Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

class I taught had a much less successful launch – they are a very weak group and work badly in teams – and I actually had to abandon the launch lesson half way through because they were so awful which was a shame. However at the end of that lesson I explained the project fully to them and said that they could have another chance next lesson if they worked well. They did – and are now really into the project too – although they do need a bit more support.
    One of the interesting aspects of such a project was that a similar intervention in each of the three schools threw up a range of different findings, which I summarized as follows:
    School One in the Midlands
    1 The changes to the curriculum mean that we do have a great opportunity to make things different. If we don’t grasp this chance then there could be dire consequences for our society. But there is a great pressure on schools to be ‘traditional’, focus on the ‘basics’ and do it like they’ve always done it.
    2 The better the lesson is planned, the more opportunity the teacher has to do very little during the lesson. ‘Lazy teachers’ are the ones who will step back and let children sort things for themselves, help children find the knowledge but not drip-feed them with it and allow children to learn more by teaching less.
    3 The ability to work in teams of different abilities and strengths brings with it a variety of experience that will allow more children to succeed, contribute and learn.
    School Two in the West of England
    1 The opportunity to plan in a cross-curricular way is very beneficial, helping to break down barriers between subject areas, helps develop much-needed confidence and is motivating for staff.
    2 Working in this way has positive implications for transition with the primary schools and has clear benefits in terms of employability (and not just, do well at school and you’ll get a good job).
    3 These lessons explicitly help to develop emotional intelligence in the learners including aspects such as resilience and awareness of self and others.
    School Three in the East of England
    1 Students can ‘do well’ at school academically by sitting and copying passively but we do them a great disservice if we allow that to continue and claim we are a ‘good’ school. These lessons help develop active learning.
    2 The content of the lessons is important (the need to know ‘stuff’) but the skill and competences that are developed are the
most
important. The lesson structure is governed by the competences to be developed, not by the subject matter. The lesson objectives move from ‘What I will learn …’to ‘What I will learn to be …’.
    3 Having the support both of the ‘knowledgeable expert’ as well as the opportunity to work across boundaries and plan in a team are all vital elements of the process of helping teachers build the confidence to learn to work in this way.
    Overall, the attributes developed in the ‘learning’, as opposed to ‘teaching’, classroom experience I was able to sum up in nine separate headings:
    1 Choice
    2 Responsibility
    3 Trust
    4 Practical nature of the work
    5 Development of competences
    6 Fun
    7 Multiply-intelligent working
    8 Independence
    9 Team working.
    As I wrote in my final report:
    None of the above is surprising or rocket science. We know what to do. We need now to work out
how
to do what to do.
    Which, again, is where you come in. One of the findings from the Cambridge University
Learning How to Learn
research was that a key element of the success of any learning-focused classroom was the set of beliefs that the teacher carried into the room. Teachers may well have been given a series of strategies about, for example,
Assessment for Learning
, but this was done ‘without considering what they already believe about learning in the first place’. In the report by project director Professor Mary James of the Institute of Education, she compares and contrasts two separate year eight English lessons, A and B, highlighting the differences in terms of quality of independent thinking and learning that was achieved. Lesson B outshone a perfectly acceptable lesson A. Why? 9
    According to the report:
    Underpinning lesson B … was the teacher’s strongly held conviction that her job was to make her classes less passively dependent on her and more dependent on themselves and each other. Unlike the teacher in lesson A, her beliefs about learning all centred around a move towards