Curios of the week #30

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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So, after a visit to the beach came my school’s Senior Staff conference and then three professional learning days. For these, we have examined talk in the classroom — prosody, choral responses, turn and talk and so on — and a research project conducted by a group of teachers. This project involved observing lessons and noting, without judgement, common themes and common differences. It has been fascinating. We have also had a focus on what many schools may call ‘pastoral care’ but we call ‘student development,’ and the other deputy principal and I have been meeting with a group of new staff who have joined at the start of term, many from overseas.

On that note, we don’t have any specific jobs advertised at the moment but we always welcome expressions of interest from anyone who might think Clarendon is for them. Click here if that is you. It might help your decision making to note that we don’t do ‘book looks,’ which I recently discovered is still a popular, evidence free but labour intensive strategy in the UK.

This week’s Curios include thinktankery, a cancellation, a right to reply on ‘woke’ education courses, a canvassing of the views of teachers Reddit and much more.

Reddit insights of the week

Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette and columnist for The Australian, has read my submission to the Australian Senate’s inquiry into, “The issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms.” Being younger and hipper than me, Lehmann is able to work the levers of Reddit, a social media site that I find baffling, and has found quotes from teachers that corroborate some of my arguments.

Writing in The Australian, Lehmann discusses the ideology that refuses to even name the behaviour issue:

“‘Apparently we are not supposed to use the term “behaviour” anymore,’ wrote one teacher just this week. ‘Apparently behavioural issues are “wellbeing” issues. And behaviour is a stigmatising term for young people.’”

The standard response of Australia’s educational establishment has been to avoid the behaviour issue by making it a taboo topic, a stance that contributes to our students reporting shocking levels of classroom disruption in international surveys. None of this helps in the context of a worsening teacher shortage.

Fortunately, we are starting to see a movement to bypass these intransigent gatekeepers and start addressing the problem. As ever in education, the most promising solutions will bottom-up, but they can be bolstered by government initiatives such as regular behaviour surveys.

Sequel of the week

Last week, I explored part 1 of Old Andrew's series on 'Oracy.' In this installment, he delved into the evidence, or rather the lack of it, supporting this concept. The evidence was apparently summarised by the United Kingdom's Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). This week, Old Andrew has published part 2. This time, he demonstrates convincingly that the main study the EEF draws upon to claim a positive effect from such interventions is deeply flawed.

This all reminds me of the rabbit hole I went down a few years back when I tried to examine the evidence for the EEF’s inflated claims about the value of teaching ‘metacognition and self-regulation.’