TeachMeet Failure?
Of course it is a truth universally acknowledged that an Assistant Head who has had a 'good idea' is usually to be avoided at all costs, or at least pointed in a direction where the pursuit of said idea doesn't cause too much disruption to everybody else in school who is trying to get on with their job. With this in mind, I'm slightly dismayed to announce that I think I've had one. Or at least stolen one.
I've been reading a couple of books on how professionals and organisations learn and improve, notably Adapt by 'Undercover Economist' Tim Harford and Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov. Harford argues that the most effective model of prompting positive change in organisations lies in a sort of replication of natural selection. He describes a constant cycle of trying out lots and lots of new ideas, getting good feedback and then selecting and going with the few among them that work. Google is a good example, with their policy of giving staff twenty percent of their time to dedicate to doing... well, whatever they want. Employees choose a project and have free rein to experiment, to have a go at ideas, to see what works and what doesn't. Of course most of it doesn't work at all and is therefore discarded, but occasionally, someone will come up with Google Earth or Adsense, and the gains made in these few steps forward justify (and pay for) the approach as a whole.
I've been reading a couple of books on how professionals and organisations learn and improve, notably Adapt by 'Undercover Economist' Tim Harford and Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov. Harford argues that the most effective model of prompting positive change in organisations lies in a sort of replication of natural selection. He describes a constant cycle of trying out lots and lots of new ideas, getting good feedback and then selecting and going with the few among them that work. Google is a good example, with their policy of giving staff twenty percent of their time to dedicate to doing... well, whatever they want. Employees choose a project and have free rein to experiment, to have a go at ideas, to see what works and what doesn't. Of course most of it doesn't work at all and is therefore discarded, but occasionally, someone will come up with Google Earth or Adsense, and the gains made in these few steps forward justify (and pay for) the approach as a whole.Practice Perfect, on the other hand, explores a simple but striking premise, which is this: a key reason why professional learning for teachers can be ineffective is that we simply don't get enough opportunity to practise the techniques and approaches we learn about. This might sound ridiculous given the packed timetables that many are slogging through each week, but here's the thing: doing it live, teaching real lessons in front of real kids is not an effective environment in which to practise, in the same way that professional footballers don't tend to break off in the middle of a match to hone their skills ('...sorry Lionel, didn't get that vicious sliding tackle quite right, do you mind if I have another quick go...?' ). It's too high stakes for the kids, and let's face it, teaching lots of lessons that just don't work very well is unsustainably exhausting and demoralising for the teacher also.
Both books bring attention to the same barrier to teacher professional learning, which is our lack of capacity to tolerate failure. We can't fail to the extent we would need to in order to justify constant trialling of new approaches, and we can't fail too much in practising techniques which others might already be using but we don't yet have in our repertoire. There are of course very good reasons for this: fundamentally, it matters that the education of each individual child is as effective as we can get it, and we therefore don't have a mandate to embrace excessive risk. This seems to mitigate against prolonged risk-taking or unfettered experimentation from individual teachers, instead pushing us towards safer, more reliable methods of teaching, and, you could argue, quite right too.
So what about the stolen idea? Well, we were fortunate recently to have Tim Harford in school recently talking to our A Level Economists; I snatched a quick conversation with him on this topic, and he brought my attention to the idea of 'fail faires', at which employees gather to talk not about their successes at work, but about the things they'd tried which had gone wrong - details to be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development-professionals-network/2012/dec/07/fail-faire-how-to-talk-about-failure . This got me thinking that in order to get real value from reflecting on what we do in the classroom, we need to learn to talk about our failures more openly - to make more of them and focus more on sharing and reflecting on what went wrong rather than what went right.
TeachMeets are a case in point - in my experience these have been enjoyable, worthwhile events. I've met many superb colleagues through TMs, and I've loved being part of the sense of a wider community of teachers coming together. The problem with the actual learning, however, is that people tend to present the most impressive or effective parts of what they do, and that means that putting it into practice in the classroom for the attendees can be almost impossible. TeachMeets, and sharing best practice events generally, tend to be limited by the very fact that what is shown is often the result of lots of time, reflection and practice by the teachers delivering the session; the audience sees the end of the process, and often this puts it too far out of reach to be useful. It might be inspiring, but being inspired in itself doesn't help too much in going through the slow process of making the technical changes in practice which are necessary if an individual's teaching is to improve and to sustain that improvement over time.
So, here goes: TeachMeet Oxford on 11th July this year becomes TMOxfail (click to reach the sign up page for more details) - the idea here is that, rather than coming along to present something that worked really well, we ask teachers to come along with something that failed. Present a lesson, an activity, a scheme an idea - something that you had high hopes for, but which fell flat. To describe it as 'sharing worst practice' would be amusing but not quite accurate - the idea would be an interrogation of failure, not a celebration. It would be good, therefore, for presenters to include some reflection as to why they thought it failed, and how they did or would do it next time to make it work. We'd have to have rules I suppose - one of which would be 'no blaming the kids', in the sense that there'd be little point in presenting something which you are convinced was actually brilliant but just didn't work because the little sods were in a funny mood after PE or whatever, and I suppose we'd have to suggest relatively small-scale, classroom-based failures, thereby avoiding epic car-crash 'oh yes one time I got wazzoed after work, threw my controlled assessments in the canal for a laugh and got sacked' sort of stuff (engaging though that would be), but in principle, what do you think? Anyone up for it? Is this doomed, like so many AHT 'good ideas', to failure... would no-one turn up? Are people more likely to gain from hearing about failure or success? Answers on a tweet please - @tomboulter
Both books bring attention to the same barrier to teacher professional learning, which is our lack of capacity to tolerate failure. We can't fail to the extent we would need to in order to justify constant trialling of new approaches, and we can't fail too much in practising techniques which others might already be using but we don't yet have in our repertoire. There are of course very good reasons for this: fundamentally, it matters that the education of each individual child is as effective as we can get it, and we therefore don't have a mandate to embrace excessive risk. This seems to mitigate against prolonged risk-taking or unfettered experimentation from individual teachers, instead pushing us towards safer, more reliable methods of teaching, and, you could argue, quite right too.
So what about the stolen idea? Well, we were fortunate recently to have Tim Harford in school recently talking to our A Level Economists; I snatched a quick conversation with him on this topic, and he brought my attention to the idea of 'fail faires', at which employees gather to talk not about their successes at work, but about the things they'd tried which had gone wrong - details to be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development-professionals-network/2012/dec/07/fail-faire-how-to-talk-about-failure . This got me thinking that in order to get real value from reflecting on what we do in the classroom, we need to learn to talk about our failures more openly - to make more of them and focus more on sharing and reflecting on what went wrong rather than what went right.
TeachMeets are a case in point - in my experience these have been enjoyable, worthwhile events. I've met many superb colleagues through TMs, and I've loved being part of the sense of a wider community of teachers coming together. The problem with the actual learning, however, is that people tend to present the most impressive or effective parts of what they do, and that means that putting it into practice in the classroom for the attendees can be almost impossible. TeachMeets, and sharing best practice events generally, tend to be limited by the very fact that what is shown is often the result of lots of time, reflection and practice by the teachers delivering the session; the audience sees the end of the process, and often this puts it too far out of reach to be useful. It might be inspiring, but being inspired in itself doesn't help too much in going through the slow process of making the technical changes in practice which are necessary if an individual's teaching is to improve and to sustain that improvement over time.
So, here goes: TeachMeet Oxford on 11th July this year becomes TMOxfail (click to reach the sign up page for more details) - the idea here is that, rather than coming along to present something that worked really well, we ask teachers to come along with something that failed. Present a lesson, an activity, a scheme an idea - something that you had high hopes for, but which fell flat. To describe it as 'sharing worst practice' would be amusing but not quite accurate - the idea would be an interrogation of failure, not a celebration. It would be good, therefore, for presenters to include some reflection as to why they thought it failed, and how they did or would do it next time to make it work. We'd have to have rules I suppose - one of which would be 'no blaming the kids', in the sense that there'd be little point in presenting something which you are convinced was actually brilliant but just didn't work because the little sods were in a funny mood after PE or whatever, and I suppose we'd have to suggest relatively small-scale, classroom-based failures, thereby avoiding epic car-crash 'oh yes one time I got wazzoed after work, threw my controlled assessments in the canal for a laugh and got sacked' sort of stuff (engaging though that would be), but in principle, what do you think? Anyone up for it? Is this doomed, like so many AHT 'good ideas', to failure... would no-one turn up? Are people more likely to gain from hearing about failure or success? Answers on a tweet please - @tomboulter
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