On Being Chefs not Food Critics

Here's my final post of the academic year, and I guess I have to revert to type and use one of my (now infamous?) extended metaphors. The difference is that this one is not new to me. This is one I've already developed and one I believe in more than anything else. I've used it freely with many members of staff and I even have it in a nutshell version which goes something like this.

Ofsted are food critics whilst we are chefs. We need to stop thinking like the food critics and think a lot more like chefs.

I come to this conclusion because essentially I see teaching as a creative process, not a reductive one. McDonaldisation is not something you can do to education and teaching because teachers, students and parents are not homogeniseable. There are too many variables that schools can't control and so to try to do so is a futile effort. You could set up the most restrictive academy chain, make all your students start in your nursery and run through to post-16, make all their families attend parenting classes and set up your own in-house ITT provision to train all your teachers and you still wouldn't get near to uniformity.

So why are so many schools trying to follow a recipe for success written by the non-teachers at the DfE and Ofsted (I know SMW is a former Head, but you know what I mean)? Every time Ofsted changes its focus and publishes a new inspection schedule we set off at a gallop to attend courses by consultancy firms, to gather to listen to horror stories from the guinea pigs from the trials and - most alarmingly - change many of the things we do to ensure we still meet the new 'outstanding' criteria or pull clear of the new 'requires improvement' criteria. This mania to ensure compliance runs from the local authority and unions to school leaders and to teachers. Sometimes it even finds its way into the consciousness of students and their parents ("we must get our happy parents onto ParentView").

Compare this to the much-coveted Michelin Guide stars awarded to restaurants. The first is awarded because its a place the critics feel is worth stopping to eat for. The second is awarded because its a place the critics feel is worth taking a detour for. The third is awarded because its a place the critics feel is worth making a special journey for. And that's it. No evaluation schedule. No tick boxes. No guidance notes. Nothing.

The net result of this is that if you're a chef with aspirations of being exceptional there is nothing that you can do to make it happen other than be exceptional for your customers, to make the experience uniquely wonderful for everyone who sits down at one of your tables. You can't second guess when a critic will come in (and even if you could, two more will follow at a later date to validate their judgement so its best not to even try to), but instead cook what you want to cook, how you want to cook it and do so brilliantly every time. And this is what I mean when I say teachers need to think more like chefs than food critics.

Of course it isn't easy in education. Ofsted aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and in the interests of openness they are required to publish their evaluation schedules and guidance to inspectors. Added to that recently we have even seen a return to the (in my eyes) bad old days of advance notice of when we can expect an inspection, a keep-you-on-your-toes mechanism if ever there was one! I can't imagine that the teaching profession would accept Michelin-style secrecy around the judging process (and nor should they) especially given the recent furore over zero-notice inspections.

What that all means is that it is up to leaders at all levels in schools to set the tone and to encourage and foster everyday excellence in teaching and learning. Michelin don't look any further than the food and, if the hype is to be believed, Ofsted won't be looking much further than the quality of teaching when making their judgements.

Since taking over as Chief Inspector Michael Wilshaw has repeatedly asserted that there is no single Ofsted way to teach that inspectors are looking for, and he has even urged school leaders to be a little odd and experimental in their approach. So let's take him at his word (we could always quote him to any disapproving inspectors) and then do our best to put him to the back of our minds. Instead we need to co-construct with all our partners in learning the way in which we want to be a place worth planning a special trip to go and see, and then we need to make it happen day in and day out for every teacher, student and parent we serve. And that's not easy, and it doesn't involve taking shortcuts or tolerating mediocrity or excluding people from the process no more than a Michelin star seeking restaurant can allow standards to slip in any way. But the standards we need to hold each other to need to be our standards, not Ofsted's or the DfE's. More than this, they need to be standards rooted in the shared experiences of our schools and their people.

iTeachFreely - SOLO Taxonomy 2: usage examples

Despite setting myself the target of writing one post per week, due to a hectic month I have fallen behind. Time to get back on track! This is a very wordy blog post but I hope you find it useful.

Recently, I delivered a small section of an INSET day at our school. The INSET was planned and led by the school's 'Pedagogy Leaders', a team of teachers whose task it is to share good practice and promote great pedagogy across the school. I've been very keen to work with the group to improve my own practice and share my ideas.

The day was laid out around the school's newly proposed Accelerated Learning Cycle. My section was contained within the 'Consolidation' phase and was specifically about the use of SOLO taxonomy. To make the taxonomy (which could fit within any section of the ACL) relevant to the consolidation phase, I had a slight focus on peer and self-evaluation.

I felt the day was a great success, with lots of positive feedback received from our colleagues. The two most common questions I have been presented with since the INSET have been how could we use SOLO in our assessments, and what sorts of classroom activities can you do with SOLO. The latter is going to be dealt with in this post.

I think it's important to point out that SOLO can be used in plenty of activities that you may already be doing. SOLO should be supplementary to what the pupils are doing and not the focus of it. I want my pupils to be able to engage with interesting activities, and through their familiarity with SOLO be able to comment on their progression, as well as see what they could do to improve. For me, SOLO is there to inform the teacher that learning and progression is taking place, and to inform the pupil of how deep their level of thinking is, and where it needs to head.

To help "SOLO virgins" get started, I'm going to write about a few ways in which I have used SOLO in the classroom. Some of these methods may already be documented about in my earlier posts, but the format here will be more of a scaffold than a reflection on what I've done.

SOLO Stations

in a nutshell - SOLO Stations is a fantastic way of incorporating SOLO into the existing Carousel technique we use all the time! Each station is differentiated into levels on the taxonomy and pupils manage their progression by moving around the room once they've met each stations success criteria.

how to set up the lesson - You will need 5 stations, one for Prestructural, Unistructural, Multistructural, Relational and Extended Abstract. When I move labs next year I intend to have these hanging from the ceiling, providing the students continuity and routine. At each station you should have a task which reflects its level on the taxonomy. Prestructural should usually provide reference material for students to use when they are unsure of something (part of 3B4Me). I like to position the prestructural station in the middle of the room and allow students to access it at any time, outside of the linear progression of the other stations. Each station should have a clear set of success criteria so the pupils know when they have completed the task and can move on.

how the lesson runs - Students are instantly engaged on entering with the presentation of a question related to the LOs. The question should be difficult enough for them to realise they do not have a grasp of the topic. Some pupils may be able to handle the question better than others, and this is what facilitates the spreading of students around the stations. Once pupils have thought about the question, they should express where on the taxonomy they believe their understanding is. This then needs to be justified in order to stop little friendship groups from forming and pupils starting above their station. The two methods I have used for justification so far have been either "turn to your neighbour and tell them which station you are starting at and why" or "write you starting position and why on a mini whiteboard and hold it up". Both work but the second one incorporates a bit of AFL. Once you have ascertained the pupil's starting stations, they begin their tasks. Instruct the pupils to move on once they have met the success criteria. If a pupil is struggling to meet the criteria, they should be advised to move down a station and come back to it later. If they have already completed the prior station they should look to the Prestructural Station. I like to tailor my tasks so that the lower level stations build up to the higher level stations. This means pupils transfer skills between stations to help them progress. The movement of students around the room shows their progression but I like to signpost the progression by chosing a child to explain what they have done at a station, why they are moving on and to where they are moving to the whole class. At the end of the session I start a discussion with the class about what they've learnt, let them demonstrate something and then consolidate.

pros - Clear progression is made as pupils move around the class. Pupils can talk about their learning at each station and where their learning is going to go next. Differentiation is achieved and all students can be stretched easily by moving on from the levels they're comfortable at.

cons - Requires a room that can easily be moved around. Behaviour for learning is key to keep students on task. You need to be more safety conscious whilst students are moving about the room (practical/equipment).

HOT maps

in a nutshell - HOT SOLO maps are basically mind maps that guide students through different parts of the taxonomy. There are different maps for the different verbs associated with each level of the taxonomy. The HOT maps are extensively described in SOLO Taxonomy: A Guide for Schools Book 1. I may in the future write a more at length guide on each of the HOT maps along with advice on how the pupils could assess themselves.

how to set up the lesson - Depending on the task set, you should choose the HOT map aligned to the most relevant verb. For example in science, if I wanted my pupils to hypothesise what was going to happen if we changed a variable in an experiment, I'd want them to use the "predict" map. Here is an overview of the HOT SOLO maps paired with their learning verbs.



how the lesson runs - the maps could be used on their own, or as part of a larger project in order to clarify the nature of the learning task.

pros - An advantage of using SOLO in this context is that the task and success criteria can be at different levels. The learning objective could be at a relational level, but using the maps the outcome could be at a unistructural, multistructural, relational or extended abstract level. An example by Hook and Mills (2011) goes as follows:

• A task set to Compare and Contrast is at a relational level, but students comparison statements in the map could be coded against SOLO - the task could involve the student:
  
  
  • listing similarities and differences (multistructural)
  • listing and explaining (relational)
  • listing, explaining and generalising or evaluating the extent of the similarity or differences

cons - There are a large number of maps that can seem overwhelming at first, introducing them slowly is recommended. I would suggest being comfortable with the way they work before setting them for your students.

Interacting with GCSE markschemes

in a nutshell- I recently visited the classroom of @7tbj to see how he was using SOLO taxonomy to help his pupils get better acquainted with the new style AQA science ISA. The difference in this new style of ISA to the old is the length of answers the pupils are expected to write. By using SOLO taxonomy whilst writing their answers, pupils could structure and connect their ideas better and we found it drew more information out of them.

how to set up the lesson- @7tbj had prepared a mock ISA, a mark scheme and a SOLO prompt sheet. He had arranged his classroom into groups and had a stash of numbered bits of paper for grouping. He also had post it notes to use as exit passes.

how the lesson runs- when I joined the lesson, pupils were grouped and were working on answering a different question depending on what table they were sat on. They first created their own answer before conferring with the group. Once they had all voiced their answer they were then given time to create a model answer and given the SOLO prompt sheet to help them.

pros - pupils made clear progress in the lesson and the length of their answers increased once given the SOLO scaffold. The new, slightly ambiguous mark schemes fit in nicely with the SOLO progression to reach higher marks.cons - only tested on Science ISAs.

Success criteria

in a nutshell - success criteria can be set by the pupils using SOLO taxonomy as the framework. Allowing pupils to set their own success criteria gives them ownership and gives you insight.

how to set up the lesson - when I have run this lesson, I have created an exemplar piece of work and opened it up to critique by the pupils. Instead of an example, you could just have clear learning objectives and ask the pupils how they can show they have met them. When I run this activity I like to have a SOLO display (more on this later) and laminated success criteria rubrics:



how the lesson runs - once pupils have evaluated the exemplar piece of work, I get them to write down success criteria they think is appropriate if they were to create something similar. Once the time is up, The pupils post it note these onto our SOLO display. From there, the class pick the "best" ones and we put them up on the whiteboard. We then have differentiated success criteria that the pupils have set and agreed on themselves.

pros - pupils take ownership of their learning and set their own, differentiated success criteria. All pupils should be able to meet at least some of the differentiated criteria.

cons - can be time-consuming if struggling to get through course content.

Peer and self-evaluation

in a nutshell - pupils are able to give useful feedback to each other using the taxonomy. They are able to identify clearly what they need to do to improve their work and/or level of thinking. I have grouped peer and self-evaluation together for the sake of this blogpost because I feel the methods in which it is executed do not vary much. The main difference is that a pupil will be saying I need to do this next in order to progress rather than pupil x needs to do this etc. Peer evaluation has been highlighted as a very effective tool in assessment for learning.

how to set up the lesson - in order to peer or self evaluate, pupils need to have done some work! I'll let your minds run mad with the possibilities here. As stressed by @CanonsScienceT at our recent INSET, it is important that pupils are given some form of training in order to peer evaluate. @totallywired77 recently blogged about Public Critique, definitely worth a read here.

how the lesson runs - once at an appropriate time in the task/lesson, an effort should be made to create space for some evaluation. Pupils can either look at their own work or feedback on another's. This could either be done by swapping books, or putting one pupils work up for everyone's to look at. I think it is very important that evaluation sessions should end with the critique of one piece of work by the whole class. It is important that pupils are trained to critique properly, and give feedback based on how to improve, rather than just commenting on how great or terrible it is. You could go down the route of two stars and a wish. The important thing to implement is the taxonomy. Pupils can use the taxonomy to clearly highlight levels of thinking in the work. For example:

• in a presentation, Pupil X is describing the different ways you can hit a ball in tennis. She describes how to play both topspin and backspin. She then describes why you would want to use both types of shot. All of her explanations have been described using the forehand.


• Class Y are "in-depth" evaluating Pupil X. One member of the class says that pupil X has shown a multistructural level of thinking as she has described 2 different types of shot. Another says pupil X has shown relational levels of thinking by relating them to the bigger picture, why would you use either shot? A third member then feedsforward, suggesting that in order to improve and reach an extended abstract level, pupil X should look at the shots in a new way, perhaps hypothesising how you would play these shots on the backhand. The class is able to contribute as a whole and the teacher can model good feedback along the way.

I often use peer and self-evaluation on the fly in alignment with my questioning to get more out of pupils verbally. I often will receive an answer from one student, and another student to mark where on the taxonomy the answer lies, then get that same student to add to the answer to move it up a level.Focusing on the self aspect, I find this extremely useful for approaching a child, asking them what level they are working at and what they need to do to reach the next level. They can tell me clearly and effectively what they plan to do to next, using the taxonomy. Since introducing this to my classes, I have noticed a marked decrease in the number of pupils with hands up asking "what do I do next sir?".

pros - differentiated feedback supplied by the pupils. Pupils are able to independently recognise what they need to do to improve. Cuts down on marking. Supplies an effective scaffold for feeding back and forward.

cons - pupils need to be trained in order to supply feedback, SOLO does make this much more straightforward though.

Planning

in a nutshell - I first saw this done by @tommegit in a first attempt at using solo. I hadn't thought of structuring lessons around the taxonomy in such an explicit way but I really like the way the lesson flows. The lesson takes the form of the taxonomy, beginning with a presumption of prestructural understanding and ending at an extended abstract level. I highly recommend this to practitioners just getting started in order to better acquaint themselves with the stages.

how to set up the lesson - take the progression of SOLO and plan an activity for each level. The class moves as a whole through the activities, building on prior knowledge and reaching an extended abstract level.

how the lesson runs - original lesson plan taken from @tommegit:

 

Prestructural: The verb "COMPRAR" (to buy) is written on the board when students enter the classroom. Students may wonder why? What is that word? Why is it on its own? Do I even know or remember what that word means?

Unistructural: Starter - In pairs, come up with at least one thing that you can tell me about this word.

Multistructural: Feedback by students from the starter activity. Feedback is written up on the board around the word "COMPRAR" to form a sort of mind-map. How do these ideas/observations/concepts link up with one another?

Relational: 3 sentences in Spanish written up on the board and on worksheet (students are already familiar with most of this vocabulary) -

• Normalmente, compro pan en una panadería (Normally, I buy bread at a baker's)


• Ayer, compré un CD de Michael Jackson (Yesterday, I bought a Michael Jackson CD)


• Mañana, voy a comprar un nuevo móvil (Tomorrow, I'm going to buy a new mobile)

Questions for discussion - What has happened to the word "COMPRAR" in these 3 sentences? Why has this happened? (Also remind students in this discussion that using 3 time frames in their written and spoken Spanish demonstrates understanding at an NC Level 6)

Extended abstract: What if I wasn't doing the buying? What if my sister was doing the buying instead? How would the verb change in each of the 3 sentences? What resources and support materials could you use to help you make the appropriate changes to the verbs? Try changing them now.

Extension activity - Try writing 3 of your own sentences in Spanish using a DIFFERENT VERB from "COMPRAR". Each sentence should be in a different time frame (present, past & future). Can you write sentences which are NOT in the 1st person?

Discussion and plenary.

pros - a great way for you as the teacher to become acquainted with the levels of the taxonomy. Lesson has flow and shows progression of pupils.cons - whilst great in a lesson/subject where a prestructual knowledge can be guaranteed, in a lesson where some prior knowledge could be entering the room, you could be left with a few activities that are completed very quickly.

Written feedback

in a nutshell - oh marking, time-consuming, but so effective. Feedback has time and time again been show to be one of the most effective methods in teaching, and whilst it doesn't always have to be written, it certainly is an effective method of delivery.

As a PGCE student, effective marking was drilled into me from the get go. "Very neat", "use a ruler", "underline" are all comments I'm sure we have used. It's easy enough to say these comments are worthless, but what can you write that does have worth? I used to struggle to come up with good feedback but now that I am armed with SOLO and my pupils understand it, it is easy to write feedback and targets using the SOLO language. Just as our pupils can peer assess using it, you can mark work with it.

• Well done, this piece of work shows you have a secure multistructural knowledge of the techniques you can employ as a SOLO teacher. I particularly liked the part where you talked about tennis. In order to progress, think about how these techniques could link together and how you could apply them to SEN students.

So that's it for now, when I try anything new I'll be sure to include it in a future update. Hope you found this useful.Joe

 

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Practitioner-Led INSET

As part of our drive to build capacity towards Teaching School status Canons hired 6 Pedagogy Leaders from across the staff to put rocket boosters onto our existing Outstanding Pedagogy Project (OPP as in our twitter handle). The project, as I have blogged about previously is to capture the art, craft and science of effective teaching as it best suits the context of our school community, students and teachers in order to gather the strands into a Canons Pedagogy or house style of teaching and learning.

The four-term role of the Ped Leaders, as we have come to call them, was to bring two years of work to a conclusion and identify the core ethos, structures and techniques of the Canons Pedagogy, to share these with staff and students and to create a sustained (and sustainable) programme for a full implementation through collaborative pedagogic development practices. Most of all, their job has been - and continues to be - to engage and enthuse staff in this process, to retain a bottom-up focus and to find the surplus of excellent practice rather than start from an assumption that teachers' classroom practice is a broken thing in need of a quick fix.

We are now at the end of the first full term of their work and the results have been magnificent. The team of Ped Leaders is made up of two Heads of Department, an AST, a TLR holder and two NQTs covering five different subject areas and they have attacked their brief with relish, skill and sensitivity. I'll leave @renniesherrie to share with you how they have developed over the term, but this post is focused on their first major public challenge; to plan and deliver an INSET day to introduce the core principles underpinning their Canons Pedagogy.

Their first significant task in the process was to relegate the Deputy Head (me) and Assistant Head (@renniesherrie) to the role of 'guides on the side' and to ignore our guidance on how they should do the day completely. I say 'relegate' but the truth is we were delighted at their chutzpah and sense of adventure (or risk as @alatalite might have it). They trashed everything about the way in which INSET days are normally done (not in the Hall, no Head or SLT introduction, a welcome breakfast, a full programme, Subway lunch, etc, etc) and they invited their SLT leads to get involved purely to assign to us admin tasks to support their vision of the day (our watchword became "what the Ped Leaders want, the Ped Leaders get").

And their product? The Lazy Teacher's INSET day (we have apologised in person to @lazyteacher and now hope that the copyrighting laws aren't too tough). The aim was to introduce the overarching structure of the Canons Pedagogy - essentially the Accelerated Learning Cycle - and to showcase a range of techniques to exemplify each phase of the cycle through pedagogy with our teachers as learners. Their determination to avoid a powerpointed lecture approach and to model the techniques and structure we were advocating throughout the day was a testament to their concern that the actual classroom be the focus of the INSET.

The only problem with this approach was that it made the Ped Leaders the teachers of their peers, and as the day approached some of them began to express concern that it might all fall flat and that colleagues might not participate as learners, particularly in the highly active sessions. This was where @renniesherrie and I were able to feel a real sense of participation in the organisation of the day. But, of course, their concerns were unfounded and once the day was upon us they came to realise that engaging and enthusing learners is pretty much a constant whether they are 13 or 31 or twice that age. They were helped by the fact that the cafeteria staff had played a blinder with their full English breakfast that got the staff buzzing from the first moment; a reminder that the little things often make all the difference to large groups of people.

On the other hand though food alone won't mask the faults of a poor INSET day and the real quality was in the sessions themselves. The Ped Leaders, @biomadhatter and myself (I was allowed off the leash as a teacher on the proviso I didn't let them down!!) delivered sessions that really did demonstrate how to get the students working. A typical comment between us was how little we were doing beyond the initial planning and our in-session facilitating (apologies but I had to use the F word) and how hard our 'students' were working - a fact that was not lost on the teachers we exhausted that day. At least three members of staff reported that this was the first INSET day where they had not looked at a clock or watch for the entire day.

At the end of the INSET day the six Ped Leaders, @renniesherrie and I got into taxis to Kings Cross to head up to the Cramlington Learning Village festival. The first task was to read the evaluations (written on cups in free form style as requested by the Ped Leaders) as we crushed a cup in the wait for the train. Watching the faces of our colleagues as comments like "the best INSET ever", and "can we get started now", and "so inspired", and variations on that theme emerged was truly one of the most pleasurable parts of my career, but it was the way that they immediately began buzzing about "what next?" that really flabbergasted me. And beyond that still, the way that they absorbed the phenomenal school that is Cramlington by being inspired by it but not overwhelmed by it was a joy to behold.

But of course INSET days have no meaning if they have no impact beyond the feelgood vibe of the day, however welcome that is. It's too soon to fully evaluate at the moment, but it is clear from discussions with key departments and individual teachers that the Accelerated Learning Cycle is liked and understood, that Flipped Learning has enthused many, and today I have worked with the RE department to apply SOLO to their lesson planning processes. In the meantime the only people in the school who are less than content with the measures of impact of the INSET day are the Ped Leaders themselves, and they have once again sidelined their SLT 'guides' to prepare the next phase of staff engagement in pedagogy. I'd wish them good luck in this, but they don't need it. What they need is for me and my SLT colleagues to stand back, let them loose, support them when needed and watch them as they change the nature of teaching and learning at Canons in a way which exceeds outstanding because it is practitioner-led to its core.

 

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Seeking Authenticity in Theory and Practice

Last night @informed_edu posted a tweet that said "Grrr. Every time someone in an education discussion uses the word 'authentic' a small part of me dies.... There's very little left now". This made me genuinely curious as I have full respect for his views expressed on Twitter but I am also one of those regular users of the word 'authentic' and I don't really want to be responsible for his slow death. I sought some clarification of why he so hates the word and got the response "I feel that 'authentic' is jargony, vague and inexplicable... Unless you're talking about an old painting". Fair dos I thought. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and the joy of social interaction, including through twitter, is the differences between us not the similarities.

And I could have left it there. And I would have left it there. And maybe by the end of this post you'll think that I should have left it there, but since using a phenomenological methodology for my Masters dissertation I have become fascinated in unpicking jargonistic concepts through exploration of the etymology of the words used to express them. There is an amazing amount of power generated by this process of revealing the original and varied meanings of words we take for granted and it was clear to me that I too had been taking the word 'authentic' for granted when I thought about @informed_edu's tweets (I gave the rather weak answer of 'authentic' being an expression of the inexpressible that must have made him die just that little bit more). So this morning I have had a dig into the rich soil of the word and been once again enthralled by the fossils I have found down there.

The first thing of note is that the modern notion of 'authentic' as meaning genuine or the 'real deal' has no etymological link, so let's dismiss that immediately as the thing that @informed_edu was being killed by. Instead the next most recent etymological incarnation of the word (from 13th century French) is to express a feeling of the 'canonical'; of something being 'original' or 'principal'. Now let me be honest with you here: I do love it when something I value as an ideology can be traced back to the word canon because it offers me as a Senior Leader of a school called Canons the opportunity to express our values ever more powerfully. We do strive at the school to be 'original' and to be a 'principal' (as well as principled) body within the community we serve and so are, in this derivation of the word 'authentic'. Similarly we ask our teachers and our students to be original in their thoughts and deeds: to absorb the many different ways in which people do learning and produce something that is authentic to us as a learning organisation, a Canons Pedagogy rooted in our very specific context.

In the next, ancient Greek, layer of the linguistic heritage of the word 'authentic' there is an etymological meaning of "one acting on one's own authority". In other words for a school to be authentic it must make decisions by itself and for itself, weighing up the strengths and limitations of an external accountability agenda, but not being weighted down by it. With rapid expansion of academies across the secondary sector in particular, and the opening up of those freedoms promised under it - not to mention the mothballing of the National Strategies as a what-to-teach-and-how-to-teach juggernaut - this vision of authenticity as "acting on one's own authority" has never been more relevant and more necessary. Even Ofsted are saying that there is no single type of lesson they want to see. We appear to be being given permission by all the key players to be authentic in our pedagogy, so let's take them at their word as teachers and school leaders. At Canons we are demonstrating this by investing heavily in time, resources and enthusiasm to develop a shared understanding of core structures and techniques that can underpin our Canons Pedagogy. We are striving to empower our teachers - both experienced and inexperienced, progressive and traditional - to lead in the identification, explanation and verification of these core structures and techniques so that our Canons Pedagogy is authentic at a personal as well as a contextual level.

The final and original etymological meaning of the word 'authentic' is listed as being "to accomplish" and "to achieve". Schools, their leaders, teachers and students need to have an end product to their activities if they are going to lay claim to being authentic, whether this is measured by the dominant performance measures of examination success and Ofsted recognition or by the so-called soft achievement outcomes of learner roundedness, exemplary citizenship and communal interdependence. At Canons we have had significant recent success and progress against the 'hard', DfE-recognised accomplishments and achievements, but the dominant ethos of the school has always overwhelmingly been built upon the 'soft', community-valued accomplishments and achievements. Marrying these two together in a Canons Pedagogy that values the former very highly but never forgets its fundamental duty to enable the latter is what the Canons Outstanding Pedagogy Project (OPP) has been all about.

In using the phenomenological process the word 'authentic', which some find so troubling and which I have used rather lazily in the past, has this weekend become much clearer and more tangible to me.

From now on when I use the word authentic about an institution I will be talking about it as being so original in its thinking and acting that it plays a principal role in the system it serves. It will be an institution that uses these thoughts and actions to be self-authorising and self-validating, respectful of external agencies and their evaluation but never slavish to them. And it will be an institution that enables all of its people to accomplish whatever they set their minds to and achieve success in all of the ways that it can be measured.

Now that would be something worth living for.

 

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