MA: Me & my Pen Portrait

I qualified as a Business Studies and Economics teacher in 1995 following a conversation on an aeroplane with a former musician turned teacher turned businessman nearing retirement. The PGCE course was disappointing – the first lesson I taught was given 9.5 out of 10 and then it was busy people without the time to talk teaching – but I did okay and, unsure of where to move next, I signed up to a supply teaching agency in London. In teaching practice my mentor had identified a talent for classroom management so I was keen to see the capital’s challenging inner-city and requested to work in failing schools. For sixteen months, amidst many alarming eye-openers in classrooms and corridors, I saw glimpses of excellence in colleagues working hard to do the right thing: high standards in the classroom, good organisation, a positive and balanced attitude of respect. Firm but fair. I was surrounded by children who had a difficult start in life and it seemed important, as a teacher, to champion equal opportunities and inclusive education.

Supply teaching was a bad master but a good servant and led me to teach ICT, a subject I grew to love, and, following longer contracts in a range of schools, I applied to be a full time ICT teacher and was quickly promoted to Head of Department. Today I lead my department and ICT across the curriculum. The reading material on this course has made me think that I should lead more inclusively, something I had done as a department head, but not in my wider school role. ICT across the curriculum is a challenge facing all schools and for a long time it has seemed that I am left alone to do as I see fit. Only upon reading about distributed leadership did I start to think about doing the job differently by engaging other teachers’ non-specialist expertise and opinion, as equals. I have an opportunity to encourage teachers to lead in the use of technology to make an impact on learning, to distribute leadership. It is interesting to me how the reading this course demands has changed my thinking. I am moving away from the idea of doing what the Head wants and focussing more on what will make ICT across the curriculum the best it can be for our pupils. It is a refreshing perspective. It moves me on to thinking about how I learn and how others learn.

At school I liked some of my teachers; a mixture of popular and fun, eccentric and grumpy, story tellers with text books. I remember lessons standing on a desk reciting Shakespeare, dramatic science experiments, or enforced silence with learning by doing. My memories reveal I generally paid very little attention to subject content unless the activity drew me in. I liked it when I felt I had done something well. I stood on a desk and deceptively incited violence as Mark Anthony. As Toby Belch I was compelled by Viola’s cross-dressing danger in Twelfth Night. I know the properties of mercury. I still love working through numbers in silence. My parents didn’t go to university and neither did my elder brother which generated little expectation of me to do any better than okay at school. And that was what I did. However, what I learnt and how I learnt it are vivid in my mind. The teaching and learning I lead tries to incorporate the same variety of styles that worked for me; not qualifications but the things that made me learn. My experience as a teacher makes me concerned however, that schools are driven by standardisation with faceless initiatives that stifle creativity when what I think good school society is ‘constituted of individuals and groups who keep learning in new and innovative ways, which is not aided by excessive standardisation’ (Bottery, 2004: 97).

I signed up for this course to address the self-inflicted intellectual rigour missing from my learning path. I have had opportunities to do this but, in my youth, failed to break the mediocre deadlock which I feel suspends me outside academic integrity. So, what kind of teacher does that make me? I encourage students to exceed academic expectations but when I was their age I opted for my guitar or the television. My children are all academic scholars and play their instrument of choice. Am I a fraud or hypocrite? Or, am I learning from my mistakes? A turning point for me was when I attended a MirandaMod unconference at the Institute of Education. Here was the first time I heard someone say pedagogy. ‘The word comes from the Greek: παίδ (paíd) means “child” and άγω (ágō) means “lead”; is also sometimes referred to as the correct use of teaching strategies’ (Wikipedia, Nov 2009). I was in a room full of people who wanted to discuss education and wanted to know what happened in my classroom. Teachers, consultants and lecturers, all educationalists, discussing the detail of teaching and learning as equals. It was inspiring to be in this forum without the shackles of obeying any one great leader; we were all learners.

To sustain this conversation I signed up to twitter and slowly started connecting to more than one thousand educationalists across the world. Twitter now forms the glue of my personal learning network (PLN) whereby I listen, learn, share and collaborate using blogs, podcasts and attending conferences online. Through this network I can ask advice on best practice from people who have actual experience of using a tool in the classroom or a policy across a school. This is incredibly important to me because as Hargreaves (1999: 238) identifies that ‘networks within and between schools could promote professional knowledge creation within the individual school and in the education service as a whole.’ My PLN encouraged me to do a masters degree; developing my PLN has fostered in me a belief in learning for life. The reading material on the course has challenged my educational thinking, broadened my perspective and sharpened my focus on classroom practice; on my responsibility to my pupils and fellow teachers. I am now looking how I can channel my energy into leading for learning. The question for me is will I be able to convert this opportunity into something productive?

Bottery, M. (2004) ‘The Impact of Standardisation and Control’, in The Challenges of Educational Leadership. London: Sage.

Hargreaves, D. (1999) ‘The Knowledge-creating school’, Journal of Education Studies, 47 (2) June 1999.

Wikipedia (2009) (on-line), accessed 15/11/09, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy