Tony Cassidy

I’ve been teaching for the last ten years, and spent all of this time at one school. Part of me is ready for new challenges, not being particularly organised I’ve never kept a record of the different projects and developments I’ve been involved with; I’ve tried to summarise my main external activities over the last five years, it’s a stock take, rather then a form of self-promotion.

I think over this period my career has taken three phases

Establishing- at the start of my career I was establishing myself as a teacher, coping with demands that this entails.

Engaging- after the challenges of establishing myself within the classroom, I think I then began to engage with the wider subject community- in part to enhance my practice and as an opportunity to seek external challenges.

Refocusing- external engagement encouraged me to evaluate my practice within the classroom, now that the challenges of establishing myself had subsided, I began to focus on the quality and effectiveness of learning opportunities. During this time internal challenges developed, that I was able to engage with, this somewhat limited the time that I had to work with other external partners.

I now feel comfortable in the role of an ‘educator’, but over the last two years, for personal reasons, I feel I have lost the confidence to engage with challenges both internally and externally, it’s something I hope to rediscover over the next year…

I suppose one of things about being a teacher is that everyone has an opinion on education to share with you.

One of my brother’s family is now in Year 8 at secondary school, his partner asked me about my opinion on homework- sadly it’s one of those areas I still can’t get right in my mind. There were two interesting and opposing viewpoints.

• Setting homework, provides additional burden to students, time when they could be widening their interests or becoming involved in different groups.
• Some students find homework difficult to complete for a number of reasons, lack of home space, or ability, homework tasks may cause friction at home, particularly if a child needs an adult to help, or failure to hand in homework has become an issue.
• Lack of homework from a class can cause friction between teacher and student, as a sanction is given to the student, the student may become less motivated, in extreme cases purposely missing the lesson.
• Some homework tasks set can be completely inappropriate, unchallenging and dull, thus they devalue the knowledge or the lesson where it is being provided.

On the opposite side-

• Homework offers an opportunity for students to work independently, as such it can extend knowledge and promote interest.
• Appropriate open-ended tasks can encourage students to think and produce creatively.
• It helps students develop time management skills.

We don’t have a specific homework policy, but over my time teaching I have evolved the following personal philosophy-

• I don’t set homework for the sake of it, why create the additional burden and stress, for a pointless piece of work?
• I tend to set open ended and more creative tasks over a longer time period. The aim being that choice will help engage students.
• I take in and mark homework, but do not use sanctions when individuals do not complete it.

The third point is contentious, one which I’ve had a quite heated debate over in the last term- A key Stage 4 student being given a detention over non-submission of coursework, I find this sends a very confusing message, you will be made to complete work that benefits you, as a result you may do just as well, or better, than the individual who is intrinsically motivated and has completed the work on time. What do both students learn from this? Happily the issue of coursework submission has died with the creation of controlled assessment.

This is not to say that as a professional I don’t have a responsibility to inform the student’s parents and offer support, sometimes failure to complete can be an issue of motivation: but it can also be symptomatic of a lack of understanding, or an inherent issue with the task.

But I see no reason to force an individual to complete work, nor do I wish to damage a relationship with a student so much, that they opt with their feet, and ultimately are turned off from learning and school.

I’m of the mindset that individuals who show effort, should be praised and rewarded, part of that ‘reward’ is intrinsic, but extrinsically it is also celebrated with improved skill, knowledge and progress.

I suppose my four point is more challenging, but I have given up on

• Deadlines

But that’s for another time…

One of the traditional messages I took note of over Christmas Day was from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who I have a great deal of time for, he spoke about dependency and independence, there were several points that spoke to me as an educator.

‘Yet we have over the long millennia of human existence created a whole culture in which there is a basic impatience about learning – we want to get to the point where we can say, OK that’s enough, I know what I need to know – and about receiving’

As educators we are focused on successfully preparing students for their examinations, within a tight time allocation and under the pressure of performance management, we focus on the content and skills needed to successfully navigate the exam hurdle, but at what expense?

The ‘expense’ is that educators feel restrained from deviating from the content through fear of not covering what is necessary; this creates a stress that I believe is transmitted to students, approaches become less creative, as a result student motivation begins to wane, relationships become strained.

Often students begin to ask what the minimum requirement in terms of effort and knowledge are in order to be successful, utility rather than interest takes over.

A notion of life-long learning evaporates… as we provide students with a narrow set of skills needed to be successful in the short-term, we create a negative dependency.

‘And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools… we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing – which is ‘independence’, turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won’t need too much maintenance.’

Difficult to argue with this, students are under intense pressure to succeed, such turns students away from learning in some cases, a fixed mindset develops, where success is related to a grade or percentage, other successes and personal qualities are devalued.

Economic utility has become king, a liberal sense of exploring and engaging with knowledge for its intrinsic value has disappeared.

’Can we as a society accept and even celebrate the fact that there is a place for proper and mature dependence – that human beings need to receive and learn: not so that they can get to the point where they stop receiving and learning, but so that they can acquire the habits of receiving and learning in ever-new settings? Can we help children enjoy their dependency so that they don’t just leave it behind but get to manage it with freedom and imagination as they grow older?’

A call for a focus on life-long learning, we need to prepare students with the necessary skills to engage with learning throughout their lifetime, within a variety of contexts.

‘One is simply to reconnect ourselves to our own capacity to receive and learn with joy and excitement – to become like little children, as Somebody once said.   The other is to be ready to give the nurture and security that children need – to create the safe places where they can learn, where they can make their mistakes.’

Finally, as educators we need to promote our love of learning, but at the same time reassure that failure is part of learning…

2009 is nearing its end and the time comes to think about the New Year, I have a number of personal and professional resolutions swimming around in my head, but will choose, as always, to keep them private.

At the previous Geography Flash Meet, we discussed our geo-resolutions for the year, I summarised my own with the word SEE.

Share- I intend to continue to share my practice and resources with others. Over the last couple of months, I’ve found this difficult, both internally and externally, for a number of reasons. I’ve never set myself up as an example of good practice, but often worry that sharing can be a viewed by others as self-promoting, perhaps I’m overly thinking about this. Sharing is also incredibly difficult because your work is open to review by your peers: I like discourse and really enjoy when constructive criticism helps develop an idea or resource, but it seems increasingly of late, that some individuals are too quick to criticise without necessarily providing the constructive element. I also feel that often I don’t necessarily have anything to add to the discussion.

Engage- I intend to engage more within the professional communities I inhabit, both real-time and virtually. As an introverted character, virtual communities are a great way to engage with other professionals, though of late I’ve tended to distance myself from certain places, real-time engagement is much more difficult for myself personally, but I intend to have a go!

Experiment- I’m intending to experiment a little more over the coming year, something which I  think I have lost from my practice over the last year or so, now I feel comfortable in my classroom, I think it’s think to push my boundaries a little more.

I’ve made some changes to my web projects over the last couple of days. I wanted to slim things down, and the additional domains and hosting were costing. I have an issue with disposing of anything, but I felt I had too many rooms, and not the time to speak in any of them- basically I couldn’t justify them.

The first change is this blog, I’ve got rid of the old site and replaced it with a blog. After ten years of teaching I want to become more reflective with my practice, so will be using this space for my random thoughts about teaching and learning.

People speak about having an ‘audience’ for your blog, with the exception of student and resource sharing blogs, I always thought the audience was the writer, with comments from outside observers, contributing and developing the practitioner’s internal, but externally projected, dialogue.

So, gone but not forgotten are…

Pilot GCSE Radical Geography – this was my first blog, aimed at students following OCR Pilot Geography course, but the course expires this year and my final cohort are nearing the end. We have also changed to the CCEA examining group.

Radical Webcam Geography – a project I was involved in, but really didn’t do it justice.

Teaching and Learning Forum – again, just didn’t really work- though it was praised by OFSTED, I couldn’t engage with it, mostly because I think I was writing generally, rather than from a practice point of view.

Not wishing to lose some of the better posts, I’ve exported them to Share Geography, where they have been archived and can be searched.

Another domain discarded is we still love rocks , a bit of a joke really, after a conversation about Geographers not liking to teach geology…

I’ve have realised that I have, somewhat, an obsession with the longest domain names I can think of…

I’m also working on a Geography-free project, which ironically will need a short domain name-