Professor Brian Boyd’s Speech
Your Voice – Education Matters conference, 2 October 2010, Stirling
Thank you very much for that introduction, can I just – I don’t have to do a sound check, I’ve already
done one – just do an accent check, just for those from south of the border, just do a bit of talking
before I start saying anything of interest. I’ll fill you in a wee bit on the background that’s there. As
you probably can do if you do the math, I’ve been teaching now for 40 years. I started in 1970. All
that does is to make me old, it doesn’t do anything else. I often speak to audiences now where at
least half of them weren’t born when I started teaching, so they just had to listen to my pearls of
wisdom.
I’m a secondary teacher by training. As you can see, I’ve held various posts in secondary schools,
and for the last 15 years or so I’ve worked as, some people would call, an academic at the University
of Strathclyde. More importantly than that, my wife was also, up until recently, a Deputy Head of a
secondary and she recently asked me a question, and she said “Brian, when was the last time you
actually taught?” So she doesn’t think that anything I do now is teaching. If you don’t teach children
then you’re not really teaching and she thinks I shouldn’t pontificate about teaching because I’m no
longer doing it! And I have a son Chris and Chris has a modicum of fame in Scotland. In fact
someone already this morning asked how he was doing. “How’s Chris doing?” Chris is now 23, for
those of you who want to know, and I’ve been writing about him for all of his 23 years. He’s been my
little, kind of research sample of one, throughout my career.
I would also like to say that what I am going to try and do today is to speak for no longer than 40
minutes, you’d be glad to hear, so we can leave some time for questions. I am I going to try and
address the central issue which is motivating learners in Scottish schools. I’m going to talk about how
we do it and how we might do it.
So, let me fill in one or two bits of information that I really have to come clean on. One is that I was a
member on the group that produced a Curriculum for Excellence. So if you are looking for somebody
to blame, blame me. Now I’ll defend it to the hilt, but I’m not going to talk about it for the whole of the
next 40 minutes. One or two of you have reached the end of your tether about discussions for
Curriculum for Excellence. The one thing I will say is that I tried very hard to get my point of view
across in the discussions that lead to the Curriculum for Excellence without an awful lot of success on
one or two occasions. I also tried to get the word “fun” into the document and I failed. It’s not there. I
can remember the conversation, I remember one of the members of the group said to me, “Brian, you
can’t put the word ‘fun’ in the document”, and there was a pause. She said: “If you put the word ‘fun’
in the document, that will give the impression that all learning should be fun”. And there was another
pause. And she said, “Some learning just has to be boring”. And that was it. So 300 years of
Calvinism, if it’s good for you, you shouldn’t be enjoying it, basically, that’s what they put in this
Curriculum for Excellence!
And the second thing was, I didn’t much like the title. I still don’t like it. Excellence was a word that
was given to us by the politicians. It’s a good word, but it keeps bad company and the bad company
is the politicians. I wanted it to be Curriculum for Learning, or a Curriculum for Life or whatever, but
we were stuck with it. So, that’s the only apology that I am going to make.
Now you will notice that I’ve started this particular section of the day with a quotation from a poem by
Mya Angelou. Now Mya Angelou is a black American writer, she writes a lot of autobiographical pros,
but also as a poet of some note. In fact she wrote a poem on the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, I
seem to remember and read it out at that event. Now one of her poems is called To My Grandmother
and there’s a section of the poem at the end is a stanza, which is a series of one line descriptions of
roles that her grandmother played throughout her long life and one of them is in classrooms, loving
children to understanding. But for me that just summed up, I think, what I’d always tried to do as a
teacher, loving children to understanding. Now, I just wanted to let you know that I feel quite proud of
reading that quotation out, because I’m from the west of Scotland and west of Scotland men don’t use
the word love in public. In fact, we don’t even use it in private. So here am I saying essentially, ok,
you’ll not find the word love either in Curriculum for Excellence but it’s about empathy, it’s about trying
to put yourself in the shoes of the other (inaudible) it’s about belief, it’s about having faith in the
youngster’s ability to be a successfully learner. But it’s also about understanding, and understanding
and learning are not the same. Understanding is a whole different process. It’s about depth as
opposed to coverage of the curriculum and I’ll say a wee bit more about that later. So, I make no
apologies for the poem, for the poetic reference, and there will be one or two others as we go in,
hopefully if I’ve got time.
So, Motivating Learners in Scottish Schools. How do we do it and how would we do it more
effectively? Are you impressed about my command of this technology? If I press this button at any
point and nothing happens I’ll probably cry. Ok, I’ve no idea how it works, I just know that it should.
So I’m going to give you a little advanced organiser in the best traditions of being a teacher. This is
what I am going to try to cover in the next 35 minutes or so.
So, let’s have a look at learning. That’s our core business as you might say in another kind of sphere,
that’s our core endeavour. What do we know about it? What are the things that hinder it? What are
the things that help it?
Inspiration, now that’s a big ask, isn’t it? If someone asks you to come along and talk about
inspiration, quite often when I get asked to do this kind of thing, and we have a bit of a discussion
about what topic we have to cover and occasionally people say, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter, just be
inspiring”. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s a huge weight of responsibility, “Just be inspiring”.
So I’m going to try and talk a wee bit about inspiration, what it is and how we can produce it, if you
like. And finally, how do you find space for inspiration in an increasingly crowded curriculum?
So, before any further ado, I’m going to say something about at least one person sitting in this room,
but I’m not going to identify that person, it would be cruel. But it’s in the context of inspiration. About,
it must be 12 / 13 years or so ago, I was working on a school improvement project and it was a joint
venture between Strathclyde University and the University of London, Institute of Education. People
like Peter Mortimore and so on were involved and as part of my role I was a critical friend to a number
of schools, two of which were primary schools in the Inverness area, one of them was Dalneigh
Primary and the other was Smithton. And there are various things that I can remember from those
days, all of which are positive, but there was one in particular. One particular visit that I made to
Dalneigh Primary School that I often talk about, but I didn’t think I would ever meet the person again,
although I’ve met her this morning.
I remember standing talking to this particular person in the school cafeteria and we were standing
chatting about various things. And every now and again a child would appear with a tray and on the
tray would be the remnants of her lunch. Now very often there were no words spoken, the child would
come up and present the tray to this person and this person would go – and that would mean, no you
haven’t eaten enough, sit down. And then someone else would come up and this person would go –
and point over there and that’s where the trays went. I mean, I was absolutely fascinated. And
sometimes there would be a word, and she would say “more peas”, “more potatoes”, seriously, and
this went on, and I thought wow, this is fantastic, isn’t it?
Now you’ve got healthy eating summed up in a kind of wordless exchange. The youngsters knew you
didn’t get out of that room without this person checking that you’d eaten enough of your lunch, that
was the first thing. And the second thing, and this is highly topical if you’re looking at what is
happening south of the border in education, I was standing in a crowded corridor, when just after the
bell had gone and a wee girl, who was probably Primary 1 I think, came running along the corridor,
shouted this teacher’s name and ran towards her. And I looked and thought what’s going to happen
next. And just as the child approached her she bent down, picked the child up and gave her a hug.
It’s good isn’t it, isn’t it? That’s what you would do, wouldn’t you? That’s what you would do, but it’s
not what everybody would do, because people are now concerned about that. And now there’s more
discussion about whether or not teachers have really been dissuaded from that kind of physical
contact. But that image stays with me, that was inspirational. That approach to the young person.
So, I just I’d do that, I’ve embarrassed her now, she’s now, if you want to know who she is, she’s
probably sliding under your table at the moment, but I’ll say nothing more about that.
So, can we have a wee look at learning and let’s see what we can say about learning and its
connection, if you like with inspiration. Right, let’s have a look at what learning is for. Well of course
learning is about passing exams, isn’t it? That’s why we are here. That’s the thing that we are
measured by. As you will probably know, those of you working in Scottish primary schools, you’ll
know that there was a decision taken maybe 5 or 6 years ago by the previous administration that we
no longer had to use 5-14 tests and that the information from 5-14 tests would not be gathered, and
would not be used as a measure of the school, or of the teacher. And what’s happening now, well
they are still being gathered in some authorities, even when we have now ostensibly got a new
curriculum.
So the idea that somehow or other exam success and test scores measure the effectiveness of
education is very stubborn, isn’t it? It just simply won’t go away. And even if local authorities don’t do
it, the press does it. They use freedom of information, so that every year in Scotland’s Scotland on
Sunday, will produce league tables, won’t they, of primary schools or of secondary schools. So there
is a big issue I think about what’s been happening over the last 30 years. Why have examination
results become, in some people’s eyes, the only measure of the effectiveness of schools? Now I’m
going to argue, as you can probably guess, that they are a very incomplete measure of the
effectiveness of schools or of teachers. But they are part of the real politic, they are there, and I don’t
see any signs, do you, that it’s going to go away? So, we somehow have to take them into account,
and we will see how we can do that as we move on.
Employment. Well, clearly there is a link, isn’t there, between schooling and employment? But it
would be a very utilitarian school system if that was its only focus, preparing young people for
employment. How would you do it anyway, when the kinds of employment that young people will take
up in the future sometimes don’t yet exist, because technology hasn’t created new forms of
employment? So in a sense it’s a very narrow way of looking at the role of education and yet clearly
there is some kind of reality we need to produce young people who are flexible, who are creative.
Who are, if you like, adaptable, who can solve problems, who can work in teams, who can work with
people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different races.
All of these things are important, employability skills, soft skills as sometimes called, but that can’t be
the only reason why we’re involved in the particular endeavour. Is it for life? Is it about preparing
people for life? Now Nardia [Foster] has just made the point that we, most of us, wouldn’t be here
were it not for our particular educational experiences. How often, and I haven’t got time to go over
this today, but I often talk to people about what I think of the strengths of Scottish education and I
often use my own family as a kind of backdrop to that.
My father was born in 1913 and just for a case of symmetry I will collect my old age pension in 2013.
Quite nice isn’t it? Nice kind of symmetry. When my father and mother were educated in the 1930s
(1920s/1930s), neither of them achieved a secondary education. I came across my mother’s last
report card a few years back and she left school from the advanced division of a primary school in
Anderson in Glasgow. She never got to secondary, why? Because she wasn’t deemed academic
enough and the same was true of my father.
By the time I got to school, things had changed, much better, I went to school in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I
went to secondary school. I went to a prestigious senior secondary school. It took two buses to get
there. We lived in Drumchapel, I had to get the bus into George Square and another up to the east
end of Glasgow, now that’s how prestigious it was, two buses. Now I got there, and I got a good
education and got to university. It was only much later that I realised that only 35% of the pupil
population got to senior secondary schools, the other 65% got to junior secondaries. Now I still meet
people, you’ll meet them, who still carry a burden of resentment, a feeling of failure that they never got
to senior secondary school. So selection was big then and it was based on very incomplete
measures of people’s ability to benefit from education. So it wasn’t a brilliant system.
By the time that my son got to school, it was much better. Now I know that this is contentious, it’s
quite nice when you reach my age to think it was better in my day, wasn’t it, It’s always better in my
day. Well actually I’m not sure that it was. My son’s education was fantastic, in Mossnewk Primary
School in East Kilbride, it was wonderful. It was a broad, balanced, creative, inspirational, empathetic
kind of environment. Whenever there were problems they just solved them, they just got together and
they solved them, it was fantastic. And he went to Duncanrig Secondary School and he had a very
successful experience, curricular, extra curricular and he achieved a group of highers that I could only
have dreamt of.
When I was in fifth year, I have to say, I went on to university where I also did well, so I’m a strong,
strong proponent of education being as broadly based as possible and not making decisions that
close off avenues for young people. I’m absolutely against labelling young people and putting them
into categories. I think what we need to do is keep the door open to the possibility that young people
are capable of learning.
Now, it’s all been pretty serious so far hasn’t it, and this is a Saturday morning. I should have just
come off a 5-a-side court about 15 minutes ago, so I’m not going to be po-faced for the whole of this
time. Can I tell you the odd anecdote, would you mind, would that be okay? Well can I just give you
a little indication of how, in a sense, how fragile the whole business of being a teacher is? And how
sometimes we can get it wrong, unwittingly, and how now I think now-a-days we are much better
informed as teachers and much less likely to get it wrong.
Right, here’s a piece of information I left out of my biography. When I was 18 years of age in 1966, I
played football for Scottish schoolboys against English schoolboys in England, right, 1966. Now
those of you who know anything about football will know that there was another game that year, do
you remember it? So our game was overshadowed more than somewhat, right, nobody remembers
it. And you might be wondering what was the score, and the score was we beat them, one each.
Now you nearly need to be Scottish to appreciate the irony of that don’t you? We beat them one
each, they were bigger than us, they were heavier than us, but we beat them one each. Now I’m just
putting that as a background because I was good at football, that was my forte.
So, when I was moving from primary school to secondary school there were two things of which I was
pretty certain, one is that I would get into the school football team, just a matter of time really, and I
would also get into the choir. Now, how did I know I would get into the choir, well I was a great singer.
How did I know that? Well because my big brother was six years older than me and he was really
into Elvis in the 50s. So apparently, I am told that I could sing any Elvis hit, at any point, word for
word. And every New Year we went to my Granny’s, okay a wee bit of nostalgia here, you went to
your Granny’s at New Year, didn’t you and you had a sing-song. So every year my Granny would
say, come on Brian give us a song, so I would stand up and although I didn’t invent air guitar, I’ve got
a picture of myself standing with an imaginary guitar singing Blue Suede Shoes, probably, at my
Granny’s and inevitably she would say, “Brian, you’re a great wee singer”.
So that was it, it was obvious wasn’t it? So I was waiting for the auditions for the choir. I was waiting
for the trial for the football team also and that came and went and I got picked, that was easy and I
was waiting for auditions and I was sure they would say to me, which song would you like to sing, and
I would say Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog or something like that. But anyway, it didn’t work like that
and it took about three weeks and there was no sign of the auditions. And the teacher came and said
don’t bother bringing your books to music on Monday boys (it was a boys school) we are going to do
the auditions for the choir. Yes, yes. That weekend I sang every Elvis song, over and over again, just
waiting to be called. And I was called, but it wasn’t that kind of audition. He took us out, one by one
to the front of the class, sat down at the piano and said, right, I’m going to play a few notes, I’d like
you to hum them.
So, my name was near the beginning of the alphabet, so I was pretty early on. So I thought, I was
disappointed I have to say, I did want to sing an Elvis song, but I thought humming a few bars
wouldn’t be difficult. He called me out. And I have to tell you a bit of information I’ve omitted, that I
was a very biddable wee boy, you know, I was keen to do well, keen to be liked, something of a
teacher’s pet, actually, basically when all I’ve said and done. So when I was called out I stood there,
he played a few notes, I hummed them and to this day I’ll never forget the look on his face, he looked
at me and said, “Are you having me on son?” Seriously! Now I thought, would I ever have a teacher
and I said, “No sir”. Okay, try again, he played a few notes, hummed them, he said fine, go and sit in
the corner. And that was the end of my musical career.
Now I have to say, to be fair to him, later on when he was coming round the class he did speak to me,
and he knew I was upset. I think it was the loud sobbing and the tears –
something along those lines – and he said to me, just by way of making me feel better, “Don’t worry
son”, he said, “You’re tone deaf”. Good one, isn’t it? Good one, that’s better. Feel better about that.
Anyway, for the rest of my life I believed I was tone deaf, I did. And I didn’t go to many concerts and
so on, that’s another story, but anyway, when my son was in Mossnewk Primary School, Mrs Strath,
who is now a head teacher in a Highland Council school, way up at the top, Mrs Strath decided to
start a recorder group and my wee boy came back in. He was a wee boy then and said “Mrs Strath’s
starting a recorder group, can I join?” Now my wife and I, well as middle-class parents you do think
ahead, don’t you? He’s an only child, he’s a son of two teachers, he doesn’t play football, he’s got
long lovely hair because we liked it that way, so there’s a wee danger there isn’t there, he could be
bullied. So what’s going to happen when he gets to secondary school? Let’s try and help him to be
musical, because if you are struggling in a secondary school, you can always hide in the music
department, can’t you? You can, you can get down there at play time and lunch time and hide in one
of the practice rooms, eat your packed lunch.
Anyway, so we were thinking ahead, so when he came in and said he wanted to join that particular
group, we said yes. We bought him his recorder immediately, so we didn’t realise at that time that the
boys were hugely outnumbered by the girls, we just didn’t know that. So by the time it got to about
November of that year all the boys had gone, they’d all dropped out. He was the only boy left and so
he wanted to leave the group. So what do you do? Do you resort to bribery and corruption, that’s
what you do. I promised him a drum kit, I did, I did, I promised him a drum kit. If he wanted one that
is. And we also colluded with the owner of a village music shop in East Kilbride. We phoned him, we
told him the story and he said “Bring him down, I will speak to him”. So we brought him down, he
came across, took Chris by the shoulder, took him over and showed him the clarinets. Look at those,
wow, gleaming clarinets. He said, “If you continue with the recorder Chris, and do well, you will get
one of those”. He was impressed and what happened next was more impressive. He said, “And if
you are good at that, two things will happen. One is you will make lots of money in gigs, and all the
girls will be after you!” Neither of those two things ever happened I have to say, my son tells me now!
But he stuck at it and he finished it. He even got a solo at the end of the year at the school award
ceremony. It was great. So when he got to primary five, he might get into the clarinet group, but,
there would have to be an audition, and the audition would be carried out by the peripatetic music
teacher. Are you getting this picture, can you see where this is going, can you see?
And anyway, when I used to pick my son up from his Gran’s after school, we would go through a
similar kind of routine. We would go and I would say, “How was school today Chris?” and he would
say “Great” “Brilliant” or “Fantastic”. He loved school, all the way through and I said to him for the first
few days in primary five “Any sign of the music teacher son?” “No”.
So I went home on the Friday of the first week. Now my wife still to this day says I should have
spotted this, you tell me if you agree with her. I went in and I would say, “Chris, how was school
today?” He would say “Fine”. Should I have spotted that? I should have, shouldn’t I? But I didn’t, I
didn’t. I didn’t spot it and I said, “Any sign of a peripatetic music teacher?” Ooh he came running
across the room, arms around my shoulders, sobbing, sobbing uncontrollably. So I had to sit him
down, by this time it was 4 o’clock, half past 4 on a Friday, sit him down and the whole sorry tale
unfolded. This guy had appeared, he had taken them along to a noisy quiet room, sat them down,
brought them out, one by one, he played a few notes, Chris hummed them, you’re tone deaf son.
That’s what he said. Now I’m a pacifist by nature, but if I had got the guy, at that point, if I had got him
I’d probably have done something that would have ended my career right there and then, so it’s just
as well.
So over the weekend we worked hard to try and build up his confidence, and first thing on Monday I’m
up there to Mrs Bruce, just to explain what had happened. And what did the school do? Well they did
just what primary schools do, they just all got together. They just wrapped their arms around him and
what do you know, within a week or so, he’s in the clarinet group and to this day he still plays clarinet.
He plays saxophone, he plays piano. He’s got a Gibson Les Paul guitar.
Now you see, there’s a few people going “Wow”, others are going, “What is he talking about?” But
anyway, so what’s my point? My point is, it’s a very fine line, isn’t it? It’s about trying to keep open
the doors, trying to say, well although you couldn’t sing all the notes, we will still let you into the choir
and see if you really like it. It’s just about, isn’t it, having a positive, optimistic outlook that young
people can do things given the right kind of support, it’s a forgotsee(?) principle isn’t it? It’s a zone of
proximal development. It’s about not looking at what they can do today, it’s what they might be able
to do tomorrow, with the right kind of support. And we might not always be the right person to give
the support, there might be somebody else, somewhere in the school.
Just before I left the University of Strathclyde somebody asked me, seriously, why did I spend so
much time going to see students? You know, what they call crip(?) lessons in Scotland. And I think
the assumption was that I was either too old, or too important to be doing that. “Why do you still do
it?” Well, I’ve got two answers to that, the flippant answer is, well, where else can you get one hour’s
free entertainment? No, no, I don’t mean that, I don’t mean that, I’m only kidding. There’s at least
one of my students in the audience, you know I don’t mean that, I’m only kidding. But the serious
answer is, I’ve never seen a student teacher yet, without coming away saying, ooh that was a good
idea, never thought of that. In other words, you learn something every time you watch a student
teach.
Now I think the corollary of that is, that if you learn from students, how much more could we learn
from our colleagues in schools? And yet I think there’s a phenomenon that exists, my background is
secondary, it exists in secondary, it may exist everywhere. If two young people leave initial teacher
education on the same day, two different subjects, arrive at the same school, are teaching in different
departments, they stay there for forty years each – God forbid – they do forty years each, they never
move and they retire on the same day. And they get together, just before their retiral do just to
compare notes and they discover they have never seen each other teach. Possible? Probable, still
to this day.
Now it seems to me that’s an issue. If you are talking about inspiration, we need to share with others
what we do well. Everybody in this room is good at something, maybe a number of things, but
something in particular and there are other people in your staff that are not good at it. Some of them
who may not even want to be good at it, but they should be. And I think we need to share, it seems to
me that collegiality is a far more important concept than leadership, at the moment. And yet
leadership is the one that attracts all of the attention. It’s about making cumulative, respective
experiences. Now if you look around this room just now. It’s not a huge gathering, but I reckon we’ve
got maybe fifteen hundred years of experience, in this room. I don’t mean to insult any particular
people, I’m just doing a head count. Now, what problems are there that couldn’t be soluble by
application of fifteen hundred years of experience, if we could just share it?
So it seems to me that inspiration is not necessarily an individual characteristic. Inspiration can be
collective, it can be shared, it can come about through a feeling of a joint venture in helping young
people learn, rather than, sometimes I think inspiration can be seen as a burden. Individual people
expect to be inspirational every day, even on a Friday. That’s too hard for most people. So,
education, as I tried to say earlier on, is for life. And the last thing, I think some of you will recognise
this from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, just to throw in a old kind of idea, it’s about helping people to
be, and I’m going to come to that in just a second in terms of aims. Helping human beings to be what
they can be, to achieve everything that they are capable of achieving. That seems to me to be the
essence of education. These other things on that slide, important though they are, are much less
important than the last one.
Ok, let me just talk about aims for a second. Now, if we had more time I would do this interactively,
and what I would do is ask you to take a piece of paper and I’d ask you to write down the aims of the
establishment that you currently work in, verbatim. And I would say to you, with a po-face, “I’m not
interested in paraphrasing, I want it word for word. And don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes.
Because I, when I was asked to do this, I contacted Royce, and I got him to send me a copy of the
aims of every establishment that’s being represented here, so don’t try and cheat. So write down
your aims verbatim.”
Now I’ve done this at lots of places up and down the country and only once has my bluff been called.
I think it was in Banff Academy. This guy stood up and he recited the school aims, verbatim. Well,
and there was a huge round of applause, and people fell about laughing, I had no idea why it was so
funny. It turns out he had just been interviewed for a job, the day before, in the school, so he thought
he had better learn them. So there’s an issue about aims, everybody’s got them, but nobody knows
what they are. So, are they important, or are they not important? I think they are important. I think
the aims of an establishment should be a working document, something you refer to on a regular
basis. And I think they should also be the subject of an annual general meeting, of everybody who’s
got a stake. And the establishment would collectively say, well did we achieve our aims? And how
would we know, what kind of evidence would we look at? It wouldn’t just be exams, it wouldn’t be
statistics. It would be about people’s perspectives and views and feelings and so on and all of that
kind of thing.
So anyway, when we were producing Curriculum for Excellence we started with aims and this is the
set of aims we started with. These are from UNESCO, 1998, a set of aims for education world-wide.
Now I think that very interesting as a set of aims. On the positive side, they are short, very brief, easy
to remember. They have the word ‘learning’ in each of the four bullet points. Quite important it
seems to me. But of course, they run the risk, as you have probably guessed, of being maybe a little
bit too generalised. Maybe woolly, possibly.
For me, the single biggest problem they have is the order. I think they are in the wrong order.
Personally. The order they are in, is the order you would expect, for an education system in an
advanced industrial country.
Learning to know is always seen as the most important thing, because that’s the thing you measure.
That’s the thing you examine, you test, you turn into a statistic, a letter, a number, a percentage. And
so, just knowing stuff, you know, knowing things has always been seen to be very important.
Learning to do, struggles for parity of esteem, the practical aspect of learning has always struggled. If
you’re in a secondary school just now, a question you might want to pose, if you haven’t already come
up with an answer to it is, are all subjects regarded equally? Are all subjects regarded as of equal
importance? And I would hazard a guess that the so called practical subjects struggle, have always
struggled for parity of esteem with so called academic subjects.
The university I used to work in had a kind of little strap line which was A Place of Useful Learning.
So the Application of Learning is really important, I think. But it always comes a distant second, if
you’re trying to order them in any kind of priority.
Learning to Live Together, well you could argue, could you not, that looking around the world, that’s
the most important aim. If we don’t get that one right and there are signs we are not getting it right at
the moment, there may not be a species to worry about for very much longer.
So learning to live together, and it is something we do quite well in Scotland, I think. We didn’t quite
invent the concept or the ethos, but we are good at it, aren’t we? Our schools are places where
relationships, the quality of relationships in school are important in most primary/secondary/early
years establishments that I go to north of the border at least and elsewhere. But it seems to me we
should reverse the order, the most important aim I think is Learning to Be. That’s what education’s
about. Who am I? What is it to be human? What is it to be human in the twenty first century? Why
am I here? What’s the purpose or meaning of life? And there might be spiritual dimensions to that,
there might not be spiritual, but the big egostentialist question(?) There’s also an issue about what
kind of learner am I? What kind of things do I naturally do well? What kind of innate skills do I bring
to learning and what are the things I am not good at? And how do I become better at the things I’m
not good at, so that I can become an all rounded kind of person and kind of learner?
So I would reverse the order, otherwise I think you just simply reinforce the status quo at the present
time. So let me just try and do a very kind of simplistic, kind of one for one correspondence exercise.
So I think you can make the link. Now, what you have to remember about these aims as the Scottish
people will recognise from Curriculum for Excellence, they are in a sense also arbitrary, I mean you
could have come up with, I suppose, with another set of descriptions of the characteristics of young
people you want to have coming out of the education system. But it seems to me there is at least a
link. So those four I think are at least starting points for discussion, if you want to reach an answer to
the question what’s education for? What are schools for? What are educational establishments
trying to do? And I don’t think we should get bogged down at all with, when this examination comes
in, or when that examination goes out, it’s really about getting to the heart of what it is that they are
doing as educators. And I happen to think, although I am biased, I think a starting point like this is
quite a good one. A better one certainly than 5-14 or other curriculum formats that pre-existed.
Let me try then and deal with a wee bit of what inspiration is about. There is a question which I
sometimes ask rhetorically. “Are good teachers boring, or are they made?” Now sometimes in the
past I’ve been asked that question and by a member of the audience, is usually accompanied by a
folding of the arms, and a sitting back saying, “Well, answer that one if you think you’re smart”! That’s
the kind of question I get asked sometimes when I do this kind of thing. So I used to struggle with that
a wee bit. Well, are they boring, or are they made? Well I’ve got an answer now. They have to be
born first. Well they do, they do. Nobody’s born a teacher. You don’t come across one of your
former pupils pushing a pram and say, “What did you have? A wee boy, a wee girl, a wee teacher?”
Well, what colour would you knit for a wee teacher? Ask yourself that question – it’s a good one,isn’t
it?
So there’s a sense in which everybody is born with a certain range of characteristics, but nobody is
born a teacher. And there are people who have certain qualities, which makes certain aspects of
teaching perhaps more easier, but you can’t jump to conclusions. Now do you mind, can I insert my
second anecdote into this bit, do you mind? There’s a wee bit of theatricality in this one, I might have
to leave the podium, do you mind? I will try not to make a complete fool of myself, but this is a story
about a student, or at least a prospective student who attended an interview in the Jordanhill Campus
of Strathclyde University maybe about seven or eight years ago now. And the format used to be that
we would invite students to come in groups, six or seven at a time.
There would be two members of staff from the Faculty Department and a member of teaching staff
usually at principal teacher level. This was of people wanting to be English teachers in a secondary
school. And I can remember this young man who appeared and he seemed really diffident, very
quiet, very self contained and I found it very difficult, immediately, to make eye contact. And I
immediately felt, hmmm, I don’t know about this. So what we did was we got them to make a
presentation on any subject of their choice. It didn’t have to be about education at all. And his
presentation was ok, it wasn’t too bad, but there were questions at the end.
So the fellow prospective students would ask each other questions and of course the unspoken rule
was don’t ask a difficult question, because you’ve got to stand up there next. So the questions were
fairly bland, but he didn’t really deal with them that well, he found it quite difficult. So I was writing
notes thinking, hmmm, not sure. When it came to him asking questions of the others, he didn’t, not
once, didn’t ask a single question. And then they all went for coffee, came back and had an individual
interview, and his individual interview was alright, it wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t brilliant.
So we deliberated long and hard and we eventually gave him the benefit of the doubt. We thought we
would try, so we entered him in and as luck would have it he was in my class, my section. So he was
there, he took part in the first few weeks, not really giving very much in terms of group discussions or
whole class discussion. He did the two week induction block, came back, seemed to have gone ok,
but we were heading toward the first block of teaching placements, and I was worried at this point.
So anyway what we did at Jordanhill at that time, we would let the students be out for a week in their
schools and then we would start the process of visits. Two visits in the next four or five weeks. So, I
was due to see him on the Tuesday of his second week of placement in the secondary school in the
south side of Glasgow. Ok, so I turned up at the pre-appointed time. Now, I don’t know about you,
but you may well think because of my great importance that everywhere I go people meet me in the
foyer of schools, I mean there may be a red carpet involved, there may not be, but actually that very
rarely happens. There’s usually a janitor or maybe the person behind the counter, you tell who you
are here to see. But this particular day the principal teacher was waiting for me, she said, “Brian, we
need to talk, we need to talk before you go up there”. So she took me into a wee room and she said,
“I just wanted to let you know that last week”, that was the first Tuesday, the first week, “he didn’t turn
up, just didn’t come, didn’t come in. Didn’t phone, didn’t contact anybody, just didn’t come”. She
said, “So I asked the other student”, there were two students in the (inaudible). “Do you know
anything about him, what’s happened?” “No” she said. She said, “Did anything happen yesterday?”
She said, “Well, I think he had a difficult time in the afternoon with a couple of classes, but that’s all”.
And she said to this other student apparently, “Do you know where he lives?” She said “Yes”.
So she said, “Right, come with me”. So they jumped in the car, took the other student, went to his
house and brought him back. And to this day I’ll never know whether she brought him back
physically, like over her shoulder, but if you know this woman, she was capable of doing that,
manhandling him. Anyway, she brought him back and he was still there. So I thought right. She
said, “I just needed to let you know”, but she said, “That’s not the thing I’m worried about”, she said “I
don’t like the lesson he’s teaching. I don’t think it will work with that class”. She said, “I’ve told him
and he refuses to take my advice”.
Now, this was serious, because we always told the students, if you get advice from somebody who is
much more experienced that you, take it. Take it. Even if you don’t think its right, take the advice, at
least initially, you know, when you’ve just started. No, he was adamant, his lesson was a good
lesson. His lesson was on the Jabberwocky. Do you remember The Jabberwocky the poem, great
poem isn’t it? The only problem is it’s a nonsense poem, it doesn’t mean anything. Most of the words
aren’t even English. This was a second year, mixed ability class, right. Tricky was how they were
described, a tricky class. Get the wee picture? Anyway, he was going to do it. So I said, “Well look,
I’ll go up and speak to him”. She said, “But it’s too late now”. I said, “Ok, but I’ll go up and speak to
him”.
I went up and spoke to him and said, “You’ve had advice, why didn’t you take it?” He said, “I know
I’ve had advice, but I really do think this will work”. I said, “Ok, remember I am up at the back any
time you need me”. I never said that to students. I never gave the impression that I wanted to take
over, but I said it in this case.
So anyway he then gives me his lesson plan. Do you remember lesson plans, do you remember?
Ok, bell goes, 9 o’clock, pupils enter classroom 9.01, jackets off 9.02, share learning outcomes 9.04.
Do you remember those lesson plans? Completely unrealistic, well he had one of those, and it said,
“Twenty minutes into the lesson the Jabberwocky enters the classroom.” I thought, “Oh my God”.
No, no. So I said to him “What’s this, Jabberwocky enters classroom?” And he said to me, and it’s
amazing, he said in a very kind of patronising way, “It’s ok, it’s not really the Jabberwocky, it’s
invisible.” That’s what he said to me. I thought, right ok, I’m going to have to intervene.
So anyway, the lesson got underway, I sat up the back, he started. Now he read the poem quite well,
I have to say. The kids were with him and he did a bit of talking about what was going on and he was
building up and telling them to share the outcomes and he was going to get them to write their own
nonsense poems in groups and by the end of the lesson at least one group, hopefully, would have
written at least a verse and they could read it out to the rest of the class.
It looked ok, but I just wasn’t comfortable, confident anyway. So I’m watching this and I’m counting
down the minutes. So anyway we get to the pre-appointed time and he said, “Now boys and girls, just
before we break into groups to do our poems, I’ve got a surprise for you.” And suddenly he started to
whisper. He said, “Outside the door, is the Jabberwocky”. Now this is a class that you had difficulty
getting to be quiet. Silence. “The Jabberwocky is outside the door. I’m going to open the door, let
the Jabberwocky in, it will only be for a couple of minutes, then he will go again and I will tell you why
it was here.” So he then tip-toes theatrically (inaudible) opened the door. Right, at this point, I’ll never
know if the wee boy sitting in the front was in on this. I don’t think he was, but anyway, as the
Jabberwocky came in, he went (sharp intake of breath) as if it brushed passed him. Of course they all
started doing that, so this Jabberwocky was all over. And after about maybe thirty seconds, maybe a
wee bit more he walked to the door again, opened it, ushered the Jabberwocky out and went “phew,
phew”.
Then he said, “Right boys and girls, the Jabberwocky has left something for us that will help us with
the next task, shall we find it?” And at this point I’m thinking, oh no, oh no. Oh no, no, no this will be
chaos. So the kids are all up, they are all up, they are crawling about, they are underneath the desks,
they are in the cupboards, there’s one boy who’s got his pal standing on his shoulders. I’m thinking
no, risk assessment, he’s looking on top of the cupboard. And eventually what I discovered was he’d
sellotaped all sorts of nonsense words all over the class. And they found them.
When each group got four, that was the starting point, off they went, started writing their poem. Two
or three finished the first verse, read it out to the class, a wee bit of discussion, end of lesson.
Perfect. I gave him straight As. It was wonderful. Now he never quite reached those heights again,
but he was good, he was good.
So what’s my point? Well, inspiration can come from the most unlikely sources. There isn’t an
identikit of an inspirational teacher. Think of all the films you’ve ever seen with inspirational teachers.
I should say, and I don’t say in any boastful way, most of the inspirational teachers in films are English
teachers. Mr Chips. Dead Poets Society. Just thought I would throw that in, it can’t be a
coincidence. I’m an English teacher too, I just wanted to share that with you. But anyway, they are all
different, all different. So there is no identikit of the inspirational teacher.
We can all be inspirational in our own, different, quiet way. He was the most diffident person I’ve
seen coming into that first interview, and yet that lesson was truly inspirational, those kids will
remember that lesson for the rest of their lives, I’m sure. So, there’s an issue I think about not
assuming that inspiration is a preserve of the few. It’s not. Every teacher has it within him or her to
be inspirational, it’s often about confidence and often about being able to let ourselves be who we are
in the classroom and that’s not always easy to do.
It’s a fragile quality. Now you may think, looking at me that maybe I was an inspirational teacher.
Maybe I was always an inspirational teacher. In fact, maybe I was born an inspirational teacher.
Well, one of my first classes in St Stephen’s High School in (inaudible) Glasgow which was a junior
secondary, or secondary modern for those of you south of the border, had on my timetable – and I
wasn’t given very much in the way of induction – a class that was called 3M2 Boys. Now again, had
we more time I would do this in an interactive way, but I’m going to cut it short. 3M2 Boys. Let me tell
you what 3M2 Boys meant. 3 meant they were in the third year. In 1970 they left school at 15, ok.
M meant “modified”, that means “remedial”, ok. Now I ask people what they thought that meant they
would often say things like “mental”. Well that’s close, it’s very close, ok they were modified. The 2
meant they were leaving at Christmas. And, the last bit of it Boys, there were forty of them. There
were forty of them, no teacher contract in those days, and it wasn’t an all boys’ school, ok.
Now I have to tell you my approach to that class was dire. I have to say I nearly left the profession
before I got started, they were so difficult to teach. I can remember them swearing under their breath,
just loud enough so that I could hear them, but couldn’t tell who they were. I remember them hitting
each other up the back, you know that game boys play to punch each other to see who gives up. All
of that. I remember having an out of body experience one day, looking down thinking, “What does he
think he’s doing? He’s never going to be a….” I mean, through all of that, but managed to come out
of it eventually.
What’s my point? My point is, well you can’t be instantly a great teacher. You can’t actually. And
anybody who thinks they can don’t know what teaching is about. We get better as we get older, as
we acquire experience, but we don’t do it ourselves, we have to work with others in a collegiate
fashion.
3M2 Boys is etched forever in my psyche. I will never forget. I remember once a boy who intervened
when I was doing Dulce et Decorum Est with him, can you imagine how appropriate that was, Dulce
et Decorum Est? I remember he put his hand up and said, “Sir we don’t do that kind of thing. We are
thick.” That’s what he said. Now for me that was a turning point in my career as a teacher. Because
I thought to myself, who told him he was thick? And anyway, this was a boy who didn’t know me, it
was a time when corporal punishment was about, he put his hand up and he intervened in order to try
and help me out of a difficult situation, and yet we had told him he was thick.
I’ve never met him since, I think he is probably driving around Scotland just now in a big Bentley or
something like that. Or maybe he’s in prison, who knows. It could be one or the other. But he
certainly was not a thick boy.
So, let’s move on. The loneliness of the classroom teacher. It’s a very lonely job. We need to stop
making it a lonely job. We need it to be a job where we share, we work collaboratively. We observe
each other’s lessons. We let people in to the plusses we have in our repertoire and we learn from
them. But still too often I think, a job where the door is closed, and you are expected, individually, to
meet the needs of every single child in your class. And it can’t be done. No single teacher can meet
the needs of every single pupil who comes through his or her door, it just isn’t possible. So we need
somehow or other to begin to work collectively in our schools.
Families of schools is now becoming a concept and I think a very powerful one. For too long we have
been picked off, by inspectors, by politicians, by the media. And I think we now need to start working
together far more collaboratively within schools and across schools. Am I getting serious now? I’m
nearly finished.
OK, creating space for inspiration. Well as I said to somebody this morning before we started, one of
the problems with Curriculum for Excellence is that the assumption has been made that Curriculum
for Excellence is all new. And if you haven’t been doing it up until now you are not a good person or a
good teacher. Well actually Curriculum for Excellence isn’t all new, and not only that, it hasn’t
replaced everything that has gone before it, it is not a year zero scenario. Curriculum for Excellence
builds on the principles of 5-14. So breadth and balance, continuity games and (inaudible) are all still
there. But the new principles I think are crucial.
Depth, too often I think in education we are forced, through curriculum coverage to skim over the
surface. Got to finish the Romans by Friday, start the Egyptians on Monday. How many times have
we felt that kind of pressure? Some how or other we need to create time for depth. Let’s delve more
deeply into this.
I often wonder, when a big world shattering event takes place, from 9/11 to the Tsunami to
earthquakes and so on, how many teachers up and down the country just put the curriculum to one
side for a week and say, let’s take a look at this. Let’s examine this. Very few, because the
curriculum grinds on. You’ve got aims, you’ve got objectives, you’ve got lesson plans, that kind of
thing. Let’s create a bit of time in the system for exploration of learning at different levels.
Relevance seems to me to be a broad concept, not a narrow one. There was a time in the past when
it was suggested that if you were teaching in a working class school you only did working class
literature. Amazing isn’t it? So would that include Shakespeare or not? I wonder, I wonder.
Shakespeare working class or not, that’s an instant discussion for coffee break isn’t it? But there’s a
sense in which it’s not about that narrow kind of relevance, it’s about trying to make connections
between what goes on in an education establishment and what happens in the world. Just making
connections. Making connections seems to me to be the heart of what it is to be an educated person.
Someone who can take what they know and make connections to other things that are going on in
their lives.
Challenge and enjoyment always come together. It’s not just about fun, not just about enjoyment, it’s
about challenge. As a researcher asking pupils what makes a good teacher, the things they say more
often than others is, a good teacher is someone who makes you want to do your best. Someone you
want to really work hard for. It’s about challenge and that’s how you get enjoyment, it’s not just about
having fun.
And finally, personalisation and choices. If we try to realise that all children are different and we are
not trying to fit them in like round pegs into square holes or visa versa. For me pedagogy is at the
heart of the matter. I’m going to start a wee campaign soon for the re-introduction of the word
pedagogy into Scottish education. There will be a web site, you can subscribe for a small amount of
money…but it is such an important word, we don’t use it, because pedagogy seems to me to have
three really important elements, it’s about the experience that a teacher brings, it’s about research
evidence about what works and what doesn’t work and, it’s about educational theory. Long live the
Gotski(?) it seems to me. It’s about all of those three things coming together.
And finally, I think it’s about values. It’s about a belief system. It’s a belief in the fact that all young
people, given the right kind of support can become powerful learners. It doesn’t matter what their
background is, it doesn’t even matter what their success rate in the past has been. It’s about keeping
open the door of success for every single youngster.
I’m going to pause right there. I’ve overshot my time just a wee bit, but I’m conscious we want to ask
some questions. You might be sitting there with one of those ‘ah but’ questions in your head. So, I’ll
just pause, right there.
Question inaudible.
A: Well it’s really interesting because Graham Donaldson hasn’t asked me. It’s interesting, it doesn’t
matter, I’m not surprised about that. He hasn’t, I know he hasn’t because he knows I don’t believe in
what the inspectorate do. Anyway, what would I like to see? I would like to see it recognised, that
what you might call continuing professional development is at the heart of professionality. So that no
teacher can escape, if you like, should they want to, but it’s available for every teacher from the
moment they arrive in the profession, right through to the very end. That is at the heart of it for me,
continuing professional development.
In terms of initial teacher education, I think there is a challenge there, because I think it’s still too
discrete if you see what I mean. We are still training people to be primary teachers, or secondary
teachers, or maths teachers, or English teachers. I really think it’s time we unpacked that a bit and
started training people to be facilitators of learning, or to be teachers as a kind of base line and then
build on to it if you need those kind of specialisms. So, I think there’s a kind of institutional element to
initial teacher education that needs to be addressed, but I think it’s about the recognition that
continuing professional development is the key. And I would argue too, that if we don’t get that right,
Curriculum for Excellence will make no impact whatsoever if we don’t back it up with high quality,
relevant, continuing professional development.
OK, do you think he might listen to that? I don’t know. I have emailed him, but he hasn’t got back to
me, never mind.
Question (inaudible)
A: The question really was about examination success being the measure of school effectiveness
and can we convince parents that that is not necessarily the case. It’s interesting, I think that parents
are a much abused interest group. Politicians often refer to them, don’t they whenever they want and
say: “Parents won’t accept that, parents demand this”. And yet I don’t think parents are a
homogeneous group at all, actually. And I think parents are often a much more intelligent, thoughtful
group of people than politicians give them credit for, because when, in my experience, parents bring
their child along to that first educational establishment, whether its early years or pre-five, or primary,
yes they have got a view of the future. They would like them to do well, they would like them to be
this or that, but they really essentially want them to be happy. Want them to be friends, want people
to play with them in the playground. Want them to be well-behaved when the teacher needs them to
be. In other words they have got a whole series of desires as they arrive at the school. And when
they are trying to judge a school, yes examination results may be part of the mix, but they are very
rarely the only part, in fact the research would suggest they are very often not the most important part
either.
Because I think, I had a lovely moment, just to personalise it a bit, it was a lovely moment in
retrospect, it wasn’t lovely at the time. When my son came home one day from Primary 7, just
towards the end, to announce that his best friend was going to independent school and not to the
local secondary school. Now, that was interesting and we talked about it and he went to bed and my
wife said to me, “You’ll need to ask him” and I said, “Ask him what?” “If he wants to go to
independent school.”
Now I built my reputation, such as it was, on egalitarianism on comprehensive education. I said, “Do I
have to?” She said, “Yes”. Now when my wife says yes you have to. So I sat him down the next day
and said, “You know Andrew is going to such and such a school? Would you like to go there?” And
he said, “Why Dad?” I said, “Well because, you know, some people would say it’s a better school
than the one you are going to.” “What do you mean better?” And I said, “Well, I think probably the
examination results are probably better, and so you might get a better set of highers.” And he looked
at me and said, “But surely the highers that I get are down to me.” And I said, “Yes.” Gave him a big
hug, yes!! He just saved my life, my professional career.
So there’s a sense in which some parents will be, if you like, taken in by particular characteristics of
schools, but they won’t all be. And I think what we need to do to parents is to say, well look, we will
try to ensure that in our school any child who is capable of doing X or Y will be encouraged to do so.
And they won’t all necessarily get five highers and that kind of thing, but we will try to make sure that
we don’t discount the importance of examinations, but they will not be the be all and end all. To be
fair to independent schools, they are not the be all and end all there either, they just seem to be, you
know, far more prominent.
So, I think what we need to do is talk to parents, and my one criticism of Curriculum for Excellence at
the moment is that people who are charged with its development are not talking to parents enough.
And parents, at the moment, don’t know what’s happening and they keep reading things in the press
and they are worried about it. Now the more you keep parents in the dark, the less likely they are to
understand what it is that we are doing. I’m optimistic about parents, I like parents. They keep us in a
job. Don’t they?
Question: Ian Pringle, National Vice Chairman. Over the years, and I’ve done one year less than
you, so I’m a real novice I suppose. People observing you do things (inaudible) threat. How do you
think you ever overcome that?
A: Well it’s interesting, I agree with you. It is, for some people still to this day, an implicit threat. In
Scottish terms the person who is responsible for that is someone who was once MP for this area. A
man called Michael Forsyth. Michael Forsyth was a person who imposed on the profession Staff
Development and Appraisal. Remember it? Staff Development and Appraisal, and it was the
appraisal bit that was the issue. HMI simply made it worse, because they kept sending out signals to
senior management of educational establishments, that you must go into classrooms and you must
observe, and you must record. So they would sit up at the back and write notes. Now that’s not
observation in my book.
I think what we need to try and project is a professional shared observation. An observation amongst
equals, in fact, I personally, to get the ball rolling, would make it voluntary, I wouldn’t impose it. I
would encourage staff to share the lessons with others and I would try to make it, initially, nonjudgemental. I’ve often felt that if you are going to feed back to a colleague, just feed back positives,
initially. Just feed back what you saw that worked well, and once that the trust is established, sooner
or later the person being observed would say, “That didn’t go very well did it? What do you think?”
And they will encourage you.
So in a sense we need to try and break down some of the barriers to shared observation. One of
them I think is still linked to that old notion of appraisal. And I think we need to start encouraging
senior managers away from the notion that they are the only ones that can observe, and I think they
also need to be prepared to be observed by other people. So in a sense it’s about a collegial
approach to observation. An observation that is seen by those participating in it, to be of mutual
benefit and the overall aim is to try and improve the quality of learning and teaching in the classroom,
but also to improve the consistency. Because I think that’s still a big challenge for us as a profession
that there’s still a lot of inconsistency even within a school and certainly across schools. Now I think
shared observation is part of that package. But I do acknowledge the fact that some people,
legitimately still have concerns about it.
Now there’s a lovely wee psychological thing happens at this point, right. People have already looked
at the clock, so they are saying to themselves, telepathically, no words have been spoken, they are
saying, don’t ask him a question. Don’t ask him a question, he will take ten minutes to answer it and I
need a coffee. So if there are no more questions that’s fine, I’m happy to take questions individually
over the coffee time.
Thank you very much.
pressoffice@voicetheunion.org.uk