School holidays are the perfect opportunity to catch up on some reading – a little bit of ‘trash’ (usually a crime thriller), some children’s fiction (Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpugo, which made me cry so hard at the end that my family came to find out what on earth was the matter) and something that, although it might not have anything to do with education, might teach me something about leadership, the working of effective teams and life in general. This holiday I read ‘An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth’ by Chris Hadfield, as recommended to me by Marc Rowland. So, for what it’s worth, here is what I learnt.
Teachers are quite a lot like astronauts.
Chris Hadfield is an amazing man, the book is inspirational and I really recommend it. However, it did not make me want to go into space or feel any less anxious when getting on a plane. It did make me reflect on the similarities between the task of an astronaut and that of a teacher.
Astronauts have a really difficult job and so do teachers.
Early on in the book Chris says that astronauts are public servants, tasked with doing something difficult on behalf of the people of their country. It seems to me that this applies equally well to teachers and all those who work in education as it does to astronauts. Our job is to give all children the best possible chances in life and to make the education system better for those who come after us. We too are public servants tasked with doing something difficult. Just how difficult was evidenced by the recent report from CentreForum stating that “4 out of 5 disadvantaged pupils are failing to achieve a world-class standard at secondary school”.
Just like astronauts, teachers don’t give up when confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem. They will ‘work the problem’ with experts and colleagues. The recent focus on evidence based practice is a great help. As is the work of organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation which support schools to find and share that practice. Schools need to insist on evidence based practice in their classrooms and they need to be as willing to acknowledge the importance of finding out what doesn’t work as finding out what does. School leaders should encourage innovation and risk taking as a way to improve practice and this will involve making mistakes along the way. They need support to do this from an accountability system that is based on dialogue and trust not just data and suspicion. It would also help if the goal posts didn’t keep moving. It is easy for an astronaut and the general public to tell if a mission has been successful. Did we get to the moon and did we all come back alive? However when assessment and grade boundaries change as often as the weather and the means of reporting good progress suddenly looks completely different it is hard for anyone to really know if your mission has been successful or not. It is also hard not to feel a certain frustration when schools are told that they are only successful because the exams are a lot easier. It’s like being told that you only got to the moon because it is a lot closer now (when in fact we all know that the moon is moving away from us).
Preparation is as important when you enter a classroom as it is when you enter a rocket.
Chris talks about the need to “love the preparation as much as the actual thing” and we all know that the better you prepare for a lesson the better it is likely to be. I don’t just mean how important it is to protect teachers’ PPA time which guarantees them a proper amount of time to plan with colleagues so that they are properly prepared for the week. I also mean the other things that teachers do to better prepare themselves and that school leaders should facilitate, such as observing other teachers, having time to talk to children out of lessons, looking at children’s work to see where they need support or extension, planning with other adults who work with their children. In fact, anything that informs and improves teaching and learning is important preparation.
For an astronaut simulations are a bit like lesson study is for a teacher.
One of the best ways that astronauts practice for difficult jobs is through the use of simulations, perhaps via a computer or in a swimming pool. They also use this technique when something goes wrong in space and they have to improvise a solution. Astronauts back on earth practice things and iron out the problems so that their colleagues in space don’t make the same mistakes. Mistakes in space tend to be fatal! Lesson study works in a very similar way. A group of colleagues get together to prepare a ‘research lesson’ which is trying to show how to improve learning, especially overcoming barriers to learning for identified children who find learning difficult. These lessons are watched by a group of teachers who are going to be focussing on the learning of the identified children and assessing how well or otherwise the lesson supports them. Before the ‘research lesson’ other teachers, who have planned the lesson, teach it to another group of children so that they can find out what the problems are before the lesson ‘goes public’ and those problems can be ironed out. Often the problem is around the lesson being far too long, there being too much teacher talk and not enough time for children to work independently. These problems can be caught early and eliminated but other problems will occur in the lesson that couldn’t necessarily have been foreseen. This is where the post lesson discussion comes in. Just as the astronauts have a lengthy debrief after every simulation, so teachers have a discussion after every lesson study and in both cases observers and participants talk about what they observed and what went well and what went wrong. But here comes the big difference between the two and it is a difference that I hope to reflect on with colleagues over the coming weeks.
After any space simulation, the astronauts and the whole of the flight team, spare no punches in the debrief. They identify and analyse every single mistake as well as all the things that went right. Chris Hadfield says that they learn every single lesson possible and then ‘fold them back’ into what they call Flight Rules so that everyone benefits from those lessons and the same mistakes can’t be made again. I don’t think we do that particularly well in the post lesson discussion because we are very aware of the negative effect of too much criticism on our colleagues and I genuinely understand this. I hate being criticised, so my response (aside from preparing as much as possible) is to be the first to critique my own performance. I work with several teachers who are exactly the same and at the end of a lesson observation will come with a list of things that they think went wrong with the lesson. I think that there is something very powerful about this kind of critical debrief and I especially like the idea of ‘publishing’ some kind of ‘lesson rules’ so that the learning is shared and we come closer to codifying good practice in the classroom.
This holiday’s reading has given me lots to think about and lots to share and discuss with my colleagues. I did not think that I would learn so much from Chris Hadfield and you might not be convinced that astronauts and teachers are alike. Obviously, there are far more differences than similarities but one thing I’m certain of, to paraphrase Bill Shankley – teaching isn’t a matter of life or death. It’s much more important than that.
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