Black horehound.
How can we create
‘an ethic of excellence’ in our schools?
Harry Fletcher-Wood
For twenty-five years I’ve led a double life. I’m a
full-time classroom teacher in a public school.
In order to make ends meet for my family, I’ve worked
during the summers, vacations,
and sometimes weekends, as a carpenter. In the
classroom or on the building site
my passion is the same: If you’re going to do something, I
believe, you should do it well. You should sweat over it and make sure
it’s strong and accurate and beautiful and you should be proud of it.”
So, beguilingly, Ron Berger begins An Ethic
of Excellence. I imagine him sweating over
a series of drafts to refine this passage into a fitting
introduction to the aspects of the book
which make it such a pleasure to read: expressing his
pride in his craftsmanship
and his students’ work; drawing explicit analogies
between carpentry and scholarship;
demonstrating his care for elegant writing.
What is ‘An Ethic
of Excellence?’
Much of Berger’s environment is alien to me – but his
careful evocation brings it to life.
With a handful of colleagues, he teaches in a rural
elementary school which educates
all of the town’s children. In this small
community, he spends much of his spare time
working as a carpenter. His students pursue
long-running projects, for example, one term,
students learn about the culture of deaf people and
conduct an exchange with
a school for deaf children; another project sees students
analyse the town’s water supplies
and share the results. Berger remains in contact
with a large number of his students,
long after they have left the school. This life and
work is woven throughout the book
and forms much of the substance for the arguments he
makes about education:
An archive of
excellence
They can’t have lost my student work.
This work is
more precious than anything I own. It’s irreplaceable. My students will kill me.”
Berger shows that his heart is in his students’ work.
He writes with passion about the growth his students achieve and their ability to
articulate it.
Their portfolios showcase work which outsiders deem
professional
and beyond the competence of children; it is revealed to be the product of careful and patient redrafting.
Every student is proved capable of creating astonishingly competent and
mature work, overcoming individual weaknesses in doing so.
Berger collects this work and uses it as his strongest proof
of the worth of all he does.
A culture of
excellence
Thinking
that projects or critique or portfolios are a
magic solution is as silly
as thinking high-stakes testing will turn schools around.
Only as part of a strong classroom culture
or school culture are those tools valuable. Culture
matters.”
Berger deliberately places developing a ‘culture of
excellence’ first, arguing that the environment
and peer pressure do most to
form students’ attitudes and responses to school.
He mentions a critical moment in a troubled student’s
integration into his school:
the lesson when he first made a real effort in his work
and received genuine praise
from his peers. He contrasts schools which suffer
from, and are overwhelmed by, neglect,
with those where teachers and principals create oases of
calm, order and beauty.
The interaction between his school and town exemplifies
the merits of treating the school
as belonging to the community and the reciprocal support
offered by residents.
Berger gives no magic formula for developing a strong
culture in a school;
he offers ideas to think about, and a sense of the
importance of doing so.
Work of excellence
Last year I was at the checkout counter of a grocery
store and the cashier,
the mother of one of the students who worked on the
project, looked at me and said:
My son will never be the same. No matter how many
tests tell him he’s stupid,
he knows he’s not. He did that work. He knows
he’s capable of excellence.”
Berger explains a series of the strategies he employs
which help his students
create great work. Some of these are fundamental
decisions about the curriculum:
he uses extended cross-curricular studies and conducts
genuine research, investigating
and publishing the radon levels and water purity in the
town, for example.
Others are techniques which make high quality work within
these projects possible,
such as using multiple drafts and keeping ‘tribute work’
– models of the best projects completed
in previous years. His use of ‘critique’
(peer-assessment, in essence), was particularly interesting, because he has
turned something which is often denigrated (frequently with good reason),
into a powerful tool which refines students’
understanding of their work and how to improve
while also reinforcing the notions of peer pressure and
community made in the previous section.
I could go on about this section: each of the strategies
is interesting and worthy of consideration
and analysis, in a forthcoming post I will come back to
some of them.
Teachers’ pursuit
of excellence
I look at this group of teachers and I’m filled with
admiration. The building is a wreck,
the administration is awful, the students are transient
and struggling, the newspapers attack
the school and the teachers with criticism over test
scores. But these people aren’t giving up!”
What do teachers need to ensure their students’ success?
Berger discusses, with distaste,
the efforts of some of the ‘reformers’ with whom he has
come into contact,
disdaining ideas such as merit pay, teacher competition and ‘teacherproof’
solutions.
He contrasts the choice between a body of teachers who
are underpaid, insufficiently supported
and considered replaceable, and the prospects of making
teaching a desirable profession
in which teachers are given autonomy and support to work
well.
Berger considers the apprenticeship which a carpenter
goes through to attain mastery
and compares it unfavourably with the limited mentoring
given new teachers.
He provides few answers, but he sounds a strong warning
that the success he has achieved
in his own school can only be undermined by policies
which fail to trust and support teachers.
How does An Ethic
of Excellence apply outside rural America?
How applicable is this narrative outside Berger’s
context?
Here are some of my thoughts while reading the book:
– If I taught in elementary school teacher and had the same students all day,
then I could do this…
– If only we had portfolio-based assessment, then this would work…
– If I were in a one-school district and we could design our own measures of
success, then…
– If I were a carpenter…
But these questions missed the mark, because they fixated
on the superficial.
Most of what Berger writes about could be applied in any
British classroom.
The quality of work Berger describes is something I have
always wished to see
in my students’ writing. What his book forced me to
reconsider was how I ensure students
achieve this. I made myself one promise on reading
the book: every piece of serious work
my students do this year, they will redraft three times.
As with many of Berger’s actions,
this may appear superficial; behind it lies a commitment
to deploy a range of strategies
(some Berger’s, some from elsewhere) which ensure that
the act of redrafting is worthwhile
and leads to substantial improvement between the drafts
and a culminating work of excellence.
(Assuming I write quickly enough, next week’s blog will
examine this process in more detail).
With an underlying vision for an ethic of excellence in
my classroom,
I can commit to this single change; I suspect the same
impulse could work in any school
and any teacher’s role. Berger’s book is a powerful
manifesto for an original and inspiring curriculum and pedagogy, inseparable
from deep rigour and a quest for perfection.
Berger believes in the potential of his students to
create great work and he calls for teachers
to be trusted to make this possible, there are many ways
teachers,
schools and policy-makers could achieve this.
What do teachers
make?
Berger’s conclusion reminds us what we are doing as
teachers: forming adults.
He asks himself, “How do I really know what I have done
for my students?”
I think of my life in my small town. The policeman
for my town is a former student.
I trust him to protect my life; I trust him to work
kindly and carefully with the young students
in my school, which he does often and does tenderly.
The nurse at my medical clinic
is my former student. I trust her with my health….
There may not be numbers to measure
these things but there is a reason I feel so free and
thankful trusting my life to these people:
They take pride in doing their best. They have an
ethic of excellence.”
Perhaps, for teachers of my age, experience or career
history, it is easy to overlook this.
The targets which schools and governments set, the data
which we collect
and on which we are judged, do very little to correct
this deficiency.
I was inspired by Andy Day’s reflections on teaching
generations of students
and looking to the long term; likewise, Berger reminds us
where our ultimate responsibility lies
and the real product of our lessons.
My reaction to working in a very authoritarian school
abroad, before teacher training,
was to enter teaching enraptured by the works of AS Neill
and Paolo Freire.
At present, I suspect a pervading feeling that teachers’
professionalism is under constant assault
is driving me to a faith in it which borders on panacea.
Nonetheless, Berger’s argument culminates, strongly, in a belief that
teachers, as professionals and craftsmen,
must be trusted to formulate and cultivate an ethic of
excellence in their students.
Further reading
Alex Quigley has also reviewed the book.
To see this in practice, Tom Sherrington wrote earlier
this week on some of Berger’s techniques, while David Didau has explored employing
‘public critique.’
Dave Fawcett has written a characteristically thoughtful
and thorough post on building a culture of
critique.
If you haven’t read Andy Day’s post discussing
this generational approach to teaching
and educational and social justice, I’d
encourage you to do so.
http://improvingteaching.co.uk/2013/11/10/how-can-we-create-an-ethic-of-excellence-in-our-schools/
You can TCR software
and engineering manuals for spontaneously recall –
or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what
I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve
read.
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading
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Perhaps you’d like to check
out my sister blogs:
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.”
