising and undermining all and sundry whilst seemingly doing good themselves. You see them in teachers, disdainfully dismissing all ideas about education from others, the government, from HEI, from anyone really. Anyone can be toxic and it can take a number of forms.

Communication can be toxic – who are the people you dread emails from? Why do you dread them? Are they passive aggressive? Are they down right rude? Are they ad hominem? Do you write such emails? Are you toxic? We do need to be reflective about our own practice.

Face to face communication can be toxic. In meetings, it’s the same – whose presence do you dread in meetings? Who would you least like to have do a learning walk on you? Who would you rather not do duty with?

Recently, online meetings have been vogue. Toxic practice exists here also. People who dominate the video side with aggressive questioning, people who passively aggressively refuse to turn their videos on when speaking or notice that their video is almost black with lack of light, people who chat in the chat box throughout an important presentation – the list is endless.

Policies can be toxic. Which policies make you despair? No evidence for the policy, focused on ‘what ofsted want’, controlling for the sake of controlling, and so forth. Relentless mock exams with no costing of the hourage spent by teacher who have to mark them. With mock exams, an already busy few weeks have to make room for days and days of marking. Which policies affect your well-being and make you want to leave the school or profession?

Don’t think anyone is immune to toxicity. Senior leaders can end up living in fear of a toxic Ofsted inspector passing a subjective judgement on them, ending their career and causing enormous upheaval to the school community. Those who experience it can suffer PTSD. Toxic people are everywhere and no educational institution, Ofsted included, is free of it.

We are turning the profession around these days – I genuinely believe we have more schools, federations, HEIs, MATs and LAs focused on well-being, work load reduction and a better profession. But we also need to recognise the toxic pollution in our system and be more conscious of it. Not replying all or CCing in someone to an email. Not using passive aggressive language in a meeting. Not formulating a marking policy which makes people leave the profession. Purging the toxic side of Ofsted. Overall, by making the profession a place where new teachers want to stay, not leave.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Proof – the final frontier for teachers

Is it time to return to the cult of the teacher?

It’s the first thing you get told when you come into teaching: what works with one class doesn’t necessarily work with another.

A trainee teacher might lament after a lesson (that did not go so well) where they had repeated the plan from another class and their sage mentor would say – it might have worked quite well with 9x, but 9y are a different class.

This is not about learning styles, which has been substantially criticised. This is about knowing the individuals in your classes. A good teacher is always thinking about ‘maximum learning’. Don’t mistake this for, ‘entertainment’, ‘engagement’ or any other glib insult. We are not ‘making our subject interesting’ – our subject is interesting. But we are fine tuning the lesson to the unique community of learners that have been assembled to experience the subject with us in the form of lessons.

If we are really honest this is one of the biggest issues with the accountability system. A school’s results and standards of teaching don’t go up and down so dramatically as measured from year to year as the data likes to report. What happens is that one cohort is very different to another in terms of collated outcomes. A senior manager prays that a specific cohort goes through the system out of sync with the ofsted inspection cycle of a school. God help any school if ofsted turns up shortly after their one dodgy cohort’s variable results. This is really an amplified version of what Becky Allen refers to as ‘noise’ – the variables that can affect outcomes and attempts to measure progress using what is actually non-comparable data. A school could be comparing one good cohort with one not so good cohort and be deemed terrible or amazing depending on which came first. I’m afraid Progress 8 has done nothing to prevent this from happening as others have already said. The off-rolling we have seen is a direct result of people trying to manage this ‘noise’ and its impact on accountability measures. Indeed, having read Becky Allen’s blogs on closing the gap you begin to think the issue with the RCTs of the EEF is that they need to make stronger their awareness of ‘noise’ and how schools cater for this when exploring ideas that emerge from the RCTs. Rather than use the RCTs as eternal proof that setting, technology or any other intervention ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’, one should see the output from these RCTs as a source of information and evidence that could be useful when looking at one’s own specific cohorts (and remember, every year group is different).

All too often, we end up looking for the silver bullet. We try to remove the very thing which makes us human from the school system – our variability. Once all variability is removed then we can finally say that our resource or pedagogy is proven to work with all. Yet the inherent variables and other influential attributes all mean we cannot prove that something ‘works’ for everyone and every school.  That’s why social science can never lose its subjectivity or its lack of ability to resolutely prove things in the way that medicine likes to do. It’s therefore why you can’t ‘prove’ anything in education. But you can get the next best thing: a teacher.

A teacher, through forming a deep relationship with a class, can use their knowledge, intuition and teaching to maximise the outcomes for the individuals in that class. Those outcomes will be many, varied and not always measured or be measurable. Those outcomes will be assessment outcomes, aspirations, values, passions, inspiration, personal growth and so forth. Some will be quantified and some will be qualitative. The teacher will subjectively work out which methods, from their vast list of methods and evidence, are best for this group of individuals. It’s an amazing feat of human engineering and it’s a time-honoured ability: to be a truly amazing teacher for a class. And it’s the closest thing we will get to proving something works in education. You want a silver bullet? There it is: the teacher.