If teachers want to have high status they should work in classrooms in China, Malaysia or Taiwan, because an international survey suggests these are the countries where teaching is held in the highest public esteem.
But their colleagues in Brazil, Israel and Italy are at the other end of this "teacher status index", based on research from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the Varkey Foundation.
The UK is in the upper half of the rankings of 35 countries, with the teaching profession held in higher regard than in the United States, France and Germany.
But China leads the way - with 81% believing that pupils respect their teachers, compared with an international average of 36%, in a survey of 35,000 people.
Culture of respectIn Europe and South America there were "generally higher levels of pessimism about students' respect for teachers".
This culture of respect seems to be particularly strong in Asia, including countries such as South Korea and Singapore.

Pupils in these countries are also top performers in international tests and the researchers suggest that a well-regarded teaching profession, which can attract talented staff, seems to go hand-in-hand with high standards.
Another way of looking at the perceived status of teaching was to ask if people saw it as a desirable career for their own children.
In China, India and Ghana, high numbers of families would encourage their children to become teachers.
But in Russia, Israel and Japan it was more likely that parents would actively discourage children from entering the profession.
In the UK, only 23% of adults would push their child to become a teacher, the ninth lowest among the countries surveyed.
The study of public attitudes also asked about teachers' working lives.
In most of the countries examined, the public underestimated teachers' working hours - whether it was New Zealand, which had some of the longest, or Panama or Egypt, with some of the lowest.
Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption Would people want their own children to become teachers when they grow up?
The exceptions to this were two of the highest-achieving education systems - Canada and Finland - where the public thought their teachers were working even more hours than they were in reality.
Teachers in the UK worked the fourth longest hours, more than 50 a week, including work at home such as marking.
Performance pay out of fashionThe study is a follow-up to similar research on attitudes to teaching five years ago.
Among the biggest differences was the shift in opinion on performance-related pay for teachers, which had been much in discussion at the time.
In every country, support for linking teachers' pay to results had fallen between 2013 and 2018.
In Finland, it had dropped from 80% in favour to 21% and in the UK, backing for performance pay had gone down from 74% to 34%.
The survey has been published by the Varkey Foundation education charity, organisers of the Global Teacher Prize, which aims to raise the profile of teaching.
Sunny Varkey, founder of the foundation, said: "This index finally gives academic proof to something that we've always instinctively known - the link between the status of teachers in society and the performance of children in school.
"Now we can say beyond doubt that respecting teachers isn't only an important moral duty - it's essential for a country's educational outcomes."
Top 10 for teacher status

1. China
2. Malaysia
3. Taiwan
4. Russia
5. Indonesia
6. South Korea
7. Turkey
8. India
9. New Zealand
10. Singapore

This is a great Guardian article, published today, by Kay Holmes.  I've always been interested in transitions, and as a corollary, in rites of passage.   This week we have had graduations at Manchester Met, and we are starting to think about next year's intake and their transitional experiences.  

I'm interested in identity change - or whether identity does change with transitions in education?  I'm also interested in the rituals and rites  of passage that accompany transitions - in Germany, what is called 'schooling in' - as parents and children are welcomed into 'big school'. 

I think in HE we send out mixed messages about this.  And certainly the transition to secondary school is a step for children where they are quite suddenly 'left alone'.  For most secondary schools parents are positively discouraged from coming into school- a big contrast from many primaries. 

So what are we trying to do with transitions?  Who is making the transition? 

And if we believe in situated  and co-constructed learning then certainly secondary schools and probably HEIs need to think a bit more about how they do this - if it is the case that transitions are key in identity change, then they are of significance in determining all kinds of aspects of children's lives.  

And if this article is to be believed - and it certainly includes food for thought -  the transitions for parents and other family members are likely to be significant in terms of identity and family dynamics.    

Saying goodbye to your child’s primary school? I never knew how much I’d miss it |
Kay Holmes | Opinio


The little girl who once hugged me at the gates has moved on, and the change to secondary school has come as a shock

‘Most parents of year 6 children, as I know from recent experience, won’t be braced for how different their lives as parents is are about to become.’

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian


My first day in the school playground was terrifying. Everyone else seemed to know each other. Chatting, laughing clusters of comfortable, relaxed people made connections and bonded. I decided – out of sheer defensiveness – that was not for me. I would instead enter and leave the playground untouched by human contact. No chatting, no laughing, and definitely no PTA meetings or arranging the summer fair.

The parent-teacher association​ was all the cliches: middle class, do-gooding, ravenous for women’s free time

That lasted about a week. My daughter became close friends with two girls and I followed suit with their mothers. As my child’s friendship circle expanded, so did mine. I began to bake cakes for events and tried to control my competitiveness. I lugged innumerable huge folding tables from dark corners and pinched my fingers setting them up. I ventured into the dank horror of the disco room at parties where sugar-enraged under-10s sweated out manic interpretations of Lush Life and Uptown Funk.
My friend Liz and I cornered the tombola market. It involved a certain amount of maths to work out the ticket-stubs--to-prizes ratio, and a certain amount of sitting on the floor chatting while sticking prize numbers on to re-gifted condiment sets and bottles of wine.
Many afternoons standing behind a trestle table in a playground selling baked goods were enlivened by the spectacular rudeness of our customers. So keen was I to prove my lack of professionalism that I met rudeness with sarcasm and once yelled after a man – who was passive-aggressively chuntering about “very expensive cakes” – that “they aren’t expensive at all sir, and this is for your children!”
And against my will I was drawn into the PTA.
The parent-teacher association was all the cliches you can throw at it – middle class, do-gooding, prescriptive and ravenous for women’s free time. But it raised some money, staged some joyful communal events, and tried to include everyone.
And there’s the rub. This was the month of summer fairs and of farewells. Most parents of year 6 children are now facing the last day of primary school, but they will also be throwing their thoughts and worries forward. What they won’t be, as I know from recent experience, is in any way braced for how different their lives as parents are about to become.
The little girl who used to hold hands with me all the way to school and hug me fiercely in the playground is now a year 7 who salutes me cordially some distance from the train she takes with her friends to a school in a different part of the city. After wandering fairly freely through her primary school on PTA business, I couldn’t enter her secondary school if I wanted to because there’s a guard at the gate. He’s very nice, but holding a Victoria sponge and mumbling about raffle tickets is going to butter no parsnips with him.
Misanthropic me should be pleased not to be rubbing shoulders with other parents at drop-off. And – full disclosure – it is a relief. But it’s a shock to discover how suddenly school becomes none of your business. For children, it’s the first stage of preparation for the adult world.
The separation is natural and right and has to happen. So I hope those parents paused to enjoy the dreaded summer cake sale – and revelled in the arguments over whether or not to have a bouncy castle, or buying versus renting a popcorn machine.
Things will change fast: you’re one summer away from a different world that even a diehard curmudgeon can acknowledge is a bittersweet experience.
• Kay Holmes is a freelance writer

I use phones and ILT in my teaching a lot - but this article from Sky News talks about banning mobile phones in school all together.  And interestingly, in a poll on the Sky News website this morning, 80% of respondents have suggested that mobile phones should be banned from schools all together.   The culture secretary misrepresents the findings of a 2015 study when he says that results are impacted by students even just having phones in bags *how cold that be - it is nonsense!)  

The 2015 study (available here...cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf) suggests...
By exploiting differences in implementation dates, our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.

The existing literature on the impact of technology in the classroom implies that the unstructured presence of technology has ambiguous impacts on student achievement. We add to this by illustrating that a highly multipurpose technology, such as mobile phones, can have a negative impact on productivity through distraction. Schools that restrict access to mobile phones subsequently experience an improvement in test scores. However, these findings do not discount the possibility that mobile phones could be a useful learning tool if their use is properly structured. Our findings suggest that the presence of mobile phones in schools should not be ignored.
Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present. Given heterogeneous results, banning mobile phones could be a low-cost way for schools to reduce educational inequality.

So what is interesting here is two things;  firstly, the structured and considered use of mobile phones in scjools can be useful - and with the increase in interactive technologies, that's no surprise.   And secondly, and worryingly  - there is a difference in  the effects that phones have on different kinds of pupils. Banning mobiles has most efect on low achieving students, and less of an effect on higher achieving students.  I think this needs more investigation - this is a research project that I am really interested in.   

The Sky news  article is below....

Culture secretary Matt Hancock says schools should ban mobile phonesNot content with barring them from the classroom, Matt Hancock suggests they be confiscated from children at the start of the day.

Children should be banned from using their mobile phones at school, the culture secretary has said.

Not content with merely barring them from being used in the classroom, Matt Hancock has suggested that they be confiscated from children who carry them at the start of each school day.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he warned that mobiles could have a "real impact" on students' achievements and leave them exposed to increased amounts of bullying. He also questioned why youngsters needed to bring their phones to school in the first place.

"There are a number of schools across the country that simply don't allow them," he said.
"While it is up to individual schools to decide rather than government, I admire head teachers who do not allow mobiles to be used during the school day. I encourage more schools to follow their lead."
Mr Hancock said that "setting boundaries" in relation to how much children were exposed to technology - and notably social media - was vital in protecting them from harm and encouraging them to use the internet safely.
"Studies have shown that mobile phones can have a real impact on working memory and fluid intelligence, even if the phone is on a table or in a bag," he added.

His column was supported by a letter from seven fellow Tory MPs, also published in the newspaper.
Citing a 2015 study by the London School of Economics, they write: "Where schools banned smartphones from the premises, or required them to be handed in at the start of the day, pupils' chances of getting five good GCSEs increased by an average of 2%.
"The improvement was even more marked for lower-achieving pupils. Results among pupils in the bottom quarter of achievement improved twice as much as the average."

I've just had a case study accepted for the second edition of Peter Kahn and Lorraine Walsh's book on 'Developing your teaching'. I'm really pleased! I wrote it about reflective practice, and how I use Brookfield's lenses  and reflective journals in my own work.  
It reflects my approach to teaching social justice.  But in writing it, and in correspondence with Lorraine about my work, I realised that I don't give enough time to thinking about how I reflect; at least not in terms if pedagogy- should the reflection 'match' or be linked to the pedagogy or subject matter.  And I also haven't formalized the ideas about how I decide which teaching methods I use in which sessions, and why. 

So then I started to think about how you could deconstruct pedagogy - what are the features (possibly, what are the outcomes) of effective pedagogy?   The Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence at the University of California talks about these being key aspects: joint productive activity; language development; contextualization; challenging activities; and Instructional Conversation (IC).   https://www.tolerance.org/professional-development/five-standards-of-effective-pedagogy

In 2012 Chris Husbands and Jo Pearce wrote a booklet for the National College; What makes great pedagogy? Nine claims from research.  
They conclude:
This review has set out nine claims about what makes for great pedagogic practices drawing on a range
of research evidence. The evidence which has been reviewed suggests that outstanding pedagogy is far from straightforward. Classrooms are complex, multi-faceted and demanding places in which to work and successful pedagogies are correspondingly sophisticated. Highly successful pedagogies develop when teachers make outstanding use of their understanding of the research and knowledge-base for teaching in order to support high-quality planning and practice. The very best teaching arises when this research base is supplemented by a personal passion for what is to be taught and for the aspirations of learners.

There is a robust evidence base which helps to identify the ingredients of outstanding pedagogic practices. However, truly effective practices depend on teachers making active connections between the ideas from research. The most effective successful classroom practices work these ideas together in systematic and sophisticated ways, and the best teachers are active in building relationships between them. Understanding the ways in which these relationships are built – what Leahy et al (2005) have called ‘minute-by-minute classroom practices’ – is itself a fruitful area for both further research and improving practice.

And so, this took me back to reflection - in and on practice (Schön).   The minute by minute decisions and actions are things that over my years in practice have often saved me; and sometimes let me down big style.  So really, the values of experience, and of implicit learning, cannot be overstated.   The complex interactions in the classroom, and the way we work, which changes even as we are working, are key in our practice.

So what?  Well, so this blog, which is just my reflections - is a really useful one; I'm glad I've kept it up - the joint thinking and writing are key to my developing practice.  

(Image from Growth Coaching International, http://www.growthcoaching.com.au/articles-new/changing-the-lens-critical-reflection-through-coaching?country=au)


People who have worked with me or read any of my writing on reflection will know that I'm really keen on Stephen Brookfield's 'lenses' model for reflecting on teaching.  he's recently updated his book so we have a 2017 version of the 1995 ideas, but really there is little difference.  So I thought I would look for other models, so see if I am missing something new, or something that is useful. 

I found Terry Borton’s (1970) ideas - 3 stem questions: 'What?', 'So What?' and 'Now What?' that were developed by John Driscoll in 1994. Driscoll matched the 3 questions to the stages of an experiential learning cycle;  and added trigger questions that can be used to complete the cycle.  But this is old, and not very complex. 

Johns' model is based on five cue questions which enable you to break down your experience and reflect on the process and outcomes. John (1995) used seminal work by Carper (1978) as the basis for his model exploring aesthetics, personal knowing, ethics and empirics and then encouraging the reflective practitioner to explore how this has changed and improved their practice. But this is really designed with nursing practitioners in mind, and I am not sure that it really works too well for teaching?

Tom Russell (2013) wrote a reflective article looking back on 35 years as teacher educator, and suggests that teacher educators rarely model reflective practice, fail to link reflection clearly and directly to professional learning, and rarely explain what they mean by reflection, with the result that student teachers may complete their initial teacher education with "a muddled and negative view of what reflection is and how it might contribute to their professional learning". (p.88)  To be honest, in my role as external examiner I have seen this - trainees encouraged to reflect on their practice, but often offered no more of a structure with which to do this than 'reflection in and on action' which is really not much use in this context.   For Russell, the problems relating to reflective practice result from the fact that teacher educators have not sufficiently explored how theories of reflective practice relate to their own teaching, and so have not made the necessary "paradigmatic changes" themselves which they expect their students to make. 

I would agree; it's lip service only, very often, that I see.   And this can result in unhelpful and not very interesting egocentric descriptions of practice.  

Do we need to be constrained by existing models?  Well, maybe not.  But we do need a starting point.  So after
a bit of  literature search, I think I would still go with Brookfield as far as my own and my students' practice goes.   


References

Borton, T. (1970). Reach Touch and Teach, London: Hutchinson cited in Jasper, M. (2003) Beginning Reflective Practice, Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.

Brookfield, S. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San-Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Second Edition.  Jossey-Bass: San Francisco

Driscoll J. (1994) Reflective practice for practise. Senior Nurse. Vol.13 Jan/Feb. 47 -50

Johns, C. (1995). Framing learning through reflection within Carper’s fundamental ways of knowing in nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing. 22, 2,
226-234

Russell, T. (2013) 'Has Reflective Practice Done More Harm than Good in Teacher Education?' Phronesis, 2(1), pp. 80-88

This week I have been thinking and reading about metacognition, because of the EEF report ( see link above). 

Some ideas to think about, that the EEF suggest...

1. Which explicit strategies can you teach your pupils to help them plan, monitor, and evaluate specific aspects of their learning? 
2. How can you give them opportunities to use these strategies with support, and then independently?
3. How can you ensure you set an appropriate level of challenge to develop pupils’ self-regulation and metacognition in relation to specific learning tasks?
4. In the classroom, how can you promote and develop metacognitive talk related to your lesson objectives? 
5. What professional development is needed to develop your knowledge and understanding of these approaches? Have you considered professional development interventions which have been shown to have an impact in other schools?
   
   

Tonight a primary school colleagues told me that their school had been served with a notice from the LEA saying that they were 'at risk of coasting'. 

What was happening?  Had the school and the staff been galvanised into action?  Far from it...the staff  were depressed and demoralised.  They felt at risk, and that the academy broker vultures were circling.   I asked what the figures were looking like, and my colleague said

'I have no idea, to be honest I have seen so many meaningless figures today that I have no idea why it's been decided we are not good enough.' 

And then, and tellingly...

Kids are going home to no food/heat/clean clothes and are experiencing and seeing all manner of abuse and yet they don't give a s**t about that. Just data.

And my colleague has ben thinking about leaving the profession.  No wonder.  

Finland is moving away from traditional school subjects and on to something called 'phenomenon based learning'.    In Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL) and teaching, holistic real-world phenomena provide the starting point for learning. The phenomena are studied as complete entities, in their real context, and the information and skills related to them are studied by crossing the boundaries between subjects. Phenomena are  holistic topics like human, European Union, media and technology, water or energy.The starting point differs from the traditional school culture divided into subjects, where the things studied are often split into relatively small, separate parts (decontextualisation).

Phenomenon-based structure in a curriculum also actively creates better  opportunities for integrating different subjects and themes as well as the systematic use of pedagogically meaningful methods, such as inquiry learning, problem-based  learning, project learning and portfolios. The phenomenon-based approach is also key in the versatile utilisation of different learning environments (e.g. in diversifying and enriching learning while using eLearning environments).

In the diagram below (taken from http://livetheorganicdream.com/finland-abolishing-school-subjects/) the process is explained.   
 
Will this be the end of subjects, of 'knowledge' Govean style, and the start of an emphasis on process?  And will it be the end of HE and traditional academia?  And if so, does that matter?  It'll be interesting to see how this will pan out in Finland over the years.    

There are a lot more women than men going to university this September/October - a third more youg women than young men so far, according to UCAS (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-410669730).  


The latest figures suggest that about 133,00 18-year-old women from the UK have secured a university place in the UK, compared with approximately 104,800 men of this age. The BBC suggests that across the UK, 27.3% of all young men are expected to go to university this year compared with 37.1% of women.This is a huge gap (36%) - and larger than last year's gap; it's also 5% more than the 2012 gender gap.  


UCAS has said that there is a 9% increase in UK 18-year-olds placed on nursing courses this year, so this will be a contributory factor; women significantly outnumber men for these degrees, with around 28 women recruited for every man.



According to the BBC, Dr Mark Corver, who is UCAS's director of analysis and research, said:
"More UK 18-year-olds will be starting university this autumn than ever before but large differences in who goes remain.

"Our research has shown that the difference between 18-year-old men and women entering university is now similar to that between the richest and poorest halves of the population.

"The statistics today show the difference between men and women slowly growing wider."


We should always be wary of gender gaps; they often have their roots in schools, and in and they tend to be subject related - as we can see from the nursing figures, above.  It is great, I hope, that more young women are entering HE - but what of the young men? Rumour has it that schools are putting an increased premium on apprenticeships, and these may be more attractive to young men.  So is this the continuation of the deskilling of the workforce and of our developing a cohort of technicians (e.g. in education and nursing),  as opposed to sentient professionals?