Personal branding

A quick trawl round the ‘net has confirmed for me that you’re nothing without a personal brand nowadays. I was just trying to create a compact letter head, but that’s getting very difficult, what with the number of outlets which we now have to express ourselves publicly, and which we might therefore want to make public. Once you’ve fitted addresses for a blog, website, Facebook page, MySpace page, Bibo and Skype as well as more pedestrian information like email, or even (do people still have these?) a landline number, there’s not much space for a letter anyway. And then comes the branding issue. Does co-ordinating the look and feel of your opinion-sharing (the blog), your social networking (Facebook, Bibo) and your online credentials (website) make you a digital pioneer, keen to present yourself as a coherent and effective online personality? Or does it make you a drone; a human Big Mac so desperate for a smooth, standardised feel and appearance that you lose any semblance of the personality you’re striving so hard to create? Or does it just mean you spend way too much time online, and have probably forgotten the old-school methods of developing an interesting and effective personal brand (i.e. by being and interesting and effective personal person)? I’ve got to admit that my first impulse was to start co-ordinating everything to fit with PeriodOne’s style, but I’m now thinking that the last point does have some validity, and that large portions of the population would simply shake their heads sadly at the thought of someone devoting so much time to their virtual personality and look. And, at the back of my mind, there’s the another thought gestating and slowly becoming a monster: is it me, or is it the kind of people who, try as they might, are not able to shape their actual lives to the form that they desire who flee to the more easily adjustable parameters of the online world? Once upon a time, before they took over the world, they used to called ‘geeks’ …

The new batch …

Timing a tube strike with the first day of the new school year was a master stroke of inconvenience-causing, mayhem-inducing industrial action here in London. It certainly added an edge as key members of staff languished on the wrong side of the Thames while new year sevens arrived, wide-eyed and quivering. I have the honour of sheparding one form of these new recruits through their first year, and they turned up in a flurry of nervously clutched planners, impeccably polished shoes and ridiculously oversized blazers. One boy’s parents were particularly keen to ensure all school equipment was thoroughly future-proof: in obvious anticipation of a sudden, hulk-like expansion in their son’s physical dimensions, they had bought him a uniform that would have been a bit roomy even for me. Now, received wisdom with year sevens is that one must ‘go in hard’, i.e. not matter how scared, nervous, polite and down-right tearful they appear, here shall be no quarter. Presenting oneself as an approachable, easy-going form tutor on day one means an endless stream of pointless questions on day two (year sevens are well known for their tendency to surrender all shreds of common sense at any given opportunity), and an endless stream of complaints from colleagues on day three as the new batch tests the limits of the school behaviour policy. So, I went in hard, and am now desperately praying that it’s worked: only time will tell. By the end of the week, my form were still looking sharp, and there’s only been positive feedback so far, so here’s hoping …

The experience deficit

There are currently more and more young and / or inexperienced educational practitioners taking on levels of responsibility previously only awarded to those with several years’ experience. Especially in city schools where recruitment is difficult, young and flexible applicants (often driven on by a variety of leadership-orientated schemes) are filling the posts – witness the age profile of my school. The advice given to these leadership aspirants is often similar: actively seek out leadership opportunities and maintain a reflective approach, evaluate and improve. My question is: against what criteria should inexperienced leaders evaluate themselves? A conscientious and available mentor could provide these, but such people are understandably hard to come by given the pressures on senior school staff. The other option is to try and compensate for lack of direct experience by building up theoretical knowledge which can be accumulated readily outside of the classroom – in the library or the post-graduate lecture theatre. But is this any good? Does it cut it in a tense budget meeting or classroom confrontation? I think we need some theoretical guidance on making theoretical guidance work in practice. There are currently some incredibly successful, incredibly inexperienced leaders at work in education – we need to look at how they have bridged the experience deficit, whether through solid theory, inspirational mentors or sheer determination, fortitude and resilience. That’ll leave the rest of us to get on with bridging our other deficits…

And to the end …

My word: end-of-term staff dinners are an experience not easily forgotten. That is, of course, if one remembers them in the first place. In any case, on our last day (and the morning after such a night of revelry), I enjoyed the surreal experience of creeping to my desk in semi-darkness whilst carefully stepping over more senior colleagues foetally curled in deep slumber on the office floor.

Thus initiated, the experience of ending the first year was further heightened by the darkening of the skies (street lights came on!) and the breaking of a storm of truly biblical proportions the likes of which I have yet to witness in London. Of course, coaxing our pupils out into this maelstrom after our early finish was not easy and effectively extending the school year by an hour for staff (now awake) and pupils alike.

I went home and slept until the evening, waking completely disconcerted and confused but with a feeling of wonder which is just about still there a week into the holidays. Let the good times roll! (until September …)

Growing up

Having just deleted my bookmark for Radio 1 and replaced it with one for Radio 4, I feel that the vitality of youth is slipping away. This is also evidenced by the fact I’m up at 7.00 on Sunday for no good reason. Which in turn has led me to realise that actually, lots of people are up at this time – there are a couple waiting for the light rail train outside my flat right now. And it continues … I’ve been looking out of the window where a church spire is visible. Not content to note this and move on, I’ve just established the location, name and history of the church. What’s that all about? I read several articles in our very local paper with interest the other day. The lack of sofa in the new flat has helped me discover that getting up off the floor is something best planned in advance. And I like the fact that the news on Radio 4 isn’t delivered over a pounding trance beat which gives the impression that the news reader has just nipped out of a night club to complete the broadcast. What’s this? ‘Night’ club? Since when have I found it necessary to specify I mean a club you go to at night? Isn’t that obvious? Apparently not, any more …

Homework?

Our parent and friends association, like every other school parent and friend association, has an issue with the way the school sets homework. It’s not consistent: nothing comes for weeks then there’s four pieces in for tomorrow; it’s not challenging as length and scope are not specified; and it’s not relevant – tacked-on little tasks to appease anxious parents.

Truth is, in a highly diverse inner-city school where English (in my case) is taught in mixed-ability groupings, no homework a classroom teacher could reasonably set and mark would allow access to those students at the bottom of the ability range whilst stretching those at the top. It’s a logistical impossibility (my colleague, who teaches some 7 year 8 history groups a week, calculated that 5 minutes spent marking each pupil’s weekly homework task would take him around 14 hours) and the fractious arguments with pupils whose homework is missing impacts negatively on those who have completed the task by impinging on contact time with their teacher.

So, homework gets fudged. A creative and industrious department might co-ordinate homework tasks to fit in with subsequent lesson starters, allowing some brief feedback in class to avoid horrendous marking overload, but an average department will set homeworks now and again, get kids to finish off tasks at home, and try and take a look at the books once or twice a term.

So let’s take homework out of the classroom. It doesn’t belong there anyway – the clue’s in the name after all. Cross-curricular projects completed at home and supervised during targeted tutorials at school have the scope to push pupils without limiting access and can be assessed meaningfully at key points during the school year. Exercise books stay in school, and informed teacher will intuitively link their lesson content to the project which their kids are working on. At least, that’s the theory we’ll be piloting next year. And I’ve got some homework to do this weekend – writing the proposal. And yes, it will stretch me.

Sundays

Frenzied, desperate creativity grasps me every Sunday morning. Unfortunately, so desperate and frenzied is this urge that I rarely actually achieve anything of worth: in the last hour I’ve started working out plans for some storage furniture (unfinished), subscribed for job alerts from two employers (neither yet confirmed), and, bizarrely, spent about half an hour finding bandwidths and tuning the presets of my radio in order to sate an inexplicable desire to listen to the BBC World Service at the touch of a button (couldn’t find it in the end). Why? It might be some extremely diluted version of the feeling that Alan Johnston recently described upon his release: wanting to see and do everything at once. Of course, the last three weeks of the summer term hardly resemble interminable incarceration at the hands of dangerous and unpredictable lunatics. Hmm. Interestingly, Johnston also mentioned that the World Service kept him going …

Rate my teachers …

www.ratemyteachers.co.uk should strike fear into the heart of any educational professional. I’m on there already from one of my PGCE placements (with a modest 3.8 out of 5 for your information). As the Telegraph has already noted, the concept of a website through which pupils and parents can anonymously critique teachers is problematic, to say the least. What worries me most is that kids are not educational professionals. That the site offers a no-holds-barred, brutal and honest means of school or teacher appraisal in contrast to Ofsted’s staid and linguistically torturous reports is certainly an appealing notion. But, sadly, it’s all wrong. Kids can’t accurately assess teachers any more than the average person could rate a barrister or doctor. And yes, of course a teacher would say that. Yes, of course ‘if anyone should know, it will be the kids’. Well, no, of course not. We all think back to our school days from an adult perspective, superimposing our contemporary acuity of insight onto our teenage selves. Alright, but this site isn’t governed by the opinions of retrospectively insightful former pupils. It quantifies the opinions of children, quite possibly egged on by peers, and wholly unaware of the potential consequences of their actions. Michael Hussey, the site’s young co-creator (and one time supply teacher), may have hit on a GoogleAds goldmine of a idea, but his claims that RMT represents a reflective aid for teachers’ professional development is bordering on the delusional.