A little history. Bear with me; it is relevant.
By training and teaching area, I was a secondary geography teacher. In secondary schools, the curriculum requires teachers to become subject specialists and geography was my bag. I suppose, as a teacher in a “humanities” subject (never been sure of that term; it means many different things to many different people), I was luckier than most, as I was often required to teach RE and history to KS3 pupils; always KS3 and almost always Y 7 with maybe Y8; I think senior leaders felt teachers could do less damage there, out of their specialism.
Primary school teachers have to become more proficient at teaching a range of subjects and skills, but can become restricted in their experience by the age of the pupils that they teach. I’m still coming across teachers who have taught for years in one age group. One teacher, in one primary recently had taught all 25 years of her teaching career in Y4. She was an excellent teacher of Y4. Results first class; pupils made excellent progress; much loved by parents, but she said she’d never really had the opportunity t teach elsewhere in the school and felt that her narrow expertise in Y4 hadn’t equipped her to teach elsewhere. She also loved that age group, but her conversation showed she also had fears about teaching other ages.
Why someone felt I could perform the role of a Foundation Subjects consultant. I have still little idea. When I began the role, I felt that 22 years in the classroom had given me little to prepare me for that role of providing support and advice across 10 subjects. How could I help a subject specialist in Art, or D+T to teach better? I’d only been in those classrooms on cover. I’ve never magpies and learned so quickly in my working life as in the first 2 years in that role. But maybe the role was helped by a curiosity about other subjects and an, as yet unvoiced, feeling that I was more than a teacher of geography. Believe me, the prospect of stepping in to observe a PE lesson and then talk sense to the teacher afterwards was scary. However, being forced to do this and being lucky enough to meet so many remarkable other FS consultants in the National Strategies completely opened my eyes to pedagogy in secondary schools.
Inspection allowed me access to primary schools and I’m now hugely fortunate to have observed and talked with professionals in thousands of primary lessons in well over 100 primary schools. I’ve never run one; I’ve never taught in one, yet primary schools are a bigger source of income to my company income than are secondaries; there are more primaries! Why would primary school HTs spend precious money on a secondary geographer to help them to improve their school?
Experience is key, but younger teachers, crazily, may well have more experience than older ones.
An odd thing, is “experience”. It’s often equated to time, but it’s more a case of how you’ve used, or been forced to use, that time. How much you’ve seen, assimilated and are willing to sift and apply. 22 years classroom teaching actually left me lacking in experience. Bonkers, really. I’d been on courses, I’d put up with myriad INSET days (and I decided that the content of most were useless for me, pretty quickly), but I loved talking to others on those days and learning about their experiences of teaching. On rare occasions I met a prize beast……..a primary teacher!! Much of my time was actually spent in geography classrooms and was very subject focussed. The comment “isn’t it great to have the time to talk” on INSET and at the odd conference was so often expressed, but in school, I talked with my department more than with others in other departments.
Teachers new to the profession (most young – not all, granted), however, just have a different mindset; a wonderful magpie mentality, that I and many my contemporaries didn’t have. Not all had, but I (we – it was a lot of us) can’t have moved in their circles. Maybe we were lazier. Maybe it really was me and other, far better, magpies, who avoided me, ended up more quickly in senior leadership. The speed of assimilation of new ideas and their application by younger teachers is often astonishing to me. Newer teachers aren’t subject, or age limited, to the same degree as many older teachers still are. They are far more willing to experiment and change and – absolutely crucially – if teaching to them is not interesting and fun and if it doesn’t make them happy in their work and lives – they have the guts to admit it and move on after only a few years. Anathema to a teacher joint the profession in the 1980’s, as I did. It brings experience so much more quickly than it ever came to me and I’m not particularly worried about the future of leadership in schools, as a result. Schools will be in good hands.
Applying this to pedagogy across age groups and your teaching.
I’ve already said, in a tweet, that if I had my time again, I’d be a reception teacher. The amazingly varied pedagogy I see in most EYFS classrooms is a perfect illustration of how pedagogy crosses age boundaries. At it’s best, sixth form teaching, at times, can allow pupils the freedom to move in their own ways, out from a core introduction to a topic. A skilled teacher nudges, encourages and cajoles students to research and apply a wide range of sources and skills to grasp, inform and refine – and eventually succeed, at a marginal gain above the level they could achieve before. You can see where I’m going can’t you, reception teachers? Because that is exactly what you do and you do it on a daily basis and you monitor that progress brilliantly well. For EYFS teachers to see “A” level teaching and vice versa, would be fantastic for all those teachers’ development.
Y1 (phonics screening), Y2 and Y6 teachers are skilled at preparing pupils for tests/SATS. Most secondary teachers are skilled in preparing pupils for GCSE and a proportion are skilled in preparing students for post 16 exams. But how many times have the two camps talked about pedagogy and methodology?
A BTEC PE teacher uses so many of the skills to prepare students for assessments that geography teachers do for fieldwork and Art teachers do for Y11 coursework. Yet how many times do they talk? And then how many times do they talk with Y6 teachers about the assessment and moderation of writing at KS2? In most schools, even the idea that this could be useful to teachers is no more than a seed.
The parallels I see are extraordinary, but the skills almost always sit in age, or subject-related cans and are not made available for everyone to prepare the feast. It frustrates me to hell!!
Solutions.
There has to be a change. If SLT don’t change their approach to “training” and “INSET” (which, of course, includes the same “T” too!), I hope there will be a groundswell which will force them to change. Teachers would benefit so much from being freed to take control of their own pedagogical development. Once the need for such paradigm change is accepted, structures will evolve. Talk for Teaching is a vehicle for this, but so are all-through schools and innovative transition arrangements. The changing landscape of MATs, Co-operative structures and teaching schools now gives the imperative for some school structures to share practice in ways they never have had to under LA control, to knit those new structures together.
Pedagogy is not that different in EYFS, Y6, Y11, or Y13, but how would you know that, if you’ve been subject, or age-restricted, for all of your teaching career? There is *so* much you can learn from your colleagues in your school and in other schools. Centralised training is often not necessary and it can perpetuate the restrictions, by reinforcing age, or subject orthodoxy, which is really simply accepted wisdom and keeps training organisations in business.
Use the collective intelligence within your own school, or in your collaborative structure instead. Enthuse your staff by doing so and save pots of money on outside experts and sending staff on expensive courses. Pedagogy across different age ranges and across subjects, needs to be shared!