The Lazy Teacher's Handbook E-Book

Jim Smith

• Herausgeber: Independent Thinking Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

,p>Every chapter has been revised and some significantly expanded, particularly those on planning, conducting and reviewing lazy lessons. Others have been updated with Jim's latest tried-and-tested techniques, which all shift the emphasis away from the teaching and onto the learning. Have you ever wondered what would happen in your classroom if you simply stopped teaching? Over the last few decades the demands of countless education initiatives, not to mention the pressures good teachers put on themselves, have seen so much teaching squeezed into our lessons, it must have squeezed out some of the learning. Maybe if we spent a little less time teaching and gave students a little more time to learn, things would be different. Maybe this would allow us more opportunities to build relationships with the class and develop that all-important rapport with the individuals who might just need us most. Maybe we could even reclaim our Sunday afternoons from planning and marking? The Lazy Way can help you get more out of your students and at the same time help you to get your life back. More than just a series of tricks, the Lazy Way is something Jim Smith has put together over years of experience working with all sorts of learners (and teachers) who want their lessons to be different yet still be rewarded with academic success. The approach was born out of Jim's frustration with doing a job he loves but being slowly killed by it in the process. And, as all good psychologists know, if necessity is the mother of invention then frustration is the absent father, and being knackered the grown-up sibling who just won't leave home. If you want your students to learn more and you to work less, then The Lazy Teacher's Handbook provides you with all the arguments and evidence you need. The new edition is packed full of even more easy-to-apply, highly effective strategies (which Ofsted have rated as 'outstanding') all with the seal of approval from real students in real classrooms. So, next time someone tells you to get a life, this book will make it possible. Previously published as The Lazy Teacher's Handbook, ISBN 9781845902896. 'The Lazy Teacher' is a registered trademark. The Lazy Teacher's Handbook - first edition Winner of the 2012 Award for non-fiction bestselling English-language Book from Wales. The Lazy Teacher's Handbook New Edition - Honorable Mention 2017 Foreword INDIES Awardsin the Education category. The Lazy Teacher's Handbook - New Edition is a finalist in the 2018 Education Resources Awards in the Educational Book Award category.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook – New Edition

Just when you thought you couldn’t get any lazier as a teacher Jim returns with even more ideas to help us teachers become more effective in our classrooms.

This book is jammed full with tried and tested suggestions for us to dip in to! Well worth a read, a copy should be on hand in every classroom.

Amjad Ali, Assistant Head Teacher, @ASTSupportAali

In more than thirty years as a teacher and school leader, I’ve rarely met a lazy teacher. And that’s why we need this book so much.

Jim Smith’s approach isn’t based on gimmicks and quick fixes. It’s all about real learning, and the way we need to detox ourselves as a profession from the idea that teaching more leads inevitably to students learning more. Often – as the author so vividly demonstrates – the reverse is true.

The book has a great title, but in truth The Lazy Teacher’sHandbook isn’t for the lazy amongst us. It’s for those most committed to immersing students in the messy business of actual learning, guided by a teacher with the confidence to know when to step back and watch that learning happen.

Geoff Barton, Head Teacher, King Edward VI School

When the original Lazy Teacher’s Handbook first catapulted onto our shelves in 2010, the ideas quickly took hold and the concept of ‘Lazy Teaching’ entered teachers’ vernacular, becoming shorthand for an effective, learning-centred approach to classroom practice. At the heart of the book’s success lies Jim Smith’s ability to demystify the complexity of the teaching and learning process, supported by usable approaches that actually work for today’s generation of learners. In this fully updated edition, key ideas have been expanded and new teaching and learning approaches added, while aspects such as the use of IT in the classroom have been brought up to date. The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook is essential reading for all trainee teachers and NQTs, and is a welcome tonic for experienced teachers looking for fresh approaches.

Jayne Prior, Senior Teaching Fellow and PGCE Programme Director, University of Bristol

If you want tangible strategies and creative ideas that actually work, this book will provide you with plenty: it is accessible, honest, practical and entertaining. The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook will help you to help students become more effective, reflective and independent learners whilst helping you to retain the joy that comes from this privileged profession.

Brian Platts, Head of the Secondary School, The British School in Tokyo

Jim Smith, in his amusing and straightforward style, encourages teachers to make their lives sustainable and their teaching, and crucially their pupils’ learning, effective. Full of ideas and knowhow for the classroom teacher.

Stephen Tierney, author of Liminal Leadership

Another fantastic teaching and learning development book. Jim’s learning and experience as a teacher and head teacher echo strongly throughout the book, giving realistic perspectives on the challenges facing teachers and also practical and empowering solutions. The book could be read as a whole but also dipped in and out of as part of self-reflection and CPD. The book creates a ‘can do’ approach to issues such as pupil engagement, progress, managing workload and effective feedback. Once again, Jim Smith has written a book that supports, excites and encourages thoughtful reflection – EWAP!

Clare Cantle, Head Teacher, All Saints Catholic School

New Edition

Jim Smith

Edited by Ian Gilbert

To Wendy, Henry and Oscar – thank you. I hope you know why.

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsForeword to the New EditionForeword to the First EditionIntroduction1.Pass Notes2.Old Fashioned Teaching with a Lazy Twist3. The Lazy Approach to Lesson Outcomes4.Structuring the Lazy Lesson5.The Prepare Phase – Great Lazy Lesson Ideas6.The Action Phase – Great Lazy Lesson Ideas7.The Review Phase – Great Lazy Lesson Ideas8.Marking, Assessment and Feedback RIP!9. IT – the Lazy Teacher’s Friend10.Lazy Language that Changes Everything11.Differentiation Done the Lazy Way12.Getting the Best from Teaching Assistants – the Lazy Way13.The Lazy TutorFinal Lazy ThoughtsBibliographyCopyright

Acknowledgements

 It goes without saying that this book is a result of being in education as both a consumer and a supplier. There are simply too many of my former teachers, current colleagues and indeed students who have influenced my thinking to name them all individually. Furthermore every day brings new ideas from different people meaning the list is ever growing. The fear of missing someone out is too great. So to you all, thank you.

I am incredibly lucky to spend some of my time working with Independent Thinking Ltd, tapping into the skills, talents and support that can only be provided by such a caring, passionate and in many ways incongruent group of people you could ever wish to meet. Yet somehow, perhaps united by their passion, they all combine together to be this amazing educational inspiration to so many, including me. To you all, thank you.

Achieving success is often about belief. The support of Ian Gilbert, the founder of Independent Thinking, and Caroline Lenton, formerly at Crown House Publishing, gave me tremendous belief to write a book that would genuinely help others make a difference to how they teach. To you both, thank you.

If my family was to ever run a business, it would be a school. So many of us work or did work in schools almost to the point that Christmas dinner was more like a staff meeting than a celebration! Hence from an early age I have been surrounded by people I now recognise to be outstanding educationalists. My late Gramps, Harold, with his relentless praise and belief in young people (well, certainly when it came to cricket) and my mum, for her willingness to totally ignore the latest initiative and keep learning in practical, mucky and fun ways (meaning she was treated with the utmost respect by students and parents alike). In hindsight I have benefited from two amazing role models who have shaped my beliefs and values. Thank you.

Finally, to my wife Wendy and our gorgeous children Henry and Oscar. To be surrounded by unconditional love, support and encouragement is something very special. It is not so much, thank you; more, I love you.

Foreword to the New Edition

Well, that was interesting.

When we published Jim Smith’s wonderful book in 2010, little did we know quite what a kerfuffle it would cause or quite how successful it would be.

The premise is simple – sometimes the best thing we can do to help children learn is to stop teaching them. Or, to put it another way, sometimes there is so much teaching going on there is no space for them to learn anything. Or, in the words of the Singaporean Ministry for Education, ‘Teach less, learn more.’ Or, as a teacher I met in Tunbridge Wells last week said to me, the real learning takes place in the gaps between the teaching.

The fact that this conversation took place in that particular town is interesting as ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ has taken to their keyboard more than once about the title of this book. Indeed, even one of our own Associates at Independent Thinking wrote to me to say he had refused to have the book in the school where he was head teacher at the time.

The point, as 99% of the book’s readers seemed to grasp very well, is clearly not to encourage unprofessionalism. Quite the opposite. In fact, I would argue that ‘lazy’ teaching does far more to encourage professionalism than the once upon a time Secretary of State for Education and would-be PM Michael Gove’s drive for research-led teaching and the self-serving bandwagon his actions spawned.

Before ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ reaches for his or her keyboard again, let me explain. There are at least four major concerns inherent in research-led teaching the way I see it.

Firstly, it ignores the many variables to be found in any learning situation. ‘This works’ can never be the guarantee that it is in other fields such as medicine (although even there it is not quite the iron-clad assertion many people believe it to be). Whenever you hear the claim ‘this works’ what you are actually hearing is the statement, ‘This worked.’ Or, in full, ‘This worked. For me. There. With that group. Then.’ That’s the only claim we can make in education with 100% certainty. After that, the many variables and dynamics of real people interacting in real life situations kick in and, what with thirty or so of the thirty-one people in the room being children, anything can happen. This is what makes a classroom what experts in complexity theory, the only field we educators should really be looking at in detail, call a ‘complex adaptive system’. In other words, everything in the classroom is having an effect on everything else in the classroom on an ongoing basis all the time. You might know it better as trying to teach when a wasp enters the room.

Secondly, and far more insidious, research-led teaching carries with it an assumption that, armed with that research, anyone can teach. The adult in the room doesn’t really need much training, just a decent script and a punitive behaviour policy. For learning to happen, the ‘teachers’ simply need to do what the ‘experts’ tell them to do and it will work. And if it doesn’t, then we’ll punish the children until it does.

Thirdly, using the perfectly acceptable claims from various researchers that the most important factor in a child’s learning is the teacher, we have been fed the line that learning is, therefore, all about the teaching. The more a teacher teaches, the more a child learns. QED. Except that isn’t the case, as anyone who has sat through a boring lesson with a teacher stood at the front droning on and on (i.e. everyone who has been to school) knows. And as the T-shirt says, ‘If they’re not learning, you’re just talking.’

Fourthly, even when the lesson is in the hands of a skilled teacher who can boast not only a pulse but enough of a spark to encourage learning to actually happen, we also have evidence from researchers such as Sugata Mitra suggesting that children are quite capable of learning without a teacher and may even learn better on their own.

All of which means alarm bells should be ringing when anyone tells you exactly how you should teach. Even more so when they’re on Twitter.

In light of all of this, perhaps the best way of understanding the power of Lazy Teaching is to use the terminology of the Dutch educational academic Gert Biesta from his challenging 2013 book The Beautiful Risk of Education. Biesta argues, among other things, that rather than seeking to narrow teaching down to a series of interactions proven to make learning happen, genuine education carries with it an element of risk – the risk that nothing might be learnt at all. Not only is the idea of education as a series of ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’, so beloved of politicians, their mandarins and cronies,* nefarious it is neither ‘possible nor desirable’. Indeed, in Biesta’s words: ‘If we take the risk out of education, there is a real chance that we take out education altogether.’

What Biesta advocates – and Lazy Teaching facilitates – is what he refers to as the ‘gift of teaching’. This gift is not something the teacher can bestow but it is something the student can take. It comes about as a result of the teacher’s professional ‘wisdom’ (which is different from their subject knowledge, having a First from Cambridge or doing a summer school then spending a few years teaching before going on to a proper job in banking) interacting in the moment with the mind of a learner who ‘does not limit himself or herself to the task of learning from the teacher but is open to the possibility of being taught’.

When the Lazy Teacher shifts to the students so many of the tasks that they can not only easily perform but that will also help them benefit from the lessons more by doing so, it frees that teacher up to use their ‘gift’ far more effectively, to do the things in the classroom that only they can do. Again, to quote Biesta, it allows the teacher to ‘bring something new to the educational situation, something that was not already there’.

Lazy Teaching isn’t about constructivism. Constructivism implies the teacher has nothing to bring to the lesson (or if they do they should keep it to themselves). Nor is it about facilitation. As Biesta alludes to, ‘facilitate’ literally means ‘to make easy’, yet we know that making learning easy does nothing when it comes to making it memorable.

In a nutshell, Lazy Teaching is about having the students do more so that they learn more (and about more things such as, perhaps, leadership or working together. After all, as I like to ask the more didactic teachers I meet, what are they learning whilst you’re teaching them?). In so doing, Lazy Teaching frees up the teacher to do the things that only he or she can do.

What Jim’s easy-to-read and even easier-to-implement ideas and suggestions have done is give teachers back time – time to be more professional, time to be more creative and, based on the many letters and emails we have received, the feedback on Amazon and what Jim hears as he travels the length and breadth of the country working with schools, time to be themselves. From teachers who were contemplating leaving the profession due to workload and stress but have changed their practice and their lives as a result of this book, to those who have used it to help them come back to work after major illness, to those whose relationships it has helped salvage by giving them the time we all need to spend with loved ones, this book has been very busy working its magic worldwide for several years. Which isn’t too bad at all for a lazy little book.

Thoroughly updated and revised by Jim, who is still practising what he preaches not only in the classroom but as a head teacher now, we hope this new edition will bring its own gift to many thousands more teachers as they roll their sleeves up, adapt their lessons and embrace the Lazy Way.

Ian Gilbert, Kobe

* Exhibit One, M’lord, this extract from the Department for Education’s snappy 2016 publication School Efficiency Metric: Guide to Understanding and Using the School Efficiency Metric Tool:

Definition of school efficiency

Efficiency is generally defined as the rate at which organisations turn inputs (financial and other resources) into outputs or outcomes. An organisation can become more efficient by producing more outputs with the same level of input; producing the same output with fewer inputs; or by a combination of both.

We have defined school efficiency as the relationship between how much progress pupils make at the school (the ‘output’) and how much income the school receives (the ‘input’). We have chosen value added as the output and income per pupil as the input.

Foreword to the First Edition

‘Last Thursday, dressed like Minnie Mouse and sick with the flu, I sang the Hokey Cokey song to a classroom full of gawking parents and students. As usual, the students just sat there in silence as I sang slightly off-key to myself. And as the song on the CD got to the part, “Put your bottom in”, I thought “I’ll quit before I bend over in front of this room full of people.” I’d reached my limit of humiliating situations I was willing to endure in the name of being a good teacher. So I shut off the CD player mid-song and taught the rest of the lesson from the comfortable position of my chair.’