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Preface
In one of those moments when you know you have been at something too long, I looked out of the library window. I was halfway through the reading list for my PGCE essay on managing children’s behaviour and felt totally uninspired. I wondered, not for the first time, whether what was expected of me was to simply paraphrase all the instructions I was reading about how to control children. I thought teaching was going to be about more than this.
I moved on to the next book on the pile, opening the simple blue and orange cover expecting more instructions. This one was different; the author hadn’t set out to tell me what to do, but to raise some questions and present some research on the evidence that might inform the answers. The case studies encouraged me to think about what effect the way the furniture in a classroom might affect how the children perceived it, raise questions about the messages that were being put across through the way tasks were designed, and question the assumptions I was making about how people think when implementing reward charts, even if they do appear to work
This, I thought, is what teaching should be about; not ticking off the answers, but starting to think.
Several months later, as I walked off the stage, I felt a hand on my arm.
Turning round, I saw a teacher whose blog I had been following for the past year and who had been giving me ideas for the classroom since I had started training to be a teacher. ‘Great stuff,’ he said, ‘you really made me think differently about that; you took some research, thought about it and made it happen in your classroom. More of us should be thinking like that.’
I had found out about TeachMeets only a few months before, when I heard about a group of teachers who got together in Nottingham to share ideas that had worked in their classrooms. The empowering nature of them appealed to me and, as a newly qualified teacher in a school with a remit for trying new things, I was hungry for ideas I could develop.
So, when I saw a similar get-together was happening at an education technology show I was going to, I signed up to attend, and without thinking too much about it, I also signed up to share an idea, just thinking that was the way it worked.
I did not expect to be picked by the random generator to be one of the first to present. I did not expect to stand on a stage in front of 300 people.
I certainly did not expect for so many of those people to say I had made them think about taking perspectives from research to think differently about their teaching. That, I thought, is what teaching is about; not ticking off the next new idea, but always trying to think.
Some weeks later, I was teaching subtracting two-digit numbers, and I was demonstrating to the class of 8-year-olds how to use a hundred square to calculate the difference between 100 and any two-digit number. I was halfway through when Barnes put his hand up. So as not to confuse things, I thought I would come to his question once I had finished explaining. But Barnes couldn’t wait, and he politely but assertively interrupted me. ‘Mr Quinlan, please don’t say “count down”,’ he said. ‘It might be moving down the board but you are counting up in tens that could really confuse some people.’ He knew what I meant, but he was thinking beyond that thinking about the implications of the language I was using on the understanding of the rest of the class. That, I thought, is what teaching should be about; getting them thinking.
If we want thinking children, we need thinking teachers.