Teaching & tutoring – Page 3 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Let us be clear: what teachers could learn from the aviation industry

We in education could learn a great deal from the aviation industry. In fact, most professions could learn a lot from the aviation industry. While so many other professions have a tendency towards a blame-culture and criticism, aviation is built on the principle of learning from its mistakes and implementing procedures to mitigate against them. It is also relentlessly focused on clarity of communcation: for lives literally depend on getting this right.

Last night, my husband and I watched one of a string of documentaries aired on the National Geographic channel, which follow accident investigations in aviation. The accident explored in this particular episode occured all the way back in 1989 and involved a Boeing 707 on an American charter flight from Italy to the Dominican Republic. The flight was making a scheduled stop on the Portugese island of Santa Maria, where it was due to be refuelled. As a result of a series of minor but significant oversights in procedure made both by the flight crew and by the Air Traffic Controller, Flight 1851 came in too low and struck a mountain range, killing everyone on board.

One of the most important things about the way in which investigations are conducted in aviation is that the culture focuses not on finger-pointing but on identifying the factors which led to an accident, so that the findings can be shared within the industry and lessons truly learned. The investigators may make recommendations which lead to a tightening of regulations around pilots’ working hours, a change in how pilots are trained, an adjustment to the design of an aircraft and/or its instruments, a tweak in recommended flight procedures, or all of the above. The approach is a model in how to react under extreme pressure: it does not seek to apportion blame, it aims rather to improve safety for the future, for the benefit of everyone. The pilots who do make errors (and who pay the ultimate price for them) are treated with infinite respect and the investigators do not simply stop at putting things down to “pilot error” and then washing their hands of the incident – they go on to explore why the pilots may have made a particular error, with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of similar errors occuring again in the future. Were they overtired? Was the information they were receiving unclear or counter-intuitive? Was their training insufficient in this area? Above all, how could we have prevented them from making this mistake? I find this approach genuinely inspiring and I wish other fields would learn from it.

One of the key findings of this particular investigation was that there was a crucial miscommunication between the Air Traffic Controller and the flight crew. The ATC instructed the crew that they were “cleared to three thousand feet” (in other words, that their initial approach should not go below three thousand feet). For several reasons, the First Officer ended up mishearing the instruction as “cleared two thousand feet” and the aircraft was set to the incorrect height. My husband (a trained pilot, as it happens) informs me that this would be less likely to occur now because the advised vocalisations for this particular information have been revised, in an attempt to prevent such misunderstandings; the instruction would now be “you are cleared to altitude three thousand feet” – the word “altitude” must be used immediately before the given height in order to avoid any confusion between words and numbers, an error which in the case of Flight 1851 led to devastating consequences.

While the documentary explored numerous other reasons why the crash ultimately occured and indeed made it clear that the Captain of the flight crew undeniably missed several opportunities to prevent the disaster from happening, the underlying cause of the crash was quite simple – the aircraft came in too low. The miscommunication between the ATC and the flight crew, which was not corrected when it could and should have been, set the aircraft on a collision course with the mountainous terrain towards which it was headed.

Now I for one am jolly glad to be working in a field in which my mistakes are unlikely to cause multiple fatalities and even less likely to be the subject of a documentary on National Geographic some 35 years later. Yet this minor slip which led to such devastating consequences for the flight and its passengers did remind me of a misapprehension which I discovered in a tutee this year. On Flight 1851, the First Officer mistook a word for a number – quite simply, he heard “cleared to” as “cleared two”. Similarly, I realised this year that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of discussing this with him and trying to explore what was going on, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words. And he had been royally confused ever since.

Whilst teachers are not making minute-by-minute decisions on which hundreds of lives depend, instead they are laying the foundations for a child’s understanding in their subject. Whilst this is not life-threatening (happily, I can’t think of a single occasion on which a misunderstanding of the dative case has led to multiple fatalities), it is nevertheless important in our line of work, assuming we care about what we do. This particular child’s misunderstanding underlined for me the importance of dual coding, which means using a visual representation of what you are saying as well as a verbalisation: quite simply, if the teacher in question had merely written the words “to” and “for” on the board as they spoke, they would have avoided the misconception that was absorbed and internalised by this particular child.

On one sunny day, during which I took the photograph below, I was very privileged to join my husband on a flight during his training and listen to the impeccably high standard of teaching that he received from his instructor. My advice to all teachers if they want to observe a model in verbal clarity is to take every opportunity that they can to go and listen to people who teach a practical skill. Go and watch a PE teacher setting up a game; watch a science teacher preparing students for an experiment; take a refresher course from a driving instructor; tune in to your coach at the gym. Above all, in your own teaching, remember that every word you use must be carefully thought through and – in an ideal world – that you should take a note of every misconception which does occur and seek to mitigate against it next time by improving your verbal explanation. While I am happy and relieved to say that a child’s life will not depend on your words, their success in your subject absolutely does.

I took this photograph from inside the aircraft in which my husband did much of his training.

What’s wrong with GCSE Latin?

Sometimes you have to step off the treadmill to reflect on what is wrong with the system. After 21 years of preparing cohorts of students for Latin at GCSE level, it has taken me a year or so off the hamster wheel to reflect upon what is wrong with it and how the examination at GCSE level is fundamentally flawed.

To understand how the Latin GCSE fails our students, we first of all need to reflect upon what the purpose is of studying Latin – without this, the decisions made by the exam boards will seem even more incomprehensible than they actually are. First and foremost, forgetting any wild claims to promote excellence, increase vocabulary or whatever else we tell ourselves about our subject, the purpose of studying Latin is to train students to be able to read real Roman texts. This is the end goal and everything else is broadly irrelevant. This inescapable reality is – I believe – why both exam boards and QCA are so irrevocably wedded to the notion that students must study a substantial proportion of “real” Latin texts in order to gain a basic qualification in the subject.

Let us reflect for a moment on what this actually means. Unless a child has attended prep school and studied Latin from Year 5 or 6 onwards, students will have started Latin as a beginners’ subject in Year 7 and will be unlikely to have had more than one hour’s tuition per week in the subject. This may increase margially in Years 8-9, but not by much. Within that space of time, the exam boards are expecting a student entering Year 10 to be prepared to study real Latin texts, a frankly laughable notion. Imagine expecting a student of French to read and understand Voltaire or Maupassant during their GCSE course, when they are still wrestling with the fundamentals of the language.

The argument is often trotted out that modern language students have more to contend with, because they have to work on a wider variety of skills: Latin – being a dead language – does not require students to be tested on speaking or listening. Agreed, these skills take up a huge amount of teaching time for modern linguists that we do not have to dedicate when it comes to an ancient language. Believe me, however, this is more than made up for by the linguistic content required. My first Head of Department once quipped, when I mentioned to him that one of my Year 10 students had suddenly asked when we would learn to tell the time in Latin, that I should have replied “when you have learnt the pluperfect passive subjunctive.” He had a point. (He was right, by the way: the pluperfect passive subjunctive is required at GCSE). Rod, who had only ever taught French and German, had seen the list of grammatical constructions required for GCSE Latin and it never failed to astonish him.

Now that I am on the outside of the school system, working with a large number of GCSE candidates from a variety of schools, I am being exposed to a broad range of approaches from each school. Most of them do what I did and plough through as much of the GCSE language content as they can during the first two terms of Year 10, then start tackling the literature texts in the final term of Year 10 and throughout Year 11. This is the best we can do. I have come across one school that takes longer over the language then expects students to have gained enough linguistic knowledge to tackle the set texts very quickly due to their broader knowledge-base; this is frankly nonsense, given that the language required for the texts goes way, way beyond that required at GCSE for the language paper. Some schools start the texts immediately and encourage students to work on them from the very beginning, but this is rare.

For the unintiated, let us be clear: GCSE candidates do not have anything like the linguistic knowledge required to study the real Latin texts that are prescribed for the GCSE. The only way they can cope with and even borderline understand the texts is to learn the English translation off by heart, a simply mammoth rote-learning task. This is what I spend much of my time supporting students with as many are not given the tools and the skill-set to do this on their own.

This year I had something of an epiphany when working with a handful of independent students. Why do we do it? The requirements for Latin GCSE are so unrealistic that I would go so far as to say that the qualification is wildly inappropriate. My belief that this is the case means that I no longer encourage students to take the qualification as a supplementary subject: it simply is way too much to cope with on top of their regular studies. I do not say this lightly, not least because it will mean I miss out on a significant amount of potential tutoring work. But the truth must be told, and parents of students who have a desire to study Latin independently need to think very long and hard about the reality of what that means and whether they are prepared for the sheer slog that it will entail.

So long as the texts required for GCSE go far beyond the students’ linguistic skills, the only way to prepare for the examination will continue to be to learn the texts off by heart. I shudder to think the number of wasted hours that has been spent on this. One of my skills as a tutor is in helping students with this process, because there are indeed ways in which it can be made less arduous and more manageable. I shall continue to do this, to assist students in their quest to attain top marks in the qualification for which they have been entered. But really – what are we doing it for? Is it really the best way to prepare students for a future in the subject? I do wish QCA and the examination boards would take a long, hard and realisitc look at what they are demanding from 16-year-olds and face up to the reality that their examination in its current form is not really fit for purpose.

Beyond the chalkface

Why I left teaching after 21 years

Yesterday I listened to several panelists explain their journey into tutoring at the Love Tutoring Festival run by Qualified Tutor. Some of them had been a teacher for many years and some of them seem to have disliked it from the start. This got me thinking about my own experiences, for I was someone who loved my job, indeed I felt it had helped to keep me sane in times when I might otherwise have struggled to stay afloat.

No other job takes you out of yourself in quite the way that teaching does. No other job brings you so many laughs per hour, with so much variety woven into it, despite the fact that outstanding teaching can only thrive (in my humble opinion) within watertight perameters and established routines.

Teaching is a wonderful job and it genuinely pains me to see it talked down by the media. It pains me even more to see how the profession is haemorrhaging its own staff – often its best and its brightest – as we helter-skelter into a recruitment and retention crisis of epic proportions. When I left teaching in 2022 I was part of a very depressing set of statistics, as retention reached its worst level in history. There is something very terrible going on.

Some members of the tutoring profession, of which I am now a part, seem to me to have some rather fanciful ideas when it comes to mainstream schooling. Their belief seems to be that there is no “one size fits all” and that provision must be broadened to suit the whim of every child and every parent, to bend its nature to every individual need. The reality – of course – is that this is simply not possible. If the state is to provide a basic education for all children and if that provision is to be free to access – and I cling to the belief that these principles are not up for debate – then we have to provide that education in a setting where it can be delivered to large numbers of students at a time. There really isn’t any other option that works. Sure, you can tweak things around the edges and many schools do outstanding work accessing a variety of provision for individuals that goes beyond that model, but I haven’t yet met a sensible Headteacher that would throw out the model altogther.

One of the main problems in the profession, as I see it now from the outside, is that teachers are our own worst enemy. Whenever we are provided with models that take the pressure off us, we complain. Schools which centralise behavioural systems and provide staff with explicit guidance on how to teach and provide materials to use face complaints that teachers’ autonomy and professionalism is being questioned. It’s all pretty exhausting. I felt that morale was low amongst the teachers that I knew when we returned after Covid, but nobody seemed able to agree on why they felt this way. All of us seemed to have a different opinion on what the problems were and even where we could agree that something was an issue, SLT faced wildly differing takes on the solutions to that problem. I am very aware that whenever I beat a path to the door of my go-to Deputy Head, what I was saying to him probably contrasted irreconcilably with something that somebody else will have pitched to him just half an hour earlier.

So what I have to say is entirely personal and my pathway out of teaching – although not uncommon – is peculiar to my own experiences and my own responses to them. It is true that my attitude towards my job changed and that my feelings shifted quite dramatically over a reasonably short period of time. I am not sure that much could have been done to prevent this, although I have a few thoughts that I will choose not to share about how my departure could have been prevented, or at least postponed.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Covid pandemic played a part in my shift out of teaching. First of all, it exposed me to a different way of working. Tough as that period of isolation was, it did expose me to the experience of working from home and I didn’t hate it in the way I expected to – in fact, I rather enjoyed it. I liked the freedom of not having to be up, dressed, out and battle-face on by 7.30am. It made me think about the benefits of flexible working in a way that I had never done so before. Combined with this, the pandemic changed the world irrevocably, and this created other pull factors. I work in a very niche subject and I knew that finding enough work would rely on parents embracing the concept of online tutoring. I had pencilled this in as likely to happen within the next five to ten years, but the pandemic fast-forwarded the process overnight. Likewise, whenever I had previously considered the idea of quitting the chalkface in favour of full-time tutoring, I had dismissed it on the grounds that I would be free all day while my friends and husband were at work, and starting work at the point when they all became free; this seemd like a bad idea in terms of my personal life. However, once again, the pandemic changed all that. All of my friends – with the exception of those that are teachers – now work from home either some of the time or all of the time, meaning that their time is also flexible and that it is possible to schedule an early-morning walk, a coffee or a lunch into their day.

The year we returned to school after the switch to online learning during the pandemic was – let’s face it – hell on earth. Bubbles were a dismal failure in secondary schools, a frankly appalling and ill-thought-through brainchild of government that to this day I fail to see the point of. We were forced to teach in unsuitable environments, we were forced to be peripatetic, we were freezing cold, some of the time we were forced to wear masks and all of the time it was miserable. I hated every last second of it. So when we returned to normality the year after and I found myself back in my own classroom, mask-free, I expected my love of the job to return. It didn’t. Perhaps the experience of the year before had fast-forwarded a process that was already happening? I’m not sure. For whatever reason, the love had largely gone.

In the end, the decision to leave was quite sudden and precipitated by a couple of incidents that happened in that final year. A couple of incidents while on duty in the grounds of the school tipped me over the edge and made me feel – quite simply – that I did not want to do this job any more. Both involved groups of older boys and both found me as a lone adult, feeling threatened and being pushed around by a bunch of teenagers – either physically or emotionally. It was not pleasant. I handled it at the time and indeed was able to get back into my own classroom and get on with my job. But I was overwhelmed by a sense of fear and rage – fear that as I got older this would get less and less easy to deal with, and rage that I was expected to do so. Truly, there is no other job in which you can feel threatened – either emotionally or physically – by a gang, then be asked to reflect upon what you could have done better in that situation. Do I think that behaviour in schools has got worse since the pandemic? Yes, I do. Was it perfect beforehand? Far from it. But my tolerance has gone and I am simply not prepared to put up with it any more. Ultimately, this was what drove me out of mainstream teaching.

Defining your terms

This week I had a request from a client that made me reflect on how differently terms are used in different subjects, and how confusing this can be for all of us. At best it may mean that we are talking at cross purposes; at worst, it can mean focusing on areas that aren’t important, to the detriment of progress overall.

For much of my career I taught English language and English literature as subjects, as well as Latin. My first job indeed was advertised as “English with Latin” and for much of my career in schools around 50% of my timetable was filled with teaching English. It’s how one survives and earns one’s keep as a classroom teacher in a niche subject, especially in the state sector. English departments are always very large and always have a high turnover: consequently, there is always a little bit of room for you if you can offer it as a subject. This was how I was able to ring up a school which was advertising a very part-time Latin job and tell them that I needed a full-time job and could teach English up to GCSE. Did they have room for me in their school? Of course they did! Suddenly a role which was advertised as 0.4 became a full-time post overnight.

But back to defining our terms. Comprehension is an important skill in the subject English. Reading comprehension is used (for better or for worse) to test students’ ability to read and understand a lengthy passage of writing, extract key bits of information from it and assess its tone; they may also be asked to identify areas of bias or nuances which indicate the author’s viewpoint or opinion. Many students find comprehension remarkably difficult and as a strong reader myself I’ll be honest and say that I found this tricky to address; in my opinion, I was never a particularly brilliant English teacher because the material came so easily to me that I wasn’t very good at identifying the ways in which I could help those students for whom it was more of a struggle; Latin I had to work at, which makes me a better practitioner when it comes to teaching. But whatever my personal failings, there is no question that comprehension is a challenging and complex area in the teaching of English and it’s certainly a skill which students need to practise.

This, no doubt, is what led my client to request a focus on comprehension skills. But “comprehension” in Latin – by contrast to how this term is used in English – is an entirely different beast, certainly in the language paper at GCSE level. Students are not asked to sift a long passage for information, nor are they asked to identify connotations or empathise with the writer’s viewpoint. In Latin, the examiners direct the students to the information by quoting it, then basically ask them to translate what’s there. For example, the first sentence of a passage might be as follows:

Tarquinius erat rex Romanorum.
(Tarquinius was the king of the Romans).

The first “comprehension” question would then be:
Q1. Tarquinius erat rex Romanorum (line 1): who was Tarquinius? [2]

Not only does the examiner direct students to the relevant bit of the Latin by quoting it, they demand merely the ability to translate what’s in front of them. Comprehension is therefore not a complex skill which requires a great deal of repeated practice. Sometimes students need to be encouraged to take their time and ensure that they have written down everything that the mark scheme requires, but that is generalised exam technique – look at the number of marks and consider whether you have answered all aspects of the question. It’s not a unique skill in itself, like the process of comprehension is for students and teachers of English. Comprehension questions in the literature examination are also largely “say what you see” with the exception of those questions which ask about style – these, children do need repeated practice with. These areas I have addressed in more than one post in the past.

Another misconception which many people have is that “grammar” is something separate from “translation”. This really gets to the heart of Latin as a subject and belies why so many children need help with it. Grammar is not an optional bolt-on, it is the beating heart of how the language works. An extraordinary number of people will say when they get in touch with me that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. Sadly, this means that their translation will be based on guess work and indeed they may have got lucky to date – but as things get harder they will fall apart and find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them.

Much of my sessions are spent asking students to justify their translation – when they tell me that rex Romanorum means “the king of the Romans” … was that a guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that Romanorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the Romans”? If they can’t do that, they will never be able to translate more complex sentences. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences using vocabulary that is familiar but to challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax that makes the translation work.

It is important to be able to explain to clients how our particular subject may differ from areas in which they may be quite an expert, so that they can make more informed decisions about how and why their child needs support and the best ways to provide this at home. Pretty much everyone I meet wants to support their children in their studies, and giving them concrete guidance on how they can do so is one of the many pleasures of tutoring.

It’s never too late when it comes to the grammar questions

Have I mentioned that this month is busy? For a few days it seemed like every time I picked up my smartphone there was a new message from an anxious parent seeking last-minute support for their child. GCSE Latin may be somewhat niche, but it is still sat by thousands of students across the UK every year, and many of them are feeling uprepared.

Last week I wrote about how many of the students that have approached me are woefully ill-informed about how to go about the process of learning their set text. We are rapidly hurtling towards a time when fixing this within the available time-frame will be a real challenge. Despite this, some students who have approached me for help only recently are rising to it; but their lives could have been made so much less stressful had they been taught these techniques in the first place and tested on the text regularly.

In the last week, however, I have been approached by students presenting with concerns across the whole specification. While at this stage it is not realistic to promise a dramatic turnaround, there are things that can be done to improve a student’s grade at this late stage. Many students present with concerns about the language paper, quoting a grade 3/4 in this element and a grade 7 in the literature. They express surprise when I tell them that more work on the literature might actually help them the most. At this stage, improving a child’s grade is little more than a numbers game. For example, if I can teach them some techniques which will help them to gain full marks in the 10-mark question (which is worth 20% of their literature grade and therefore 10% of their mark overall) I can make a difference. Students who know the text well should be able to achieve a grade 8/9 in the literature papers, which will pull up their overall result, even without any improvement in their language grade.

So is there anything that can be done at this late stage to improve a child’s performance in the language paper? Well, with five weeks to go, there is little to be gained by delving in and analysing how much basic grammar is missing from a student’s knowledge bank – that can’t be fixed in five weeks, especially given the plethora of other subjects that students are studying at GCSE: it’s not like they can dedicate the majority of time to their Latin. More realitically I can focus on one element of the examination and improve their performance in that. The easiest win is the grammar questions, worth 10% and gloriously predicatable.

I teach students a series of rules and show them dozens of past and practice papers one after the other, focusing entirely on this question; as a result, students are able to identify how predicatable the examiner tends to be and at this stage that can really help. It also empowers them by enabling them to understand the language used in the questions and to identify what it is that the examiner is looking for.

Most students, in my experience, have not been prepared well for this question and there’s a reason for that. Grammar questions are a relatively new thing at GCSE level. They were introduced to the syllabus in 2018 and most teachers saw them as an entirely new phenomenon. But grammar questions have been a feature of the Common Entrance syllabus for decades and guess what? Some of the same people involved in setting those are also involved at GCSE. If anything, the GCSE questions are easier – I would place them at between Level 1 and Level 2 at Common Entrance – Level 3 grammar questions go way beyond the expectations at GCSE. As someone who has tutored the Common Entrance for years, the “new” grammar questions introduced in 2018 looked entirely familiar to me and I was immediately able to predict how they would work. In addition, Taylor & Cullen have published a series of practice papers in their books that accompany the OCR GCSE, as well as further practice with the grammar questions. Teachers now have a minimum of 10 practice, specimen and past papers to model for them how the questions work – and they are consistently repetitive.

The best way to prepare students for this element of the examination is to show them as many examples as you can in quick succession – select just this part of each paper and do one after the other. That way, students are able to spot how certain words, phrases and expectations are repeated time and time again. I usually find that within two half-hour sessions I can take a child from one who was previously mystified as to what to do and guessing wildly to one who is able to score 8, 9 or – on a good day with the wind behind them – 10 out of 10 consistently on the grammar questions.

Off you go and learn it

Time and again I am struck by how little guidance some students are given about how to go about the process of learning. I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I guarantee you most teenagers will switch off from; the guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert, and it needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and demonstrated on a regular basis. Schools need to agree what methods they are going to recommend and this needs to be reflected right across the school in all subjects, tailored specifically to what works best in each academic discipline.

Too often, it seems to me, students are still being told: here is your Latin set text, now off you go and learn the first section. I was guilty of this in my first few years of teaching – rote-learning comes relatively easy to me and I didn’t really comprehend that students need to be shown how to go about engaging with the process. Furthermore, I was working in a very high-achieving grammar school, where we were not really encouraged to support students proactively with their learning; it was assumed that all the students in the school could cope well in academia without such support.

When it comes to the literature element of the Latin GCSE, whether or not a student knows the translation of the set text off by heart and whether they can relate that knowledge to the the Latin version in front of them is without doubt the single most important differentiator between a student’s success and failure in the exam. Despite this inescapable fact, few Latin teachers appear willing to dedicate classroom time to the learning process, so wedded are they to the conviction that students can manage the learning “in their own time”. Many of my tutees have been told time and again that they “don’t know the text” well enough, that they “need to learn” it, that they need to “spend more time” on it, that generally they need to do something to gain the knowledge required. Yet when I ask them, “what methods have you practised in class?” they stare at me blankly. I have come to realise that most students are not being taught how to learn things off by heart, beyond the most rudimentary of introductions.

I am not naive. Having taught in secondary schools for 21 years, 13 of those years in a comprehensive setting, I am more than well aware of students’ uncanny ability to claim that they have “never been taught” something that they in fact have been told on more than one occasion. However, the extreme cluelessness of so many of my clients when it comes to what to do and their apparent awe when they are taught some very basic methods such as colour-coding and the first-letter technique do leave me increasingly convinced that many classroom teachers are not dedicating enough (or in some extreme cases any) classroom time to learning methodologies. I’ll bet most of them are doing what I used to do in my first few years of teaching – giving students a few bullet points of advice on how to go about learning the texts, then assuming that those students will remember this going forward. But why do we believe that? We would not (I hope) present them with the endings of the 1st declension in one lesson then assume that they will remember those endings for the rest of time – so why should that be the case when it comes to study skills?

One possible reason is teachers’ anxiety about time. One of the greatest strains that GCSE Latin teachers are under is time pressure. Very schools offer enough space on the timetable for our subject and I am fully aware that making it through both set texts within the time available is a mammoth task. I rarely finished the second set text prior to the end of March – on the few occasions that I managed to do so it was real cause for celebration. Yet despite this, as my career progressed I allocated an ever-increasing amount of classroom time to teaching students how to go about the learning process and also to giving them short bursts of learning time to actually get on with it in silence. Any spare few minutes that I found myself in possession of at the end of a new section or a new concept, I would allow them to bow their heads and spend 10 minutes using the first-letter technique to get a few sentences of the text under their belts. I wonder whether classroom teachers are afraid of allowing students this time, as if it somehow undermines the important of our teaching role. I used to remind students that I was painfully aware how much pressure I was putting them under, asking them to rote-learn a new chunk of text almost every single week. So part of the deal I made with them was that – whenever I could – I would let them have a few minutes of classroom time to kick-start the process.

The benefits of allocating this time are twofold. Firstly, it literally does get the children started on the process and is an opportunity to remind them once again of the methods that have been recommended: I used to put them up on a summary slide, even when they could all recite the methods without hesitation. Secondly, while students are studying, a teacher can circulate the room and check whether they are actually using the methods – there will always be a few hardcore reluctants who claim that the recommended methods “don’t work for them”. This is when a teacher needs to be strong. The evidence for what works and what doesn’t work in terms of how we learn is overwhelming, and unless that child can perform perfectly in every test you give them then they need to get on board with the methods!

As for what the methods should be, I recommend a variety but one is definitely stand-out brilliant and so far has worked for every student I have ever met. So if you haven’t read my previous post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away – you will never look back!

Missing the mark

This week I’ve been pondering the fact that we teachers don’t always make the best markers. I mentioned this in passing to a Year 11 tutee a couple of days ago and he expressed such incredulity that I decided to unpick my thoughts a little. Why do teachers struggle to mark accurately and disapassionately?

First of all, marking is incredibly difficult. Even shorter-answer questions take an enormous amount of concentration and classroom teachers are under intolerable time-pressure most of the time. Marking is rarely something that teachers enjoy and prioritise (I’ve met the odd bizarre teacher who claims to “love” marking but if I’m honest I always assumed they were pretending). Longer-answer questions require even greater concentration (English teachers, I feel your pain) and they also require training; if a teacher has not acted as a professional marker and/or attended a training course run by the examining body which addresses those questions and the mark scheme in detail, they may be making false assumptions about how those question will be assessed.

Secondly, teachers develop their marking as a professional tool to aid the teaching process, not as an end goal in itself. When I was training “assessment for learning” – something which its pioneers, Black and Wiliam, now say they wished they had called “responsive teaching” – was the new focus in education, and to a large extent it still dominates. Responsive teaching (I shall call it by its preferred name) requires teachers to mark in a manner that informs their planning – in other words, teachers should base their next lesson on the information that has arisen out of the last time they looked at their students’ work. From the outset, both Black and Wiliam campaigned for teachers to mark in a manner that reduced their workload – I heard Professor Black deliver a session at The Latymer School where I used to work, and he was without a doubt the first educationalist to stand up and tell me to spend less time marking. Black and Wiliam’s vision was that teachers should mark in a smarter way that genuinely informed their teaching – all outstanding advice.

What it means, however, is that teachers are trained to use marking as a diagnostic tool. Every time we mark, we are acquiring and encoding information about how that student is doing and – let’s be frank – whether they are following instructions and/or approaching their learning as we have taught them to. This all feeds into our overall impression of how a student is performing and will shape our next approaches. This is of course jolly difficult in the mainstream classroom, where a class of 30 may present a myriad of responses to what they have been taught so far. Happily, schools are learning to adapt more effectively to this, with leading proponents of whole-class feedback such as Daisy Christodoulou, the brains behind the “no more marking” campaign, driving schools towards a more effective way to share feedback to larger groups. Schools who have not fully adapted in this direction (mine was one of them) are overloading teachers with unnecessary work, since all the research points towards whole-class feedback as by far the most effective use of teachers’ time. Asking teachers to write individual, personalised feedback to every student in a large class is insane and remains one of the things that drives people out of the profession.

So let us come back to the original comment which so surprised my tutee, which was the suggestion that teachers don’t always make the best markers. I told him that I worked as part of a group of 6 professional markers who were assigned the A level literature components a few years ago. Most of us were working classroom teachers, but one member of the group was a subject expert but not a teacher. If I’m honest I was surprised she was there and expected her to struggle with the process. How wrong I was. In fact, she rapidly became the best out of all of us. You see, she was arriving without all the baggage. We teachers look at a script and immediately start thinking about the individual that wrote it. How if only they had done this or that then their answer would have been better. I found it hard not to feel frustrated by the ones who had clearly not learnt the text – again, a symptom of years at the chalkface. I rejoiced for the ones who had excelled. I ached for the ones who had misunderstood the question. But the non-teaching subject expert had no emotional baggage to bring to the table, no classroom-weary experience of working with a myriad of teenagers, who can be frustrating at the best of times; she approached the process entirely disapassionately. Teachers tend to pick up a script and think “how can I help this student to improve?”, or sometimes – let’s be honest – “what on earth are they doing?!”. Examiners must pick up a script and think nothing other than “where precisely does this response fit in the mark scheme?” That’s actually incredibly difficult to do if your brain is used to marking for the classroom – marking for the purpose of helping students to develop and improve.

One of the things we had to develop as part of the examining process was the ability to judge when an answer had hit the threshold for full marks. The teachers in the group took far longer to understand this than the non-teacher. This – I believe – is because we were so used to looking for reasons and ideas to help the students in front of us. The schools I have worked in were all obsessed with “even better if” comments – what tweaks could even the most outstanding of students make to their answer in order to make it better? Much as I applaud the notion that there is always room for improvement, this was sometimes exhausting and at times felt cruel. Sometimes I blatantly ignored school policy and said “you know what? This was perfect. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Keep up the brilliant work.” Sometimes students need to hear that. But marking for the exam board isn’t about perfection – marking for the exam board will require you to give full marks to an answer that is decidely less than perfect. The exam board does not require perfection – it requires students to show their knowledge in a way that fits the mark scheme (and yes, it is a somewhat mechanical and artificial process). Giving full marks to an answer that could be improved was something that the teachers in the group – myself included – had to be trained into doing; it still felt weird every time we did it.

Exam boards are struggling more and more to recruit markers, a symptom of the fact that teachers are already under intolerable strain much of the time as well as an indicator of just how appalling the rates of pay are. I have always advocated that working as a professional marker is excellent CPD and that teachers should mark for the board they teach to if they can; however, I completely understand why so many of them simply cannot find the time or the energy to do so.

Keeping it short

New clients are often surprised by the fact that I recommend sessions of just 30 minutes. Many are swiftly converted to the idea when I give my reasons, but some remain deeply sceptical; I have even lost one or two leads as a direct result.

Given how critical many people are of the shortness of their own child’s attention span, and also given the fact that most people approach me because of the very fact that their child is struggling to cope in my subject, I do find it strange how bitterly wedded to the hour-long model some people are. I also find it strange how many tutors are still working to it.

The latter is perhaps easily explained: to be frank, it is easier as a tutor to fill your books and your time in hourly slots, as going with the half-hour model means that you have to source double the number of clients to make the same amount of money. However, I don’t believe that this is the reason why so many tutors are sticking to the hourly model, not least because I know so many who are already over-subscribed. I think it’s got far more to do with habit. We’ve always done it this way, so let’s just carry on. Some tutors to whom I have suggested the 30-minute model have reacted to the idea as if it’s some kind of revelation – it had literally never occured to them to tutor for any period of time other than an hour. Yet in the world of music teaching, for example, 30-minute lessons are really quite common.

The hour-long model for tuition is in many ways a hang-over from when all sessions were face-to-face and practicalities therefore came into play. Parents bringing their child to a tutor’s house probably preferred an hourly session; at least it’s enough time to nip round to the Co-Op and pick up a few basics, or do another quick errand. Half an hour would mean that they would probably have no choice but to sit in the car and wait. Yet these days, with online tutoring, 30 minute sessions are a viable, workable model and students gain untold benefits from working in this way.

Here are just a few of my key reasons for going with the 30-minute model.

Most tutoring sessions are very intensive and can be taxing on the working memory, which is exceedingly limited. Over-burdening a child’s working memory is counter-productive and will hinder their progress.
Tutoring is expensive for the client. Given what I have said in number 1, I truly believe that I am giving better value for money, because a child is more able to focus intensively for the whole session. Why pay for extra time that is potentially less valuable? This is why I recommend two sessions of half an hour if parents are really keen for their child to have an hour of my time – they pay me the same amount as they would at an hourly rate, but they’re getting better value for money.
Not all children are exactly thrilled at the notion of spending extra time being coached in a subject that they are struggling with and/or that they don’t (yet) like. This is especially true of teenagers. A 30-minute session is a much easier sell to a disaffected, disgruntled Year 11 student, especially when they see how much progress they can make in that short time. I have had teenagers request to go up to two sessions per week once they realise the progress that they can make in a 30 minute slot. We must all try hard to remember what it feels like to be 14, 15 or 16 years old. An hour feels like an absolute eternity. I remember being almost in tears before double geography, just at the thought of the interminable boredom. (Sorry, Mrs Winslow).
On a related note, 30-minute sessions also mean that I don’t get bored. Sorry if this is a shock to anyone, but tutors are human and we get tired during sessions as well, especially if that session involves the patient repetition and re-explanation of very simple concepts, multiple times, which it often does. I work with numerous students who need remedial help on very simple concepts. Keeping their sessions short keeps up the sense of urgency and the interest; I am fresh, focused and your child is getting me at my best.
The 30-minute model means I can help more people. I currently have almost 40 students on my books and there is no way I could work with that many clients in hourly slots. I am already getting to the point where I am turning people away: while I do have some slots available, unless a parent can agree to a very specific time, I am currently having to pass them on to other tutors. If they have selected me for a specific reason (usually because they have read my website really carefully), this can be disappointing for them, however wonderful I know my recommended tutors are. I understand that, and I want to work with as many people as I can who want to work with me.

Finally, some thoughts about schools. While many schools work with hourly lessons, this is not true for all and indeed it is the most academic schools that tend to favour shorter lessons. The grammar school I used to work in had eight lessons per day, each one of 35 minutes. The pressure to get the students in, settled and working as soon as possible was high; as a result, every minute felt urgent and pressured, and that’s actually very conducive to a thriving learning environment. One of the biggest changes I noticed when I left this grammar school and joined a comprehensive was a terrifying lack of urgency when it came to lesson time. I remember being totally taken aback by a student who once commented “is it even worth starting this? We’ve only got half an hour.”

Many schools worry that the introduction of shorter lessons would lead to wasted time, as students will be moving between classes more often. In my experience, the exact opposite is the case. Shorter lessons put the pressure on both students and staff, and it’s easier to promote the sense that we must be making the most of every minute.