When starting your own (free) school became a distinct possibility, I was very tempted to set one up. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was far too busy at the time. I was inundated with work, and involved in caring for elderly relatives.

Whether I’d have been a good headteacher or not would have been for others to decide, but I do know that I would have been draconian. Or, to put it another way, I’d have been the adult in the room.

Every so often I read about a headteacher caving in to students ‘demanding’ their rights, or demanding something or other. The usual technique is to go from zero degrees to boiling in no seconds flat, bunking off lessons to ‘protest’.

My response would be to (a) suspend the lot of them and (b) warn the parents that they will be held responsible for their child’s unauthorised absence. But hopefully such confrontation might be avoided at the outset through one of my very first acts as headteacher: setting up a joint staff-student consultative committee.

At the tender age of 17 I was in college, and a student representative on a body called the Joint Consultative Committee. This was a means by which the Principal could learn about the concerns of students in order to, hopefully, address them.

I was asked if I’d like to write an article about the students union for the student magazine. While trawling through the Freedman archives, I came across it, and here it is.

Do I think it’s any good? Well, it gets the facts across, but these days it could have been written by ChatGPT. In other words, there are no literary flourishes.

I ended the article with the words, “The union needs you”. A friend of mine said, when I showed him the article in the magazine, said a better ending would have been, “Your union needs you [shades of Lord Kitchener] — and you need your union”.

I think he was right.

Anyway, here’s the article, warts and all.

The Students Union, by Terry Freedman

The Students Union of the college, of which the chairman is Winston Panton, has developed into an intricate network of committees and sub-committees, whose purpose is to support and carry out the wishes of the students.

The Union is completely administered by the students, with the assistance of Mrs. Cook, having its own meetings, executive committee, Secretary and Treasurer. This is to ensure that the staff have the minimum of connections with the union's decisions, so that it doesn't evolve into a constitutional figurehead, reflecting the wishes of the staff and not the students.

One of the committees mentioned above is the social committee, which has organised a number of very successful dances. The Refectory Committee has been established to deal with any enquiries and suggestions regarding the college meal service. The Joint consultative committee has recently been introduced as a medium by which the students can voice their opinions and suggestions to the Principal, Mr. Pitt, who will discuss them with the students and members of staff who are on the committee.

Students who aren't on the Students Union are welcome to attend meetings of the executive committee, the dates of which are publicised well in advance. May I draw your attention to the fact that the students union notices are there for general perusal and not just for the members of the students union. I should like to conclude by saying that I sincerely hope more students will take more interest in the affairs of the union in future since it is there for your benefit.

The union needs you.

For writing that is much better than this, click on the graphic below and have a rummage around my Eclecticism newsletter.

   

This article is a bit autobiographical, but there is an objective point to it. Actually, it’s completely autobiographical, but there is still a point to it.

One day when I was 15, I was milling around in this youth club trying to look cool, when someone came up to me and asked me if I’d be interested in joining a cinematography club he wanted to get started. He explained to me that I’d learn how to use a cine camera to shoot films, edit the films,learning about lighting and all that other technical stuff, so I said “Yes!”.

I’d never touched a cine camera in my life.

But I became hooked. I turned from hating having to go to the club to not being able to wait. I scrimped, saved and begged until around a year later, I was the ecstatic owner of a state-of-the-art camera. I would spend hours going out and about filming, and even more hours editing. In fact, my editing skills were better than those displayed in some of the semi-professional films I went to see, made and submitted to competitions by other cinematographers.

The camera purchase itself is worthy of further mention. Before I bought it I did months of research, mainly in magazines. Every month I bought 8mm Magazine and, when I could afford it, Movie Maker Magazine. I read them from cover to cover, even including all the advertisements.

There were four different and incompatible film standards available. The word ‘incompatible’ is very important here, because once you’d bought into a standard there was no going back  or crossing over to another one, unless you were an heir or heiress to a family fortune. That’s because it was not only the camera that took a particular standard, but you also had to buy a projector, editor and splicer to go with it. Plus any additional lenses and other accessories you might want. (There were a couple of camera that took dual standards, but they were seriously expensive, as opposed to just incredibly expensive.)

Now, just to put all this in context, I hated school, and was pretty much a failure as far as academic success was concerned. Perhaps it was more the case that school failed me, because I have certainly done OK academically since then. Whatever. The point is, I couldn’t see the point of most of what I was taught, and only one teacher tried to help me see it.

I also never did homework, so my spending months of research on my own is worthy of note. Maybe not in itself, but given what I’ve just told you about my relationship with school. Like I said in an email to someone this morning, when discussing some statistics that have hit the headlines recently, context is everything.

I was useless at maths and science – and that’s important too because you need a certain amount of maths and science understanding to make a serious go at photography or cinematography.

Nevertheless, I became a geek, in the context of cinematography. And that happened by my being introduced to it in an extra-curricular and voluntary context, and one in which there was no pressure to succeed in the academic sense.

I realise there is a danger of using one’s own experience as a basis for policy proposals, but I do sometimes wonder if we’d be better off cutting formal or normal lessons to allow students time to pursue personal projects or small group projects.

   

Around 30 years ago I threw my rattle out of the pram, on three separate occasions. Trawling through the Freedman archives I’ve found two of these articles. Although they are about different topics, the underlying message is the same: why do people assume that teachers don’t know anything, or at least don’t know enough to be involved in discussions?

The three topics covered were as follows, but only the first two are included in the links below. Are these points still relevant today? Yes. If you don’t believe me, just check the letters page of ,your daily newspaper once or twice a week (assuming you read one).

Topics I discussed

Internet training

Someone who started up an internet café said they were offering free training to teachers in how to access the internet. I wrote an article saying that as a token of our gratitude, the IT teachers organisation in which I was active at the time was going to offer free training in café management.

Perhaps the offer was meant well, but it shows a marked lack of understanding of the sort of thing a teacher might want or need to learn. Not just the nuts and bolts of accessing the internet, but how to manage a class of thirty kids all accessing the internet at the same time, e-safety matters, being able to identify good and bad information sources, and so on. It would have been nice, not to mention respectful, had the café people consulted with teachers first.

Teaching IT

But then, why should they, given that Naace, which was an organisation for advisors of computing in education at the time, produced a document showing how to do it as a result of a one day conference. In my article SuperNaace to the rescue (included in one of the pdfs below) I was somewhat robust about what I thought of as the arrogance underlying this.

The article seemed to make the top brass at Naace incandescent with rage. I did apologise some time later, not for the sentiments expressed, but the rather sarcastic way in which I did so.

However, reading the article again after all these years, I note that I said there was a lot to agree with in what they’d advocated. My beef was not with what they’d written, but the fact that they didn’t include us (the representative body of those who were actually doing the job day in and day out) in their consultations.

Teaching IT through other subjects

Having become increasingly fed up with teachers of other subjects basically dumbing down my subject, I enlisted my alter ego Lance Sharpe to write a diatribe about it. That’s also included in a pdf linked to below.

One of the few good things about the emphasis on ‘coding’ now is that as most people acknowledge that they know nothing about it, they leave the people teaching it in peace.

You might also be interested in this article: Beware the ultracrepidarians.

I’ve also posted this article to the Digital Education Supplement area, with the two files below merged into one for convenience. To access this, subscribe to the Digital Education newsletter for free.

Supernaace to the rescue!

Lance Sharpe

   

It is fashionable these days to avoid the ‘F’ word – by which, of course, I mean “Fail”. This is not confined to the area of teaching Computing, but enough people in this field have written about it to nudge me into writing my thoughts on the matter. So, the FAIL acronym, in case you haven’t come across it, is First Attempt In Learning. The idea of it is that instead of telling kids that they have failed at something, you tell that they have not failed. They may have not succeeded, but that is fine, because it was a First Attempt In Learning. Well, I have always been a believer in telling it how it is, and so for me the FAIL acronym does not benefit kids at all. Quite the opposite in fact. Here are my objections:

• Failing is empowering. You have the option of improving by recognising your mistakes, or having them pointed out to you. Additionally, it gives you the option of doing something else instead. There may not be much scope for this in school, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in her book Discoverability: A WMG Writers Guide* includes a great acronym: WIBBOW. This stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing? Obviously, that applies to writers, because that’s who the book is written for, but the principle is a good summary of the economist’s concept of the law of comparative advantage, which I explained in the article Why you should collaborate on a Computing scheme of work. Basically, it’s like this: I am useless at home improvement. If I put up a bookshelf, it will fall down as soon as I put a sheet of paper on one of the shelves. But I’m pretty good at other things, like writing (according to feedback I’ve had). So I would be better off writing and paying someone else to put up my bookshelf. The reason I know this to be true is that when I bought my first house, I spent ages putting up a bookshelf, using a spirit level to make sure it was completely level. After a few hours’ labour, I stood back and admired the jaunty angle that the bookshelves had assumed. In other words, I failed. And frankly, I am pleased I learnt after a relatively short and innocuous project that DIY and I don’t get on. Can you imagine if I had decided to install my own shower?

• This business of not wanting to upset kids by using the F word. Good teachers address the work rather than the person, and make it quite clear that pointing out that some work that doesn’t come up to scratch is not the same as saying the pupil is a failure. So this FAIL acronym merely serves to muddy waters that should be crystal clear.

• Besides, I thought one of the things that schools were meant to be doing is instilling resilience (another current buzzword). I don’t see how you can build up resilience without saying that some things a pupil has done aren’t good enough.

• The acronym isn’t really logical. What do we call the second attempt “in” learning (horrible grammar too if you ask me)? SAIL? The third attempt? TAIL? Fourth attempt? FAIL? Gotcha!

• Quite frankly, it’s patronising. What’s even worse is that most kids know when they are being patronised.

• When the pupil has to take a test or an exam that is externally marked, getting insufficient marks to pass will not earn the pupil a pat on the back with a note from the examiner saying “Well done! This was your First Attempt In Learning”

• In real life, getting a computer program wrong may have some pretty unfortunate circumstances. Employers and users are highly unlikely to say “Never mind! It was your First Attempt In Learning, so I don’t mind that I’ve wasted a lot of money!”

• Finally, is there any research evidence saying that using the FAIL acronym has benefits? I haven’t come across any. It sounds to me like the same sort of nonsense that says kids’ self-esteem suffers if you mark their work with a red pen, so you should use a green one. (Incidentally, that is nothing new. My head of department mentioned this to me in 1978.)

In my opinion, we should stop bending over backwards and tying ourselves in knots as if we are doing some sort of advanced mental yoga. Just tell it how it is: honesty is always the best policy.

* If you buy the book via this link, I will earn a small commission from Amazon. Go on, buy it: you know it makes sense!

For more articles like this, plus news, commentary and freebies, sign up for my ezine Digital Education, for great content, longer articles, book reviews, news, comment and guest articles. I’m working on a new issue right now, in fact.

   

In the article 12 Characteristics of a good Computing Scheme of Work I said that people should work with other people on their Computing scheme of work. Why?

You know the old saying, many hands make light work. However, other reasons given here are arguably even more important.

It helps avoids group think, which can happen even if you're the only one in the group. If you create a scheme of work on your own, there's a good chance that bits of it will be unworkable or unintelligible, because nobody was there to question them at the time.

Group think can still happen within a school, though. This is when everyone in the group thinks something is wonderful or impossible or whatever, because the group is completely self-contained and self-referential. So ideally, work with colleagues from other schools too.

·Although not everyone may be an expert in Computing, they are experts in their own field, and they also have special interests and hobbies. That means they will come with ideas and examples that you wouldn't have thought of, and which will help to bring the scheme of work alive.

· I suggest delegating responsibility rather than tasks. If each person is responsible for a unit of work they can really think about how it should be taught, what training is needed for teachers, and what resources are needed for students.

Some people have told me that this could lead to extra work for the teachers. But if they were going to be producing materials anyway, this approach saves everyone work. How come? Think about it: if I produce a pack containing six weeks' worth of lesson plans, resources, CPD materials and assessment materials (eg quizzes), then you don't have to do anything for that unit of six weeks, except teach it. Then I get to use the unit that you created. Even with only two people working together, the workload is effectively halved. If that isn't quite right, all I can say is that I was no good at mathematics at school. But you can see the point I'm making, can't you?

I have also been told that this approach doesn't work if your colleagues know less than you do. It's quicker, the argument goes, to just get on with it and produce all the units of work yourself.

I think this is a muddle-headed approach for several reasons.

First, if you apply the economics law of comparative advantage, it can still make sense to divide up the units of work between colleagues. This is how it works. Let's say I am your Head of Department, and I know a lot more about everything to do with Computing than you do, because you're a science teacher. But, it turns out, you have a particular expertise in data-logging using light sensors and sound sensors. Not only that, but you love all that stuff, whereas I can take it or leave it. In these circumstances, it makes a lot of sense for me to ask you to take on all the units involving data-logging, because you will produce the materials a lot faster than I probably would, and almost certainly make them more interesting too. You’ll also be able to slip in little snippets of knowledge or how-to stuff that I had no idea existed, because you spend more time doing data-logging than I do.

Another example: what if one of the music teachers was a self-taught expert in making use of AI to compose music? You’d be daft not to ask him or her to demonstrate some of the things tried out, and what benefits and limitations were discovered. The you could discuss with students how far those lessons might apply to other areas.

Second, part of the job of a Head of Department is, in my opinion, to bring on the people working for him or her. If your colleagues know less than you do, then you should arrange for them to have some professional development. Another thing you should do is produce your units first, to give your colleagues time to develop theirs, using yours as an exemplar.

I tried this, and by producing the first two units, ie a term's work, first, it gave one of my colleagues a whole term to produce something, another colleague a term and a half, and a third colleague two terms, ie nearly a whole school year. In case you can't see how I worked this out, here's a table to illustrate it:

Term 1 First Half

Term 1 Second Half

Term Two First Half

Term Two Second Half

Me: Unit 1

Me: Unit 2

Colleague A: Unit 3

Colleague B: Unit 4

Third, I know from experience that this works. I think it's partly because people tend to rise – or fall – to the level of your expectations. We know this to be the case with kids, so why shouldn't it be the case with adults?

Now, I suppose the mammoth in the room is why bother to create resources and lesson plans anyway, when AI can do most of the work for you? Well, even if you’re a hundred percent satisfied with what the AI has produced, it is still a good idea to see what other people think.

I was listening to a podcast featuring Blake Morrison today, and he said that when he was writing a book about his father, there was a chapter on his father’s last days, when he was frail, a shadow of his former self. That was followed by a chapter on what his father was like as a young man. Morrison showed the manuscript to someone who said those chapters were the wrong way round: “Let the reader really get to know your dad as a real person, full of vitality, so that we can feel more symnpathy and empathy in his decline.” (Interestingly enough, when my mother was old, suffering from demential and in hospital, someone told us to put a photo of her when she was a young woman above her bed, in order to remind some of the medical staff (not all, I hasten to say) that beneath that frail, dessicated, broke exterior there is a real person, a person who has led a fulfilled and productive life.)

Collaboration works, and it often gives much better results than working completely alone.

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