Exchange to Change. Too often, we become complacent in the safety of our own classrooms and within the confines of our own subject. To shake things up a bit, and to foster more cross-pollination, I would set up an internal exchange programme to take place at regular intervals. This could be in the form of one teacher teaching another teacher’s classes within the same subject, or (even better) teaching a different subject. To my mind, this would give staff many fertile ideas for collaboration, as well as giving them a little more empathy with the challenges associated with teaching a different class or subject.
12. Dismissing Belittling. All teachers are aware of the scourge of students bullying one another. However, quite a few are not attuned to how subtle bullying can really be, and they allow it to happen right under their noses. But what’s worst is that some teachers still employ undisguised threats as a ‘motivational tactic’, as well as insidiously bullying their students. In line with the type of education I would want my school to offer, no teacher may consciously insult or belittle a student. Telling my students that bullying is unacceptable means nothing if teachers can get away with it.
13. Boys and Girls and Brains. I have addressed the issue of how schools are failing boys in a previous post. For me, it is perhaps one of the biggest (and least addressed) problems with our current schooling system. (See the full post here.) Most boys learn differently to most girls, and if they are not taught differently, their self-esteem suffers massively. This is not about gender stereotypes, it is about brains. There is a reason that boys generally do better than girls in only the practical subjects like IT and Science. In essence, the reason is that unless they are actively engaged, most male brains go into a sort of ‘screen-saver’ mode. And because many teachers only teach the way girls prefer, boys tend to under-perform and cannot understand why. They then are berated and encouraged to ‘try harder’. A disturbingly large number of boys simply cannot understand why they cannot achieve better, and so begin to internalise this failure. Sometimes with tragic consequences. To address this, I would create ‘girl-heavy’ and ‘boy-heavy’ classes in Grade 8 and 9, allowing for the fact that some students may not fit the trend. (How to do this without causing offense might be a matter to challenge my staff with solving.) I would require teachers to adapt their approaches to ensure that they cater specifically for the dominant brain-based learning preferences of their classes.