All the potential is there.
This tree is a wayfaring.
Today it was announced that the government will fund the
“Claim Your College”
coalition of vested interests and their scheme to create
a professional body for teachers
that’s actually open to “anyone with an interest in
education”.
Either the government hasn’t read the proposals, or
simply does not care what they are funding
as long as they can say something about education during
the election campaign.
They are promising to make “significant funding available
to the ‘claim your college’ consortium –
a coalition of leading organisations in the education
sector – to support them in their endeavour
to establish an independent college of teaching, which
will be owned and led
by the teaching profession” [my italics]. Where this ownership is
meant to come from
given who is setting this group up and who is allowed to
join it is beyond me.
But now they seem likely to have something like £12
million of public money to play with.
Worse there is the suggestion that:
It is expected that the new college of teaching might
take on greater responsibility for areas
such as professional standards and continuous
professional development, should it so wish, thus moving stewardship of the
profession out of the hands of the government and to the profession.
So that’s not just money, but also power over our
professional development,
in the hands of a body that has no mandate from the
profession,
only one from vested interests including (as I pointed
out here ) at least one private company
selling professional development training.
Now, this sort of thoughtless spending of public money
would be challenged
by a competent opposition spokesman. In fact, in any
other sector, it probably would be.
Could you imagine Andy Burnham standing by if the
government proposed giving power
over doctors to an organisation set up by pharmaceutical
companies?
But in the Bizarro World that is education, the
opposition seem as dead set on this quango
as the government. In a speech today Tristram Hunt implied that the College
of Teaching,
rather than being a product of vested interests holding
meetings on weekdays,
lobbying for public money, was a grass roots product of
social media:
…we need an element of trust. To reject an
affliction which seems to bedevil Westminster culture.
I call it the cult of the big reformer. A sort of
alpha male compulsion to see public policy
through the prism of your ‘reforming legacy’.
But you only have to see how social media has sent a
shockwave through the teaching profession and its conversation about a new
College of Teaching,
to see how profoundly out of date this attitude really
is.
… the days of education by diktat must come to an
end.
More than ever before change in education must come from
the bottom-up.
Through decentralisation. Through devolving power.
Yes, that’s right. He thinks that chucking money at
vested interests to regulate, sorry,
to assume stewardship of the teaching
profession is decentralisation.
If he’d actually read the conversations on social media
about the College Of Teaching,
he’d know how few of those involved are actually teaching
now
and how little say those of us in the classroom have had.
That said, Tristram Hunt was probably focused on trying
to deliver the worst speech on education from a British politician I have
ever read. In what seemed to be an attempt to give an aneurysm
to anybody trying to play Bullshit Bingo, he managed
some outstandingly cliché-soaked passages
of which the following extract gives a flavour:
But I don’t think anybody here would argue with me if I
suggested we have only just begun
to scratch the surface of what we could achieve. 3D
printing; Augmented reality; Coding; Robotics; Big
data; Interactive textbooks; Adaptive learning software; The
technology is truly remarkable.
So whilst I know it has been prematurely prophesied many
times before, I do believe this is finally the moment when technology
changes the way teachers carry out their craft.
We will see schools where every lesson can be
simultaneously tailored to the needs
of each individual pupil; schools where data about
the effectiveness of different pedagogies
can be shared with teachers in real time; and
schools where software has liberated teachers
from the yoke of marking exercise books.
However, the needs of the economy will dictate a
rebalancing of what we teach
as well as how we teach it. After all, a creative
age demands more creativity.
A digital economy demands advanced digital skills such as
coding and big data analytics;
and a world class STEM sector demands we finally consign
our deeply engrained
cultural snobbery towards technical education to the
dustbin of history.
But as Andreas Schleicher of the OECD has argued – our
schools system must also
“prepare young people for jobs that have not yet been
created,
technologies that have not yet been invented and problems
that we don’t yet know will arise.”
Between government ministers unable to tell the
difference between the teaching profession
and the CPD industry, and an opposition spokesman
sounding like Shift Happens,
this is a grim day for the politics of education. Perhaps
my memory is playing tricks on me,
but I don’t remember even Ed Balls being this hopeless,
and the Gove era is a much-missed golden age compared
with this shambles.
https://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/politicians-competing-to-be-the-most-clueless-about-education/
Introduction
to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading
YouTube
How to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when
Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister
blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com gives many ways
for you to work with the stresses of life
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com which takes
advantage of the experience and expertise of others.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To
quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will
know.
The
more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
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Your opinions, experience and questions are welcome. M'reen