Whole School Progress the LAZY Way E-Book

Jim Smith

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Following on from the acclaimed The Lazy Teacher's Handbook, Jim Smith applies his lazy philosophy to flip the task of 'leading learning' to 'letting learning lead'. Covering all aspects of learning, including the planning of outstanding lessons, lesson observation, passing performance management targets and creating inspiring learning environments the book poses the question 'what would happen if you let learning lead?'. You might just find you enjoy your job more than ever as well as see a big improvement in the quality of learning and progress for your pupils.Based on Jim Smith's leadership work to improve learning (in a lazy way of course) this book is packed with highly practical solutions and suggestions that are proven to help you improve the quality of learning and progress but in a lazy way both in your classroom and across the school.

Leseprobe

Praise

Jim Smith has done it again. He has picked up the approach from his first book and pushed it right to the core of the current educational buzz word: ‘progress’.

‘Progress’ has become one of those words which it is easy to say, but harder to treat with respect. Hence it risks being treated with lip service by pupils, by teachers and at whole school level as people look over their shoulders at those who are watching them. This book cuts through all that, and offers a wealth of ideas for treating the word ‘progress’ seriously and ensuring that pupils have a chance of making some and knowing they have.

Using the techniques of his first book, Jim offers idea upon idea in a way that is entirely accessible. The Lazy bit is again a misnomer but the book does show how thinking teachers and school leaders can make their jobs enjoyable and reap the rewards for effort that makes sense.

Mick Waters, Professor of Education, Wolverhampton University

A welcome sequel to Jim Smith’s first book, and again jam-packed with ideas for invisibly transferring the learning load onto students – this time with an emphasis on whole-school processes. Readable, amusing and quirky, I expect this to do as well as its predecessor.

Barry J. Hymer, Professor of Psychology in Education, Education Faculty, University of Cumbria

Following the success of his first book, The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook, Jim Smith continues his exploration of ways in which everyone involved in schools, from NQTs to senior leaders, is responsible for ensuring that learning and progress are at the heart of the business of teaching, the Lazy Way.

Of interest to any practising teacher, the thorny issue of lesson observations is unpacked and the process of demonstrating ‘outstanding’ teaching demystified. He looks in particular at what is meant by ‘progress’ and how this can be planned for, and then demonstrated, within a lesson observation. Importantly, however, he doesn’t lose sight of the fact that teaching is a highly interpersonal activity carrying many rewards beyond a successful Ofsted grade.

When looking at professional development for teachers, the Lazy Way – encouraging teachers to take responsibility for their own development – is proposed and new approaches to CPD and performance management are suggested. At the heart of this lies the belief that teachers are highly skilled professionals with the potential to innovate, provided they are given the opportunity.

Still a practising teacher himself, Jim Smith writes with authority and also with respect for both the young people that he teaches and the colleagues with whom he works. Underpinned by a clearly articulated paradigm and written in a refreshing, engaging and accessible style, punctuated with examples drawn from his own work and from his extensive experience of working with a range of schools, this book speaks to anyone who is (or will be) part of a busy staffroom and who seeks more than a set of tips for teachers.

Jayne Prior, Senior Teaching Fellow in Education and Director of Educational and Professional Studies

(PGCE), University of Bristol

Being a self-confessed fan of the Lazy Way and having read The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook, seen Jim Smith deliver INSET and been fortunate to visit the home of Lazy Teaching in Clevedon, I greeted this book with a measure of excitement and a dose of Ofsted weary cynicism. Excitement at the idea of more offbeat, yet enormously effective, strategies for delivering effective progress in my classroom; and cynicism at the potential for the approach to have taken on the age old appearance of simply being last year’s educational fad.

Fortunately, I am writing this with yet more excitement and not a trace of cynicism. The book and its author maintain a sense of infectious enthusiasm, wonderful humour and genuinely intelligent comment on the educational landscape in 2012, allied to a rock solid approach to dealing with the challenging concept of ensuring every child makes progress in every lesson they encounter.

It is written in an easy, flowing style which allows you to take ideas on board and see how they relate to both current Ofsted requirements and contemporary educational thinking in general. It contains a constant stream of useful tips and strategies which can be adopted wholesale or picked carefully and adapted to your, and your class’s, own style.

The lesson model provides real scope for development in your own school, whilst maintaining its theme of children developing the capacity to understand the concept of checking their own progress. Whilst the book attempts to be light-hearted and humorous, it addresses very real and very complex issues. It does this without being flippant or patronising and constantly recognises that teaching should be a job which teachers should thoroughly enjoy!

The book covers the use of data, effective lesson observation and the development of a whole school Lazy ethos. All are brought into the overall approach in a simple, sharp and rational manner which seems to make perfect sense. The seemingly endless, practical strategies which litter the text add to the feeling that you are reading a genuinely relevant and useful manual for teaching today.

The book is a thoroughly enjoyable, suitably humorous and endlessly useful read. It is a natural step from The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook and takes the concept of Lazy Teaching out of the classroom and into the whole school.

Congratulations on another inevitable success, Jim.

Mind you … I’m sure he’s nicked a couple of my ideas!

Geoff Cherrill, Vice Principal, Nova Hreod, Swindon

To Wendy, Henry and Oscar

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Progress the Lazy Way – a Preface

Introduction

1. Progress and the Lazy Inspector

2. Creating Progress in Your Lessons – The Lazy Way

3. Capturing Progress – The Lazy Way

4. Lazy Observations of Learning

5. Institutionalising Progress – In a Lazy Way

Progress the Lazy Way – an Epilogue

Recommended On-line Resources

Bibliography

Copyright

Acknowledgements

This book would have still been so many ideas on bits of paper had it not been for the success of the first book. Hence, it seems appropriate to start by saying ‘thank you’ to all those who have grasped the idea of being ‘lazy’ and in one case demanded another book. I hope you like it, Mum!

It takes a team of people to turn lots of educational ideas on scraps of paper into a book, especially when some of the team may accuse me of following my Lazy Way when it comes to publishing as well as teaching! Therefore I want to acknowledge the work of Ian Gilbert who, in between sending pictures of some new amazing Chilean landscape, also finds time to guide, inspire and edit my thinking. Likewise, Caroline Lenton and the team at Independent Thinking Press. Caroline has offered unwavering support and encouragement (although without the amazing pictures).

Whether it is my ‘day job’ based in school or when I go out and about delivering the many INSET and Conference sessions I do, I am lucky to have different roles that continually provide me with the stimulus for ideas that are grounded in educational reality. So a huge thank you to my colleagues, delegates and of course the students, without whom we would never know if the ideas actually make a difference. Individual mention must go to Jamie Potter (Just Do It Wrong), David Didau (Learning Hexagons) and Gareth Beynon (Data Starts A Conversation) for offering ideas that really made me rush and write them down instantly.

As ever with a team it is those behind the scenes who play some of the most crucial roles. And in the case of Team Lazy it is no different. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my gorgeous wife Wendy for her love, support and her regular doses of realism, which keep me grounded at all times (an excuse I often used during my off-days in the rugby lineout). Likewise our two boys, Henry and Oscar, for constantly reminding me what the most important thing in life is, as well as showing me just how amazing and quick learning can be – even if it does mean regularly coming third when we play games these days. To all three of you, not only a massive thank you, but an even bigger ‘I love you’ as well.

And finally, a huge thank you to everyone working in education. It makes a tremendous difference to millions of people. And by role modelling saying thank you, maybe it might just catch on. All the way to the top. You never know …

Foreword

In his classic 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage,* technology-in-society visionary Marshall McLuhan made a number of telling predictions about the nature of our modern world in the light of the technological revolution taking place at that time.

The changes – and remember, McLuhan was writing at a time when computers were THAT big – meant that people were beginning to shift from being passive observers of a simple world to becoming active participants in a complex, interconnected one. Further still, they were even players in the sort of game-changing scenario not seen since the invention of the printing press in which they were, as near as dammit, fusing with the world around them. As he famously wrote, ‘The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin; electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system’.

Now, the fact that McLuhan’s later work was entirely bonkers, something that was eventually found out to be the result of a brain tumour, should not detract from the fact that his predictions were of enormous significance, and whose value is only just becoming apparent. Way before a world in which Twitter, Facebook and other social media flourish, McLuhan was describing a world in which Twitter, Facebook and other social media could flourish. For education, his prophecy was of a significant battle between the old model and the new, a shift from teaching as direct instruction towards ‘discovery – to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms’.

In a nutshell, a move from ‘package to discovery’.

In this brave new educational world, McLuhan envisaged a classroom in which the learners were significantly more active in the pursuit of their own knowledge than ever before, thanks in no small way to the freedom the new technologies gave them.

‘As the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work.’

However, McLuhan’s prophecies overlooked the fact that the biggest obstacle to this exciting world of whole-scale independent learning wasn’t the technology. It was the teachers. But then again, he also failed to predict Angry Birds and Celebrity Big Brother.

Nor did he take into account Jim Smith and teaching done the Lazy Way.

Lazy Teaching is not about the use of technology to do away with the twenty-first century teacher. It’s not about sitting students in front of rows of computer screens day after day. It’s not even actually about being lazy. And it’s certainly not a rejection of professionalism in the teaching workforce. Quite the opposite. Lazy Teaching came about through our observations in the classroom that if the teacher just got out of the way of the learning a little more often, everyone would benefit. And benefit significantly. After all, sometimes the best thing we can do to help young people learn is to stop teaching them. How can you expect anyone to learn anything for themselves when there’s all that teaching going on?

Jim’s first book, The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook, was a tremendous success, not without its controversies of course, but it has become the bible for all those teachers who felt that ‘working harder’ wasn’t the answer, despite the best exhortations of governments, inspectors and the management team. If you’re banging your head against a brick wall, doing it harder is rarely the answer. By stepping back from all that teaching and letting children do so much more than they were doing before, you create a scenario in which everyone wins. In the words of one grateful acolyte writing to Jim recently:

I made the decision a couple of years ago to stop working harder than my students as I was feeling constantly disappointed and let down by them. I was doing so much and getting nothing in return.

I’ve since been feeling guilty as our system of management here is always blaming us for failing results and trying to get us to do more, monitor more, put on extra classes etc. However, in your book, I’ve found a like-minded individual; you’ve restored my faith in myself and my approach.

My grades are good and getting better and the kids love me!

Just one satisfied lazy customer amongst so many. What’s more, on top of the pedagogical advantages to the approach, the stress-relieving benefits of the Lazy Way should not be under-estimated either. As one teacher wrote to Jim:

I’d just like to share a rather strange irony. I read your book in early June and announced to my boss that I planned to do ‘no teaching’ this coming year and that the learners would do all the work. She found it a bit difficult to swallow. In the middle of June I had a heart attack, and now I’m starting back this term with every intention of keeping my promise. I’ve everything prepared ready to be the really best lazy teacher, along with testimonials from my last cohort who love my lazy teaching methods, many of which of course are your methods.

Let’s make it clear, your job shouldn’t be a matter of life and death, it’s not football, but with testimonials like that you realise that there is so much to be said for the Lazy Way. I am delighted, therefore, to be writing the foreword to Jim’s new book in which he takes Lazy Teaching further, faster and lazier than ever before, applying it not only outside of the classroom and into the day-to-day to life of the school as a whole but also with a special focus on the inspector’s current buzzword, ‘progress’.

Now, ‘progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long’, as Ogden Nash once said, but learning without progress is rarely learning. I have seen too many lessons where children merely replicate what they have learnt and already know, giving the impression of a very bright class of knowledgeable souls yet who are actually missing out on the opportunity to be stretched further with every minute that ticks inexorably by. A focus on progress, however, says, ‘I commit, as your teacher, to ensure you spend some of this lesson more stupid than you thought you were, and that you leave this classroom cleverer than when you entered it.’

And, when you combine this commitment to seeing your learners actually learning new things each and every lesson with a firm belief in the Lazy Way, then you have the opportunity for some really exciting, engaging, creative and wonderfully enjoyable lessons. With you working less in the process. Then throw in a whole-school approach to being Lazy that takes into account not just your lessons but also aspects of school life such as staff meetings, leadership and CPD and you have something quite special.

Enjoy, then, this second round of teaching done the Lazy Way from a master in the art of getting ‘them’ to do the work. In doing so you will not only help McLuhan’s prophecies come true but also help yourself, your career and your health. As the teacher who wrote about doing so much and getting nowhere in return concluded in her missive to Jim:

Thanks so much. I really love my job and don’t feel stressed or harassed one bit. In fact, I love getting up in the morning to go to work.

Lazy teachers who love getting up to go to work? Now there’s a paradox, but as the great physicist Niels Bohr once said:

‘How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.’

Ian Gilbert May 2012

* Yes, ‘massage’, you heard right. It was a misprint, but when McLuhan saw it he deemed it rather apt and chose to keep it.

Progress the Lazy Way – a Preface

A few years ago I was asked by Independent Thinking to put together my thoughts and ideas for a book about what we called ‘Lazy Teaching’. This was because (a) they wanted to get across the idea that, sometimes, the best thing we can do to help young people learn is to stop teaching them, in the traditional sense of the word, and (b) being a great big, ‘outstanding’ (not once but, ahem, twice inspected and thus acclaimed) Lazy Teacher myself I was the perfect person for the job.

The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook became one of the biggest selling educational books of the last few years. This is something that has, ironically, led me to be working harder than ever, not only continuing my work in the senior leadership team and geography department of a secondary school wedged between the M5 and the Bristol Channel (and recently classed as ‘outstanding’ itself) but also working around the country helping other teachers adopt and adapt their own Lazy Teaching practices.

Of course, a book with such a title is not without its controversies, most notably the claim that being lazy is the antithesis of being a good professional teacher (more of ‘Irate of Bucks’ later). But teaching in the ‘Lazy Way’, as we came to call it, is quite the opposite of that – if you can have an antithesis of an antithesis without the universe imploding. The teacher’s job is to engage their pupils and students in the best quality learning possible, for as long as possible and as often as possible. Learning is a personal, active process. The teacher at the front teaching is, for the learner, rarely personal and never active.

The Lazy Way, therefore, says that the more we can get the learner actively engaged in the pursuit, capture, employment and assessment of their own learning, the better. Which means planning lessons that are based around the learner learning and not the teacher teaching.