Podcasted!

Exciting development: the podcast of Tuesday’s Cherchez la Femme panel has been published: here. In it, you’ll hear a couple of hours of me, Karen Pickering, Madeleine Crofts and Stephanie Rogers discussing feminism and teaching.

Listening back, I’m amazed by how quickly I’ve sponged up educational theory. “Education theory backs this up,” I say at 35:20 or so, as if I knew what I was on about. “This is actually the way that students genuinely learn and their minds actually change.”

Other things to listen out for include Madeleine at 44:05, on teaching by not being an expert [“I tell them that all the time. ‘I don’t know everything and I make mistakes all the time. Same as you. We’re pretty much the same. Like, I know a little bit more than you, but not much.'”]; Karen at 1:02:55, on not quashing comedy in classrooms [“I think that creating environments where teachers get the joke sometimes and trust kids to handle comedy and humour between themselves is a really vital kind of dimension of trust”]; and Stephanie at 1:23:45 [sic], on the gendered dynamics of parent-teacher relationships [“I could not think of a single male who’s copped it from a parent.”].

It was a great night. Enjoy the podcast and see you in the audience for next month’s Cherchez la Femme.

Playground Duty

Like many memoirs, Ned Manning’s Playground Duty reads like a yarn spun at a bar. Indeed, the story itself features a lot of drinking, including a memorable scene in which the new-in-town teacher ends up in a pub with underage students. “My second day on the job,” he recalls, “and I was drinking with a 14-year-old!” It’s the stuff of the front bar, or the fireside – wry storytelling that comes from the heart.

I came across Manning on Radio National’s EdPod, and took to his no-nonsense approach to the profession. He tells it like it is, from students exposing themselves in the front row to parent-teacher interviews to which parents turn up “a little bit stoned.” He’s no less frank about his own struggles: his fear of hostile staff rooms, or classes of disinterested kids. For me this earns him the right to rant a bit between anecdotes, as we buy the next round or nip to the bathroom, ready for what comes next. (Pet topics include the stupidity of staff meetings, the tyranny of marking and the absurdity of acronyms.)

At the heart of the book is a strong love of teaching. “One thing is for sure,” Manning declares, “we teachers see the best of kids. Admittedly, sometimes the worst as well, but the best outstrips the worst, by a huge margin. It’s why teaching is such a great job.” By last drinks, I believed him.

Gaming teacher

“Follow essentially the video game model,” says Dr Judy Willis, neuroscientist, about teaching. I picture a room full of fifteen-year-olds standing on Wiis. But she’s talking about feedback, how gamers get a neural kick from seeing the effects of their mistakes. “If kids continue to play video games despite the fact that we’ve found that 80% of the time they…get feedback that they were wrong…yet persevere without obviously being bored or frustrated, then the model shows us this can be done.”

I don’t think I’m like these kids. When I visited the Game Masters exhibition at ACMI last year, I drifted from console to console, distracted from a game before achieving anything. My characters would wander rooms or desultory plains, jumping vertically against insurmountable barricades. I ended up lurking near Dance Central, watching people choose songs and avatars by lifting and lowering their arms. Dr Willis must be joking. Recreating this in a classroom would be like, well, my year eleven chemistry class. 

But – like all good neuroscientists – Dr Willis is a few steps ahead. Her whole point about feedback is that it only works when students (and gamers) are at “the proper level of individual achievable challenge,” the zone in which it’s conceivable that you can pass the test, beat the boss. My experience at Game Masters only reinforces her point: I lost interest because I couldn’t see an achievable goal. In fact, at first glance, some of the games didn’t even have one.

Willis again: “kids will feel success if they enter at the level of mastery that they’re at and they need to see their achievement more frequently than every six weeks when you get a test back.” Smartly said, Dr Willis – here’s an exploding gold star.