Programmes Book Club reflection

BOOK CLUB REFLECTION

The benefits of STAHS' professional development Book Club have been plentiful for Politics and History Teacher and Head of Hodgkin Scholars, Cat Kordel, as she explains here.

You may think that attending an 08.00 professional development book club on a bi-weekly basis would be the absolute last thing a busy teacher would look forward to in the midst of all the last-minute lesson planning, photocopier-wrangling, and other myriad requirements of a busy morning here at STAHS. But you’d be wrong. Sitting down with my colleagues once a fortnight for half an hour to discuss matters of pedagogy, pupil inclusion, and, often, philosophy in a broader sense has been a highlight for me this year. This guaranteed anchor point of intellectual engagement and meaningful dialogue sustains me in unexpected ways as I spend my days bouncing from classroom to dining hall, topic to topic, PowerPoint to Excel spreadsheet with limited other opportunities to give any of it too much thought.

The benefit of professional development Book Club is threefold. Firstly, impetus. Despite the promises we may make ourselves, how realistic is it, for most, that in the absence of external incentive, we will sit down in the evening after tackling the pile of marking and pick up a heavy academic tome dedicated to teaching and learning? Having an impending deadline of a Book Club meeting, and not wanting to embarrass oneself with vague, inarticulate commentary, creates the sense of urgency many of us need to motivate ourselves to commit to professional reading. This has been supported by Stephen Ramsbottom’s sensible choice of publications: ‘page turners’ might be over-egging it, but everything we’ve read has certainly been engaging and manageable in terms of both content and length.

Once the decision has been made to actually pick the books up and put Instagram/BBC Sport/WhatsApp [insert distraction of choice] down, of course the second benefit comes from actually reading them. We have tackled two books in their entirety this year as well as a number of blog posts and all have been stimulating. The first book we read was Teach to the Top by Megan Mansworth. This book questions a key orthodoxy in education: the value of differentiation. In an interesting parallel with STAHS' Challenge for All philosophy, Mansworth argues that all pupils, rather than only those of the highest ability, should be afforded the opportunities to think deeply and grapple with complicated ideas. She also makes the somewhat Govian case for the centrality of subject knowledge, arguing that it is a teacher’s grasp of their subject, not pedagogical skills, which makes the single biggest difference to their pupils’ performance.

Kirsty Eddison guided us through our second pick, Diversity in Schools, in which Teach First alumna Bennie Kara asks teachers to consider how to create a school in which ‘diversity (of age, disability, gender, race and sexuality) is embraced and embedded.’ Among other questions, Kara reflects on the importance of the language used in our schools, how we can use our curriculum and classroom practices to consciously cater for a range of voices and how to introduce pupils to the concept of social injustice. More recently, Henry Cullen has facilitated discussions on pupil literacy and the patterns of language in our respective subjects, using Ruth Ashbee’s blog on the topic as a jumping off point.

Personally, and I’m sure the other Book Club members would agree, simply reading the texts has made me question and refine my practice to some degree. However, it is the third benefit of Book Club that is most impactful of all and that is the benefit of collaborative discussion. The fact that Stephen has sensibly chosen books with contentious elements combined with the fact that the Book Club attendees are a diverse crowd in terms of length of teaching experience, background, and subject specialism means debate can flourish. As you can imagine, the concept that ‘differentiation is one of the darkest arts in teaching', discussed one lively Thursday morning, was met with an entirely different reaction from the Dylan Wiliam-era English PGCE graduates than it was by the, say, 2010s trained Chemistry teachers.

Likewise, whilst some of us agreed with Bennie Kara that it’s crucial for pupil self-esteem for teachers to keep up with what, for example, the widely accepted terms for ethnic minority groups are (people of colour versus BAME?), others of us worried that this, and subjects like it, are an unnecessary distraction from the real business of teaching and learning. These two topics are just a tiny sample of the range of subjects we have discussed this year, inspired by our reading and our day-to-day experiences in the classroom here at STAHS. We haven’t always agreed on the issues at hand, but I think all Book Club members would agree how enriching and revealing it is to hear how teachers with different subject backgrounds, different worldviews, different temperaments, even, respond to the same pedagogical premise. And, even better, people don’t hold back in their responses to the texts: Thursday morning, Week B in the Forum seems to be a ‘safe space’, as if we’ve all silently agreed on the first rule of Book Club: you do not talk about Book Club.

In sum, STAHS professional development Book Club has given me the incentive to read professionally, the ability to develop my practice in meaningful ways, and a means of dusting off those critical thinking skills in order to join in with healthy debate. It has helped me to see my colleagues in a new light and appreciate different perspectives more readily. I cannot recommend attending highly enough. Why not elevate your Thursday mornings by coming along? Kicking the photocopier can wait.