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

way, had a go at them about their homework. When he finished he vacated his ‘Discipline Hot Spot’, put the smile back on his face and went back to his ‘Teaching Hot Spot’ as if nothing had happened. He never raised his voice throughout the entire lesson and the students left the lesson commenting on how much more calm, productive and enjoyable the whole experience had been.
    Julie Duckworth, another Independent Thinking friend and colleague, a headteacher and author of
The Little Book of Values
, has one Golden Rule in her school – and it is a challenging school, not one in a leafy suburb. It is ‘No shouting’. It is something that she is passionate about. ‘Try getting your point across without losing your temper and your poise. No one hears the screaming anyway’ is how she describes it in her
Little Book of Values
(Duckworth 2009).
    So, for everybody’s sake, talk less, talk more calmly and don’t shout.
    Even when you’re not shouting there is evidence that your words may not be having the effect you wanted. Research quoted in the
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
examined classroom dialogues between teachers and children. One of the things they discovered was the way in which the single biggest obstacle to children understanding what we are trying to teach them is the language we use trying to teach it to them in the first place:
    The teacher teaches within his frame of reference; the pupils learn in theirs, taking in his words which ‘mean’ something different to them, and struggling to incorporate this meaning into their own frame of reference. The language which is an essential instrument to him is a barrier to them.
    (D. Barnes, 1969, pp. 29–30, quoted in Crystal 1987)
    This is what is being highlighted when you hear the child say, ‘I used to understand it until the teacher explained it to me.’ 8
    Asking children to teach each other as we found out in chapter 23 is a useful way around this. Or, when you have given a crystal clear explanation of a particular task and just before you unleash your class on it, to give them one minute to turn to a partner and describe to them what they think the task actually is can be useful too.
    One of the biggest obstacles to becoming the ‘lazy teacher’, though is the fact that so many teachers are self-confessed control freaks. Do they enter the profession because they are control freaks or do they become control freaks once they have entered the profession? Until someone does some serious research on such a question, we will never know the answer. Yet the fact that they indubitably are so remains. So often I see classrooms set up in such a way that the one and only conduit for learning is the teacher, who then works hard to ensure that if any questions are going to be asked they will come
from
the teacher and if there are any answers going to be given they are to be given
to
the teacher. But one person’s ‘conduit’ is another person’s ‘bottle neck’ and this approach can slow down and often block the possibility of children learning anything in your classroom. Control is like respect. You get it through giving it. I have so often seen the situation where classes who consistently posed serious behavioural issues changed overnight when the teacher stopped battling with them for control and simply gave them a great deal more if it.
    Remember, you can’t control students. You can control yourself and influence your students. What’s more, your influence is greater than your power. Don’t be a control freak, be an influence freak.
    Being a ‘lazy teacher’ is all about giving the learners as much control as possible over their own learning and letting go a whole lot more yourself, from planning lessons to communicating tasks to being the one main source of learning in the classroom. Which is where technology and, yes, Google comes in.

Chapter 30
Enthusiasm and the sort of 7 per cent rule
    What you say, as a teacher, can have far-reaching consequences in terms of both a child’s academic success and their overall well-being now and in the future.
    Not only that, but also what you do says far more than what you say.
    In 1967, two researchers named Albert Mehrabian and Susan Ferris produced a small piece of research with a large name and an even larger impact on our thoughts about the nature of communication. In their study,
Inference of Attitude from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels
, Mehrabian and Ferris state that:
    the