Festival of Education Friday 2021 -Part 1 - 18th June 2021

 

Good evening,   A quick note to let you know that recordings of sessions from last week’s Friday Fest are now available to view. Please feel free to share these links with colleagues.   You can view and search recordings here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8587419   Schedule – you can view a list of the sessions held last Friday here.   Recordings of our Festival Keynotes are available here.   Best wishes,   Shane Mann, Festival Director

Why don’t we all play a small part in helping head teachers, so they have more capacity to think differently and start to help themselves

The problem is clear but is there a solution?

 

Great schools are full of great people but when are we going to appreciate them and allow them to take the lead?

On Friday I had the privilege and pleasure of attending London Skills 2018 Every employer delivered the same message.  We want the young people now, after GCSE's and A levels and are happy to train them to secure a degree.  I asked one young lady to put it into her own words, and she did an excellent pitch to the camera in one take below.

The sad thing is that the employers are disconnected from the politicians and politicians make it impossible for the teachers to have an even more significant impact on what they do.

The United Kingdon is at a crossroads in its history.  We have the opportunity to export our World Class Skills and knowledge to a broader audience, a global audience.  Many who work and teach here already do but we need to start doing things differently f we can sustain the demand of talent that the bluechip companies need and signpost our young people in school, college and University into the direction that is personal to them.

Schools are best placed to be the catalyst to achieve all of this. They have passionate, dedicated subject experts to pass on and share their knowledge and skills to the next generation and still an army of non-teaching staff to support it but in doing so, they should be exciting, inspiring and encouraging those that they teach to dream big and expect more.  Expect more from themselves, expect more from their teachers and hope for more from the school and the broader communities and companies that want them to join them.

Sadly teachers are blinkered to deliver a curriculum based around a scheme of work to get great results and the latest changes to the curriculum have destroyed the opportunities to be creative in its delivery as there's no time left to do anything more than teach content and techniques on how to pass exams. As a result, the opportunities to encourage kids to work on extended projects are lost.  The ability for kids to work collaboratively is often missed.   The time to stop and think about what they are doing is slotted into homework, tutor time or an after-school masterclass, that someone has created from the teaching team.  That's not how the world of commerce works, so we are doing every one of our school-age children a disservice, and no one is brave enough, bold enough to say stop we need to do it differently.  Why is that?

Is it because the politicians can't cope with change or are it that they don't understand it or why they need it? Evolution is a fact of life.  Yes, it stresses people out if they are not warned about it or training to be ready for it but everything changes all the time.  Surely we need to be embracing it and tooling up young people to harness it not keep the status quo.

This is my tenth year as a teacher and I have managed to avoid any opportunity for promotion as being in the classroom 23 hours a week is the best part of the job.  I've worked in national challenge schools, those that have great leadership but are struggling to fast track pupils with a low aspiration to achieve more than they started with.  I've worked in what Ofsted have rated Good schools, which in my opinion were not good enough but I have never worked in an outstanding school.  My challenge to this school has always been the same.  Be a benchmark for all schools to follow.

Being on a journey is one thing but being on a quest to greatness is very different.  Schools need to take responsibility for themselves and their learning as they communicate with their pupils.  They need to stop being hampered by budget cuts and attract their own private sources of finance to replace the priorities they have. Preferences such as IT, development of their top talent, provide the best extracurricular opportunities for their students who are after all their primary customer and sorting out the poorest in the community to inspire them and their parents and carers to engage attend and attain.  We are the fifth biggest economy in the world generating over £950bn a year in tax revenue so I do not believe that local and regional business would not bridge the budget gaps their local schools face but I know of one school who is about to embark and test it.

That said schools need to refocus on their purpose for being.  They are places that should create fulfilment in young people that attend them and prepare them for a successful and happy life.  Policy from government needs to focus on that so schools and their teaching teams not forgetting the army of support staff that can facilitate the most significant change and crack on with it.  I have never met anyone that has told me that fulfilled, contentment and a happy person is unlikely to be a successful person.  Last week the church and the press explained what a disaster we are creating with mental health across all age groups so let's stop the trend and focus on the age group that we have in front of us 25 hours a week in school to start to change the tide and let others focus on the rest.

By creating a  different environment and signposting learners down a pathway, that is personalised to them will fast-track this process.  We can't keep accepting that kids will sort themselves out.  It takes too long, and those that are in the wrong class just fight and protest as a result of it.

As a country, we are great at developing academics.  The politicians love them as they come up with all the research and suggestions that underpin their policies but as high as they are at academic thinking and research-based decision making they are rubbish at joined-up thinking and lack common sense, so nothing ever changes that is impactful! The academics will always have a pathway in our society.  Thye follow the traditional GCSE and A level route into University and beyond.

The vocational learners, those that learn by doing and link their work to developing their skills through work-related activities have also done well.  Although we don't identify those earlier enough or provide as wow a package to excite and inspire them.  They often have to settle for a BTEC at level 2 or level 3 in isolation of a fuller package.  How hard is it really to add three additional dimensions?  Work experience within the field of expertise they are studying and make this as productive and effective as they do in Germany.  The third extra dimension to this cohorts learning has to be a business mentor for the whole class they find themselves in.  These people can deliver a real flash challenge for them to work on collaboratively in teams and throughout the year and pop back termly to view their progress and give feedback on it.  The final piece of the pie should be a TED talk to every student in the local area studying the same thing once or twice a year.  A chance to meet up and share all the great stuff that they have been working on.   All of a sudden you have more than just a vocational provision you have a world-class professional arrangement by subject area and students that are world class ready for the global world of work.

Now lets quickly consider those students who are bouncing around every classroom and hate being in school and try every day to escape or avoid it as they find it hard, dull and boring.  Now let's consider that they just might be the entrepreneurs.  They are potentially wealth creators.  The job creators.  The ones that think differently but that no one understands.  This rare breed probably amounts to no more than 12-24 in a year group so no more than just a class!  How hard then can it be to provide a provision just for them based on a tailor-made version of the vocational package above. During a recent business challenge week, we used the Global Enterprise Week initiative to reach out to someone in the community who believes the same.  He kindly allowed me to record that too to share, so I've shared it below here.

I am delighted to work in the school that I do, but my challenge to them is to be brave and bold and create an environment that is even bigger and better at all of the above.  Don't get me wrong its the best school that I've ever worked in and probably as good as most private schools but we have much to do, and they haven't asked me to leave yet!

The universe I believe provides us with all the solutions to all the problems we face.  We just have to find them.  To think harder. To try harder and work collaboratively to share what we have with others so that they can add to it and make it better.  That's what businesses do.  That's what schools need to do.
As for the government and the academics, they need to catch up and get on board. After all, we are entirely capable of little joined-up thinking if we try and I believe that all that's required with most things.

As Ruskin once said, "Quality is never an accident.  It is usually a result of some intelligent effort"  Intelligence and character are what we need to develop in our young people.  Everything else will follow if our central focus is on those first, foremost and in everything we do!

IT's OKAY, YOU GOT THIS

CDP Sessions 2018 - Feedback

Session 1


Session 2


Session 3  Recent research

Why Going Google is good for everyones health and the schools wealth!

As I said to my Year 13 L3 this week, If you look great, feel great, think great then you'll probably be great.  Google for education allows you to access all four and very quickly.  Confidence in all of us be us a waiter, a carpenter, a surgeon or teacher is underpinned fundamentally by skills and knowledge.  Teachers have generally mastered the skills of pedagogy and are experts in their subject knowledge.  But are they missing a trick by not tapping into the technology?

I still remember Tony, one of my first mentors during my NQT year saying “know your subject matter, know your students and communicate that knowledge confidently and the rest of the education industry babble can be safely ignored” when he reminded me of it again last week when I text him to ask if he was fit and well.  So Ill ask you how much effective learning  can you really cram into one lesson and are you the weakest link in the classroom?  When I started teaching I came to the conclusion that I thought that some of the learners were but I quickly realised that it was me as they were a lot quicker and more mentally resilient as they were often waiting for me to catch up. How very kind they are to use to let us bore them and bumble on 25 times a week!

That coupled unfortunately with the simple fact that not every learner is ready to learn when they find themselves in front of you and like most teachers  I’ve had many classes with disengaged, unexcitable, lazy,customers with low self esteem and on a few occasions all in the class would fit that character reference at the start of the academic year or mid term if they were a new class given to me.. That said I have also had classes full of the opposite too.  The challenge is to excite and inspire them all but it gets tough when you have to do it always for everyone.  So enter the wonderful world of Google, Google Apps and Google Classroom the latter I still need to teach myself and get my head around but it’s only week four after all next week and the academic year is young and I was to some extent an early adopter in principal with one foot in the Google sea of education and the technology it has made available to everyone in schools free today and these last eight years.

Eight years ago when I started teaching,  it was in a school that spoke 57 languages so I was looking for my own USP to hook in some of those young learners that i described above.  Fortunately my NQT mentor GC was like a Harry Potter wizard and we somehow spent half of every conversation reflecting on how to change our pedagogy and save time as well as our physical health and mental state of mind.  It was a tough school in National Challenge bur we had some technology if a little old and out dated in three classrooms to play with. He build a wiki webpage and has now moved across to Google sites and I started a blog using Google blogger.

At the time I was also amazed how little teachers shared or wanted to share resources both in the school and outside of it.  Surely an outwardly looking approach was beneficial to all to see so as I still do today if and when I am  lucky enough to come by one for free but then it was often either on a paper format but the odd one was electronic but you still had to find a way to keep them both safe and make them better each year to use again so I decided to try and go paper free.   It didnt work in this first school because the learners were not allowed their phones in lessons and not every classroom was  a PC or wifi enabled suite.  It didnt work in the next either because the network blocked external methods of storage such as Google Docs plus my line management didn't see the benefit of the blog and to some extent it was found upon so you can imagine my excitement after interview on the pre-start induction day when I found that the school that I had now landed in had a G- Suite!  Since then Ive always come to the conclusion that if people and organisations don't see the benefit of something or someone they don't deserve to keep it or them, but people only know what they know so I often make allowances for that before I eventually move on.

So being a little rusty and out of practice and not realising what a G-Suite actually was I found a training provider and a marketing company to see if I could get a free 40 minute online lesson in the summer holidays which I did so booked into a Google Hangout call and having secured a free trial on a Google Chromebook to Christmas I started to re-teach myself some of what I had already learnt eight years ago.  Although my intention was to be component after the summer holiday in reality there was lots more equally fun DIY stuff, pond building and allotment chores to do so in reality I actually started to force myself to do so in real time this term and live in front of the kids so that initial lesson I had booked way back in the summer had become a distant memory.  What it had made me realise as my wife was going Google at work was how easy Google had made learning this stuff and what I had been doing eight years ago was principally the same today.  I just needed to find the time to connect it all up through the free Google Classroom as I felt that I was still missing a few sneaky tricks.

And then this week the report by the PISA boss for education landed and the headline quickly published by TES read that Teaching in England is not ‘Interesting’ enough so its available to read here  if you missed it.   Well I thought Google for Education can easily sort  and change all of that.  A separate exclusive article in the same weekly edition was all about teachers spending hundreds of pounds a year on classroom resources was also no surprise to me but you can also read that here too.  I have too but very rarely and only when I need to create or save a dozen hours of time with something that has been dumped on me to do because Google saves you all that expense and worry too.

In fact as that’s a significant part of the title of this weeks edit why don't we address that now too. Most schools PAY for a learning platform and they are often very clonkey.  My first experience was with Fronter as it rewarded learners with an opportunity to play games which I felt was a little odd.  The next was Frog and I am sure now like then these cost schools many thousands to buy the license, and maintain the contract but why they pay for all this when a G-Suite is free.  I am not promoting Google as people already have issues with its scale and size but to be fair its good at promoting and developing its own brand but I am always impressed with individuals and corporations that choose to give more than a little back.  Google for Education is free for Education but that's not its biggest USP.  What I like about it is that it increases productivity.  Whereas a business would pay on average between £3 - £5 per employee per month Goolge have created their very clever offer to schools who can develop World Ready learners and workers for free I guess in the hope that they stick with it whole of life.

This last fortnight I have dedicated a part of each and every lesson to teach some skills and convert across the most part of 13 classes as well as teach them the content of the syllabus or course.  Year 7 Computing  are working working on two extended projects.  One article for a local rag to secure their learning and one a homework project on writing a business plan.  Year 8’s are already blogging. Year 10 BTEC are still taking notes in their books as they have a finance exam just after Christmas and I didn't want them not to do well in that but class activities are now all driven through Google Docs.  Year 10 GCSE see all their lessons on a blog page before and after the lesson if they please.  This menu has three starters, three mains and a pudding plus homework but the slides for all are in Google Slides and I can now run the entire lesson from the blog page and they can look at it all or any particular bit again and afgain for free.  However so can I after each and every lesson and tweek the running order content and anything I want to capture before I lock it away safe for next year.  Year 11 BTEC are starting a customer service unit and have already had a virtual tour to a local hotel Gravetye Manor.  Year 12 L2 are a slightly different priority as they are all there for the same reason for not having a very good Year 11 but they have taken to Going Google like a frog to a new pond’ and use it in conjunction with shared resources and my blog.  It encourages them to work quicker and smarter and underpins their confidence, office skills and become independent learners and create a better quality of work.  It has also very quickly put them under pressure to adjust their attitude to learning but more importantly allows them to hit deadlines very effectively as what they need to do is always on one page.  Year 11 GCSE are in their final year and I get the impression that the previous year  wasn't too exciting so every double that I see them I write them a menu for them to feed their learning too with even more starters, ten mains and two puddings which they generally get through most if not all of that.  Their lesson take no more than half an hour to plan as its a course I havent delivered before. The only thing not on the blog page is generally the theory slides on the student shared drive.  My instruction to them wasnt to pick a dish from all three courses but to decisde what order they would eat it all.  What fascinated me oboit their lesson wasnt the fact that they did devour it all but the fact that most of the learning was by doing engaged the disengaged boys.  We all know that the girls are great at writing but not as competitive in the classroom as the boys but by exciting them all to get involved was easy and that still left room for them to be tested, reflect on the previous weeks learning and secure the knowledge on this weeks but the speed at which some were thinking and the excitement on their face allowed me to watch and learn from them as much if not more as they were learning that lesson from me and that had nothing to with the content or skills that the lesson demanded but a shift in the planning of it.  I remembered saying to them as we came to the end of the lesson “did I really physically teach you anything today or did I focus on facilitating an experience for you to learn in” It was clear on what they had all learn and you can see it here. But it also felt like that was the start of their understadning when they walked out of the lesson and not the end of it!   Year 13 L3 are working on the Purpose of Accountancy so its easy to feed that as I put the theory on their shared drive and bring it to life through Google Docs.  Last thurday in less than 20 minutes I wrote an interim 50m topic test and posted it to their blog page for them to download into their own google docs.  They completed it in the hour and shared the link for me to view (and edit by changing their permissions before pressing send) so it was there for me to see how well they had done and mark it without printing it off.  Although I will mark it by next lesson they will have done the same before then as whilst they were sitting the exam in front of me I was writing the answers in a copy on an Google Docs App on my smartphone and when I had their submission I posted that revised Google doc answer sheet to the same Blog page so that they could see how well they had done and mark their own whci they did and now have it to keep.  My feedback to them wasnt written but they were ready for it and heard it very clear when they had all recieved it and when I asked for their feedack to me I was rather shocked to hear that they thought it was the best  but they had received in 7 years and you can hear their podcast here.

     

So by now you would be correct in thinking that Google Docs is their version of Microsoft Word. Google Sheets is virtually identical to Excel and Google Slides well you can guess that.  You might not however have realised that everything automatically backs up and saves on a cloud and you need no memory on a hard drive or a corruptible or losable data stick as its easy to stored it all in folders if you choose to do all the above it sits in Google Drive.  So whenever you need to plan a lesson all the resources are in one place or if you need to share a document, spread sheet or file you just open up your chrome book connect to a wifi or hotspot on your phone click the big blue share button in the top right hand corner and change the settings from ‘Private to only me’ to ‘View’ or ‘Edit’ before getting the shareable link to send.  I think I only scrambled the minds for one minute of the BTEC Year 10’s when I posted a document to their blog page of a class activity and changed settings to ‘edit by all’ and they were amazed that they were all working on the same document all together although some thought it fun to deleate bits and in the end it was all gone but they were quick to realise the merit of working collaboratively on a business plan on the next unit of study after Christmas as their edits were all in a different coloured online pen but it was easy after the lesson to reset the the settings of the document and attach a new link to the blog page so that they all had the original document again and because they had had som much fun in the lesson they were happy to work on it at home and one memeber of the class took great deloght in explaining how by going into file and clicking version history could reset it all to that.

So Going Google I would say is the chalice of all learning because its fun builds skills and engages the learner so they are happy to both learn and work harder in front of you and even more at home, Infact one lad in that BTEC class on Friday had done all the classwork, his homework four days early and thought that he had nothing to do but Id found five minures in the lesson to edit an extension task from last year and personlised it to the content of his course.  Quickjly wrote another headline on the blog page saying Next step and posted the link and when he thought that he had finished I showed him it to make him think. We both know that he will have done it by next lesson because it was a challnege that he had seen and if he ends up with a DIstinction for BTEC Business thats because he stretched himself both in and outside and not just for me.

So dont be daunted or beat yourself up about creating an outstnafing lesson, reliably competent has always sufficed for me but let Google take the strain and help create that positive relationships quickly and you concentrate on the praise and talent spotting for all to see.  The time you save before, during the lesson will make it easier to enthuse not just your passion for the subject but for you to plan the next step and the next and impart more strentch and challenge from your expert subject knowledge.  You will find how quicjkly students are engaged in their learning and how wonderful it is to see them think.  Not just about your topic but the tools they are using today.  Because if you free their mind from the dull routine and let the software take the strain, chaos and carnage and streamkines all the litle things that can absorb too much mental capacity it frees up the mind to work and focus on the bigger picture or the important things.  Well we are no different to them.  If your free like them to amaze, inspire and motivte, enthuse and excite and really teach them how to learn they will do far more than get a distinction or A* they will establish a hunger that they can now feed themselves or light a psssion that will never go out.  They wont just change their world but the world in which one day will be theres to look after, care for protect and evolve in.

I had time in my last lesson last friday, like i do in most these days, to look at the blog page and reflect so I quickly re-ordered the layout of the skills they needed for a PASS, MERIT and DISTINCTION so they all knew in seconds what tey had to do to get theirpartuular target grade that they were challenged with.  It was very easier to make evident to the whole class their shared learning intentions and show how they were differentiated on outcome of the skills that they were learning that day and the brightest and the best clocked in seconds what that menat to them.

Its also easy to adapt lesson plans or should I say the lesson on the blog page.  If a class just doesnt get it you just edit another task or challenge in.  Last week I taught the same topic to two year 10s and a year 12 classes so the investment for one went to all three but the year 12 L2 group struggeled so we rewound and added an additional step to their learning which unhooked them from their struggle but that series of lesson on one blog page is now better for wekaer learners and more importanlty waiting for me to deliver next year but I very quickly responded to the needs of Year 12 L2 so they could progress as quickly as Year 10 abd Year 10 ultimately benefoted from securing their knowledge using what Id done for them,

I am not sure if students need to be in planned groupings as it quickly becomes apprant whos working with what and the kids if you let them are happy to help and callobiarate and share their ideas and their learning and will antutrally default to that.

So if you have a problem getting your students to create quality work, develop a positive attitude to learning and work independnently and want them to persevere inside and as they walk out of your lesson give them a variety of tasks to do and let tehm choose the order that they would like to do them. I would say Google Docs is for you.

My teaching today is still focussed on what I learnt at the start of my teaching career.  The best lessons are planned around the questions that you use skillfully to target not just subject knolwedge but practical skills and meta cognition to identify and challenge any misconceptions which is now easier for me now I am free from the mundane reputition of telling 20 + kids the same thing. The outcome of this new practice is easy to measure does their progress exceed their target grade.  Well every class I have met so far has not just a target but a flightpath and an aspirational grade.  My bet is that most if not all will meet their new challenge because they love the platform that they are now working on and the tools that I have shared but if they only achieve their target grade well guess what they are still World Class Ready with tools for work that I have now shared..  Its easy to put the icing on the cake by incuding elelments of new softawe and social media tools to surprise.  That may or may not be on my blog page infact on most occassions I spot it in a coner of the room but its still as impactful if you make a big fuss of it or just quietly whisper in someones ear and share it at leastwith them or all.  All I will promise you is this.  If your still looking for the teaching and learning chalice or a way to inspire the learners in your class to continue learning beyond the classroom you owe it to yourself to give it a go because Going Google is easy, they made it so for a reason,its also free for schools to use.  The apps that you can access are too and I could spend ages talking about some of them but like the rewst of this edit all I will do is share the top ones that I have used this last three weeks and a few that I am excited to use.  I know that I went Google eight years ago and left it too long on a shelf but I always had one foot in the Google water and ive now started to dip the other toes in.  I know that I am still in the shallow end but Im not scared of going a little deeper.  Ive set myself targets for half term, christmas and Easter but by next summer I think Ill be swimming.  The benefit for a shift in your thinking and give it a go as well, is the time, energy and stress that yousave every hour that you can use doing more fun stuff instread but I will never take for granted that I am in a school that had technicians with the forsight not just to build systems and procedures into their intrenet to automate lots of daly tasks but more importantly a network with two platforms, Microsoft for the applications schools that a school needs to run and capture data on but have cleverly hidden a Google Chrome login for people like me and those that I teach to have more a greater learning experience and dare I say much more fun with in lessons so thatnk you chaps and chapesses for that.

I am not a super hero but if I had a super power that I could actually share with you I would say going Google makes ytou productive and gives that extra hour of PPA time each day.

I hope that you are tempted to dip your toe in the water yourself to discover what you can find and save but be warned like most things that are easy to do it becomes addictive too especially once you see for yourself what you can do and I also hope that one day you will be enjoying it as much as me and those that I teach.  

I've come a long way since my first school in Special Measures but this weeks blog I have to say is Inspired by the IT chap and the G-Suit that I discovered last July on my pre-start induction day at this truly special place.

Can every lesson really be an OUTSTANDING lesson and can it really be as easy as learning your A B C? (Week 2)

Anita Roddick once said  "I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of a community. I want something not just to invest in,  I want something to believe in."  I guess she never found one during her short working career but it wasn't too short that she couldn't create one in the Bodyshop before she died.  I started a Yr 13 lesson this week with one principle that I also pinched from someone else. Seven habits of a successful person by Stephen R Covey "Start with the end in mind"

If every lesson is going to be an outstanding lesson then that's is a doubting task for any teacher that is employed to work 195 days or 39 weeks a year. For a new teacher with a 100% timetable and no responsibilities that's 858 lessons a year.  Compound that with the fact that over the last 2 years most GCSE, BTEC L3 and GCE courses have changed and are still being embedded. So that is a lot that has changed even if it has all changed for the better.  So how can it really be done?  If you're already thinking this is rubbish and impossible bear with me and let me start by telling you what’s in it for you.  Planning for the delivery of an outstanding lesson doesn't require you to work harder.  In fact, I would say the opposite is true but you will need to work smarter to earn the gain time you deserve.   

I now work in an environment like the one Anita Roddick described.  It’s already instilled a culture of no meetings which I remembered they shared on interview day but was a first for me to actually see! Teams of people meet not just to meet with someone else's agenda but to develop their own department's routines, organisation, systems and understanding from their self-audit of outcomes from last summer's result.  So after five lessons on Monday, our faculty gathered for ninety minutes to do just that.  The need for this shift was clear to me as after two weeks into my induction training and discoveries it looks like it's the option subjects that are bringing the batting average down in the overall headline results.  

One of the slides that were shared was about creating outstandingness in every lesson so that focused my mind for this week.  I also had an opportunity to talk to a wonderful lady from COPE who was waiting outside an English classroom to support a learner in her next class.  As I was waiting to go into the room next door to support mine I asked her the following question. How does the English department get the best results in the school?  This year they achieved 82% A* - C. She thought about it before saying "well I'm not actually a teacher" to which I replied "but you probably get to see a lot of English lessons so what are they doing so very very well here?"  She paused for what seemed like a very long while before replying "They start by getting them to BELIEVE, then they give them the tools to do well and the rest is up to them"  The rest of the MAGIC and SPARKLE is up to them or what they bring to the table by doing something with it.

Doesn't it seem so very very simple?  Well, why shouldn't it be?  Most of the best business ideas are similar and when you hear about them,  new products or services that have been launched into the market who doesn't say " I wish or I could have done that"  Well yes you could or should have but you didn't as someone else saw the simplicity of the solution or idea before you did.  So maybe that's the answer to the question.  We need to shift the way we think about what we do to achieve the end that we have in mind.  We need to spend a few seconds first to think about the OUTCOME we want to achieve, as professionals, the LEARNING we want to facilitate in every lesson and the IMPACT we want to be able to measure overall.  The young people that we teach deserve the very best value for money that we can provide them, in every lesson we deliver, so that they can do better than just cope. The pace of change in the world they are to live, survive, achieve and aspire in is also the reason why every lesson needs to be an outstanding one.  Shift happens and if it continues to do so at the same pace or at a quicker pace than before then surely we are part of their solution and should not be adding to their potential problems.

I spent the rest of the week being BOLD and BRAVE and giving achievement rewards to others that were doing the same.  Thirteen classes is the most that I have ever had on my timetable and I discovered indirectly, through team teaching, this week that not one person in one of those classes had chosen to study the subject that I was teaching them so I decided to start with;

A.  BELIEF.  In every lesson this week my starter for ten was a short story, a mini motivational speech or something to do with the importance of values and more importantly belief.  Surely everyone should believe in something even if it’s just in themselves.  In one class, in fact, the class full of conscripts I set them some homework in the first lesson of the day knowing that I saw them later that same day to see if anyone took the challenge to achieve it.  Two did but one wasn't brave enough to admit it until the end of the lesson.  The lovely learner that chose to share her work provided the exemplar for the starter and the lesson.   We all gathered around to see what she had done.  It was an impressive achievement.  Not because she had gone off to find out about break-even charts, independently but what impressed me the most was that she had taken up the challenge to do it between period 1 and 3.  So we continued to lavish her with praise and awarded a praise email to make it permanent!  After over half of the lesson looking at our sole achievement, I started throwing some BIG questions into the audience.  One chap who had been a selected mute for most of his time at school and preferred to work totally in semi-isolation, to the surprise of his peers, shouted out the top answer.  It was more than appropriate to ignore the no hands up policy as in his excitement he did the same again for all to see.  By the end of the third quarter of the lesson, I felt that everyone in the class had slowly started to believe.  Whatever had stopped them getting five A* - C last year was soon to be behind them as they were now looking forward to a target of 100% success in a subject they had not even chosen.  How did I know because I asked them all the simple question "Do you now after our third lesson together, now believe that you can?"  Well, who said if you think you can you can and if you think you can’t you can’t?    

B. For us to sustain the belief we need to scaffold into the foundations the tools to underpin everything that we do. When I trained early on in my previous career as a trainer in hospitality we were taught the foundation on a Train the Trainer course.   Each training session was to start with the WIN or the What, Interest and Need.  If you start training or teaching a group with this you tend to have their undivided attention very quickly.  Say I was to carry out a virtual training session now and in front of you on how to make a Berni Inn style floaty coffee (well where did you start your career?).  I would start with the finished product for all of you to see but sadly online, not easy to taste!  Then I would tell you something interesting about it.  How many the company sold last year, how possible it could be to make one quicker than me.  The story would always be truthful and I would never make anything up as people always hold on to and believe the stories.  They are in my opinion a very powerful way to anchor the knowledge and belief and help young people remember stuff by painting the picture for them in words to save in their heads safely for later.  The next step before I started training you would always be to tell you why you needed to know whatever it was to be trained, by giving you a work-related reason as well as a what’s in it for me.  

The training model continues by providing an identified step by step guide to the process that I was about to take you through and first before, you have to do it on your own.  The secret here is that at each step you identify the standards and in my virtual lesson to you, step one would look like this.  Take a heatproof Darlington coffee glass, It has to be clean and dry and heatproof before adding the piping hot coffee and in the next step any flavoured alcohol before topping it off with slightly aerated double cream in the final stage.

Once you have identified all the steps and standards at each stage you have not only started by seeing a finished product but have an appreciation of the process as well as an exemplar for all to see.  It is now OVER TO YOU to see what you can do!  Now for the magic and sparkle as the opportunity for you has arrived to impress before you do it ON THE JOB for real.  It's also the opportunity for the teacher to quickly identify where the real learning would take place or better still that lightbulb moment that the learner identifies for themselves the step or the standards that they had still got wrong, for them to rework and corrected it by doing it all over again.  Similarly in hospitality after two to three attempts they would get it right and this task could now be signed off in their training manual.  Surely the classroom should be no different as everyone needs these same tools to carry out the steps and maintain the standards in the learning tasks that we all teach.  

In all my thirteen classes this week I spent a significant amount and some might say a disproportionate amount of time explicitly teaching the tools alongside the techniques and firing them all to believe.  Teaching like many job roles is underpinned on 95% relationship and building that quick when you're a newbie is key.  Don't worry about the time it takes you’ll see the payback once your class of  young people, have both the belief from the time you have invested and they will spend a disproportionate amount of time rewarding you back by practicing and using what they now know and do so with sheer delight both outside and inside your classroom in that favourite subject of theirs that you teach on whatever exciting task you have given them.  My GCSE Year 11 business class admitted to spending 2-3 hours collaboratively in two teams in their first week's homework as they wanted to impress.   They were lucky enough to present it in front of their head-teacher who just happened to drop in.  Outstanding lessons don’t stop as bright minds leave your classroom.  That's the starting point of what could possibly be a few more hours digging deeper from within but without this belief and the tools that we teach it might stop when the lesson finishes because they are not excited or inspired to do more or impress. After all who comes to work to fail, similarly, no one comes to school to do badly, not a teacher or a young person we are all fundamentally programmed to be the best we can be if we are excited enough and are lucky enough to have been shown how to be.  My year 13 BTEC L3 class learnt different tools between Thursday and Friday this week.  They learnt not just about the purpose of accountancy for their course exam in a few weeks but how to make their learning available to themselves 24/7 so they could make it better if and when they had time.  Two chaps after their lesson on Thursday in a class in that wonderful English department stayed behind for most of their break time and asked how they could do even better this year as they clearly believed that they wanted to but didn't know how.  My answer was simple.  Use all the resources that the school has provided on the shared drive and the extra resources that I had posted for them to their blog page to illustrate this theory and bring it to life.  I then asked them what physical tools they were using to capture it all on so quickly shared with them the benefits of Google Docs should they want to convert across to them.  By our next lesson on Friday, all bar one had made a shift to the physical tools they were using.  Having both the tools and the skills from every lesson will be the biggest investment you can make in time for every student and as such should be a top priority in any part of the planning.  In some schools that I have taught it was like putting in saddle stones to underpin the massive amount of what was missing and this often took what felt like 95% of all the two years of teaching time so from experience I know that once the tools are in place and the skills are secure that time can be caught up and that wonderful person is put into poll position to learn and do what is needed to catch up.

C. The final part of this week's edit will be to reflect on what I believe is the role of every teacher in every class throughout the world today.  It really is the finest of professions and even more enjoyable when you find yourself in a fine community with people with similar values and beliefs building a culture for all to eat, smell and breath. Our job is surely to build confidence and capacity to do more from the knowledge and skills we have taught but deliver it in a way that facilitates an experience rather than get bogged down in the detail of what's on the scheme of work or specification even though that needs to be covered as all that can be assessed but whether you expressly teach it or the young minds learn it is down to the performance that you create.  I didn't teach my Year 12 L2 Business anything about the steps in creating a break-even chart this week.  Some had done their homework from the previous lesson and had got themselves ahead of the curve, using the flipped lesson technique. Others arrived on the back foot as they had never been given such a challenge within such a short time frame before but by the end of the lesson they all knew what it was all about.  All I did was share with them my top tips to success from the best resource that I had ever seen so pinched them and used it as my exemplar to see what was missing in their notes.  Anything that was, they added in and I can test them on it next week with a pencil, graph paper, ruler and rubber, to see how good their learning has been.  It's not easy to do that in a physical workbook but it is in Google docs!

So yes I think planning for an outstanding lesson in every lesson is as easy as ABC but it takes a shift in your thinking and you need to be prepared to go off-piste but if next week you choose to be brave and bold and try to do some of it in one lesson all I can say is if you don't succeed try again because once you've shifted the change in your planning, preparation and pedagogy you might just find it addictive and do it again and again and again and before you know it every lesson will be or be aspiring to be an outstanding one to be proud of, because we really never know who is in our classroom every lesson, a future entrepreneur inventing a product or service to make your life less stressful, a professional doctor or dentist helping us when we are ill or an MP hopefully taking what we have taught them looking to hopefully make our country great again.  That said the one thing that we do all know is this, that we have been placed in front of all of them because putting it simply someone believed in me!    

This week’s edit by the 'The Undercover Teacher’ was Inspired by the brilliant minds of the 13 classes of learners that I taught this week who are all now setting their sights beyond outstanding and not forgetting the lovely lady from our in-house CoPE support intervention and the brief chat with our very fine Head of English who shared a few minutes as we exchanged classroom last week.

If you want something doing give it to a busy person...

Here are a few ideas if your schools not doing enough or even a few more if it is









Future First Great to create an Alumni and bring back guest speakers For Future Friday P5 sessions for Year 10-13 or create careers opportunities, work experience and free courses




Speakers 4 schools for that big faculty week in the school calendar!


Speakers Corner similar to above




Sphere Science the website puts it clearly enough.  Exciting science activities - any age - anywhere




Young Enterprise Company Programme - Tried and tested with Year 12 and hoping to do the same with year 10 this year unless we go with Tycoon in School as well or instead with the lower year group.




Young Enterprise Tenner Award tried and tested with year Yr 7 in April / May as they loved it.


Tycoon in Schools Great programme that runs along side the BTEC L2 Unit 2 Finance but is also great for your Year 10 GCSE Business students to get involved in learning by doing too.