"Dont kid yourself lass, it's ICT": Generational attitudes towards Computing

I was recently talking to a family friend, a 7-year-old girl, the conversation turned to my occupation and she had to guess what I taught. It took her a while, guessing English, Science, Maths before me giving her a hint by acting out typing on a keyboard and using a mouse. Straight away she shouted “Computing!” When this happened, I paused to think about the difference between generations and what they label my subject.

We know that changes to the national curriculum have resulted in ICT changing to Computing. Computing is the study of the science behind computers, how they work, how to program and the components that constitute a computer. This is a change from ICT: a subject where one studies how to use a computer and the different software on a computer. Both are important, this is not a post about why one is better than the other, they both have their benefits and drawbacks. What I want to focus upon is how, as a teacher of Computer Science (as on my job description) I feel like a snob. I have had experiences where I have been talking to people from older generations and when they talk or discuss my subject they always refer to it as “ICT”. I have even had an experience where a cover teacher asked what I taught, when I stated Computing, they replied with something along the lines of “don’t kid yourself lass, it’s ICT”. As a socially polite young “lass” I just laughed this off, but it made me think about how the title teacher of Computing sounds to different generations. To the cover teacher, it was snobby and perhaps trying to be something that it is not. To the 7-year-old girl it was the subject she was studying in primary school. Either way both of these can be linked to socialisation. The cover teacher must have been socialised in the 2000s era where ICT and OCR Nationals were rife: ICT was screenshotting how you created that bar chart in Excel and creating PowerPoints with far too many animations and transitions. On the other hand, The 7-year-old girl is part of the current generation at the receiving end of the changes to the national curriculum: the focus on coding, Scratch being the favourite at primary school [and sometimes secondary school] level. Myself on the other hand, I am caught between the two, having experienced ICT within my own education, but being trained and teaching Computing.

Why is leadership favoured over management in education?

Managing and leading are two actions that can often be used to describe the same thing. As a result, it is often difficult to draw boundaries between the two. When I started my Masters in Educational Leadership I did not know the difference between the terms. Even now, I have to think about what actions pertain to each label. My reading and discussions with colleagues have led me to the following summaries:

Leaders: the ones with the ideas to drive change

Vision, mission statement, ethos, etc. Leaders are the ones that create the underlying ‘feeling’ of the educational institution. Leaders are the ones with the imagination in where they want to take the institution.

Managers: the ones who have to make sure that change happens

Managers are those who are employed to ensure that this vision, mission statement and ethos is achieved. Those who design and implement whole school policies; delegating work to other line managers such as heads of years and heads of departments.

Reflecting back upon my teaching career I have a sense that leaders are favoured over managers. I trained to teach through the Teach First Leadership Development Programme. What is interesting to reflect upon is why Teach First use “leadership” and not “management”. If one is training to teach, and therefore a potential head of department/head of year/senior leader, isn’t management something this teacher should be proficient in? Similarly, lecturers on my masters have stated that many masters courses which were called Educational Management have swapped the management out for leadership. Why was this change made? Although we do not know the true reason for this, it can be inferred that this change was a result of marketing: teachers want to be “Leaders” rather than “Managers”, but why? Is it the connotations that leadership has? I will continue to reflect upon this distinction, hopefully I can come back to the questions I have posed in this post. If you have any ideas, let me know!

Engaging the disengaged parent within education

Studies within education have consistently found that parental engagement within education positively impacts upon the educational success of young people: this is referred to as “good parenting” (Desforges and Abouchaar, 2003; Goodall, 2016; Goodall, 2017; Goodall and Vorhaus, 2011; Harris and Goodall, 2010). After critically engaging with these studies, it could be inferred that they assume a bias against parents that do not, for whatever reason, value the field of education: it positions this parenting as “bad”. As Bourdieu (1977) attributes parental involvement in education to parents of the middle class, it could be seen that this positioning of “bad parents” replicates some sociological studies which found the distancing and “disgust” of working class individuals (Lawler, 2005).  

Despite whether it is believed that labelling some parents as good or bad should be done, it has been found that the field of education can transform a child’s life (Teach First, 2017). If parental engagement contributes towards the educational success of a child, it is important that this is encouraged for disadvantaged pupils. Therefore, to raise the educational attainment of disengaged and underachieving pupils, educators must firstly engage the disengaged parent. To engage the disengaged parent, schools must strike a balance between encouraging parents to attend training session to support their child’s educational progress and treating them as a colleague: the expert on their child. Literature suggests that this balance should be achieved through engaging parents in a sensitive and personalised manner (Goodall, 2016; Smith, 2016).

There are two strategies, within the literature, that have been proven to engage parents in a sensitive and personalised manner: one that I cannot implement but another which I could adapt. The first one is Save the Children’s FAST programme in which parents and children were brought together for a meal within school (Harris and Goodall, 2010). This non-invasive approach gets the parent into the school to socialise with their child. It could make the parent feel more comfortable within the school environment and encourage them to speak about their child’s studies. Of course, as a classroom teacher, I could not implement this method. However, I found it an interesting social strategy to break down the barriers of parental disengagement. The second strategy comes from Goodall’s (2016) blog post on teachertoolkit.co.uk. This post encourages teachers to shift from reporting to parents at parents’ evening to fostering a partnership to support learning. Treating parents with respect, recognising and acknowledging their efforts to come to the parents evening are encouraged to foster this working relationship (Goodall, 2016). Furthermore, Goodall (2016) suggests giving parents a list of questions to ask teachers to supplement their cultural capital, as some parents may not know how to engage with the teacher. Similarly, Goodall (2016) suggests that teachers should ask the parents how they can facilitate learning for their children. Through treating the parent as the expert, the parent will feel more comfortable and at ease with engaging with teachers (Smith, 2016).

Following this research, I plan to approach parental engagement in a different way than I did last academic year. By moving from reporting to engaging parents to support learning and providing parents with resources they may need to do so. This is especially important within my subject, Computing; often parents will approach me and state that they “know nothing about technology” and that it is their children who are the experts. If parents feel intellectually inferior to their child, how can they possibly help support learning? Therefore, I plan to give a list of resources that may help to these parents and move away from subject specifics at parents evening. As Goodall, in a recent lecture, stated: it does not matter that parents do not know the answer, what matters is they know how to find the answer. I intend to provide parents with the means to find that answer.

References:

Bourdieu (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.

Desforges and Abouchaar (2003) The impact of parental involvement, parental support and family education on pupil achievements and adjustment: a literature review.

Goodall and Vorhaus (2011) Review of best practice in parental engagement. Department of Education.

Goodall, J (2016) Reporting to Support. Online: https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2016/08/10/parental-support/

Goodall, J (2017) From project to process. a report of the pilot of a toolkit for parental engagement. 

Harris and Goodall (2010) Helping families support children’s success at school. Save the Children.

Lawler (2005) Disgusted subjects: the making of middle-class identities. The Sociological Review, 53(3), 429-446.

Smith (2016) Swing Time. London: Penguin.

Teach First (2017) Income defines how well children do at school. Online: https://www.teachfirst.org.uk/our-mission/the-issue.

The insider/outsider continuum when researching education

There are two ways of addressing the insider/outsider debate: as a continuum and as a dichotomy. It has been argued that whilst conducting research the researcher can find themselves at some point along a continuum of insiderness (Mercer, 2007). On one side is the complete insider: the person who understands the inner workings of what they are researching. On the polar opposite side there is the outsider: the researcher completely new to the field with no knowledge of the topic. However, can one truly be an outsider? Although I would describe myself as an outsider to French art, I still have an opinion or a vague idea of what I think about the topic. Similarly, can anyone be a true insider? Although one may think they know everything about the topic they are researching, they do not know what they do not know (Krunger and Dunning, 1999). Following this logic, I must agree with Mercer (2007) in that the researcher is located along a continuum of insider and outsiderness rather than the dichotomy representing the researcher as either an insider or outsider with no in between. Below is a visual representation I have created to show the continuum vs the dichotomy.

Continuum:

Dichotomy:

Mercer (2007, p.2) writes that the insider/outsider debate is under researched yet important to an "ever increasing number of educational researchers". Indeed, when I decided to enter the teaching profession, I thought the experience would be beneficial for my future career ambitions as an educational researcher; the idea of being more of an insider appealed to me. I had decided that being a secondary STEM teacher allowed me to be in the midst of education; this would help me better understand the institution as well as its current issues. On the continuum, I wanted to be located more on the insider side than I currently was. 

Of course, there are many critiques of researching one's own educational institution, Simmel (1950) argues that the insider can be easily influenced and "blinded" by the familiarity of the setting. In contrast, advocates for insider research actually argue the opposite: the insider is able to comprehend the setting through their expert knowledge of status, culture and power relations (Merton, 1972). Looking back to when I was an undergraduate I can see why we were told to research an institution that we were a part of. Obviously ease of access played a part, but thinking back it could be possible this was due to understanding the culture and group which would help first time researchers. For instance, Mercer (2007) writes that an advantage of insiderness is flexibility; during my undergraduate degree I interviewed two of my undergraduate housemates at around 11pm after watching Made in Chelsea. The insider also negates the disadvantage of the outsider as Parades (1977) and Zinn (1979) found that these researchers are likely to be presented with a distorted image; hello every school when the famous outsider Ofsted comes for a visit.

However, one of the disadvantages of being an insider is that colleagues’ "willingness to talk to you and what they say to you is influenced by who they think you are" (Drever, 1995). During my PGCE year, my then school mentor sent an email around the school asking if any colleagues would allow me to observe them. It could be seen that their idea of who I was and what I would observe influenced their decision to allow me into their classroom. It could be that those who agreed saw me as an inexperienced trainee teacher and they held epistemological power. This highlights the type of power relationship between the researcher and the researched which Mercer (2007) describes as a dimension of the insider/outsider continuum. Whilst observing colleagues I was located at differing parts of the continuum: I am an insider to the school policies and familiar pupils but an outsider to unknown pupils, possibly the subject I am observing and the teacher’s techniques (Olson, 1977; Mercer, 2007; Deutsch, 1981).  It will be interesting to see how these relationships change when I ask to observe colleagues for my masters. Will those who do not hold the qualification feel epistemologically challenged? Will those who hold a masters degree feel more powerful, allow me in their classroom and treat me as an insider?

References:

Deutsch, C. P. (1981) The behavioral scientist: insider and outsider, Journal of Social Issues, 37(2), 172–191.

Drever, E. (1995) Using semi-structured interviews in small-scale research (Edinburgh, The Scottish Council for Research in Education).

Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. 77 (6): 1121–1134

Mercer, J. (2007) The Challenges of Insider-Research in Educational Institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas, Oxford Review of Education, 33(1), 1-17.

Merton, R. (1972) Insiders and outsiders; a chapter in the sociology of knowledge, American Journal of Sociology, 78 (July), 9–47.

Olson, D. H. (1977) Insiders’ and outsiders’ views of relationships: research studies, in: G. Levinger & H. L. Rausch (Eds) Close relationships: perspectives on the meaning of intimacy (Amhurst, University of Massachusettes Press).

Parades, A. (1977) On ethnographic work among minority groups: a folklorist’s perspective, New Scholar, 6, 1–53.

Simmel, G. (1950) The sociology of Georg Simmel (New York, Free Press).

Zinn, M. B. (1979) Field research in minority communities: ethical methodological and political observations by an insider, Social Problems, 27(2), 209–219

Recruiting teachers of Computer Science: schools losing the “best and brightest graduates” to corporations

As it is the first week of the school year, many new trainee teachers will be starting out in their future career. One of the things that brought them to teaching was recruitment. It is interesting to think about how recruitment differs within different sectors. Interestingly, my partner and I were discussing our days at work. He stated that a new Junior Software Developer had started and that he used to be a Chemistry teacher up until last academic year. He added that this teacher was well into his 30s and was evidently a “career changer”. This made me think about the state of recruitment of Computer Science teachers within the English state education system.

Jones starts the second chapter in his book, The Establishment (2015); retelling a conversation he had after an interview with a senior lobbyist for a banking company. He states his view on politician’s salary: Jones states that there is a case for reducing MP’s salaries as MP’s are “comfortably placed in the top 5% of earners” (2015, p. 46). This leads the lobbyist to argue that “such a move would deter the most talented people, particularly from the private sector, from entering politics”. This led me to think about the current recruitment context of teachers. In fact, doesn’t this argument resonate with all employment sectors? Don’t all employers wish to recruit “the most talented people”?

Indeed, the school I work at is aiming to recruit English, Math, Science and MFL teachers, a glance at the job advert shows that the salary is “competitive”. So why is there is shortage of teachers if schools are trying to attract the most talented people with these “competitive” salaries? Of course, I cannot provide a sweeping answer as this would be too generalised. But what I can do is speculate. I am currently employed as a Computer Science teacher whilst my partner, is employed as a Junior Software Developer. We’re both at the very beginnings of our careers having started our jobs at the same time. Although the subject knowledge required is relatively the same, the salary is not. My starting salary as a teacher is £10,000 less than my partner’s starting salary. Obviously financial reward is not, in isolation, the reason to enter a specific field of work but if we apply this senior lobbyist’s logic why is there not a similar recruitment incentive for teachers? Does our society not want “the most talented people” teaching our future generations?

The current financial incentives are clearly not enough, at the moment in order to attract the “best and brightest graduates” that could teach any subject within the English Baccalaureate are up to £30,000 tax free bursaries and scholarships. This clearly matches the starting salaries of some graduate jobs. But, what about after they have trained, will schools who employ the “Best and brightest graduates” be able to afford them as an NQT? Will those schools who are too poor to even afford a printing budget, be able to afford these “talented” classroom teachers? I have heard a lot of stories already from ex-classroom teachers who have found jobs in other sectors such as banking because their schools “could not afford them” as simply just classroom teachers without giving them more responsibility such as a middle/senior leader.  Although helpful, the financial incentive during the recruitment of teachers is not enough. If we want to recruit and keep, the “most talented people” as teachers, it is important to adopt a similar stance as the senior lobbyist within Jones (2015), more money needs to be put into the salary of classroom teachers. 

Teachers teaching teachers, is there pedagogy for that?

So far in my teaching career, I have attended two training sessions both with the aims of aiding the teacher with knowledge of how to teach pupils with English as an Additional Language (EAL). After attending one of these sessions at a Computing at School conference today, I began reflecting on the actual pedagogy behind teaching teachers about these matters. Both sessions began with the session leader conducting the training in another language: in one the session leader began talking to us in Spanish (although I can speak Spanish), and the other gave us an activity written entirely in Polish. I thought that this was a very useful method to get teachers to reflect upon their lessons and the language that we take for granted. Putting ourselves in the pupils shoes is often difficult when we already know the knowledge we are trying to convey, but if we do not know a language it is easier to empathise with EAL learners. This is often one thing that I am guilty of forgetting, I will ensure that when planning lessons for EAL pupils I think about it from a non-English speaking point of view and invoke the use of sound and pictures to convey the meaning.

However, this got me thinking about the overall teaching of teachers. Who trains these teachers to teach teachers? Is there a pedagogy that trainers must understand to teach pedagogy to teachers? It would be very interesting to research into this and find results, watch this space.