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

use such a phrase? Is ‘to make the lesson interesting’ one of your lesson planning criteria? Does your love of your job, of your chosen craft and métier, come through in your lessons – rainy days, Mondays and Ofsted visits notwithstanding? Does not only your love of teaching come through but also your love of learning? And do you look like you actually
like
children, not like the FE lecturer I was told about who, when a colleague asked him why he was standing outside his classroom looking at his watch, replied that there was still another 50 seconds before he had to be ‘in there’ teaching his class.
    Wherever else your God may be, when you are teaching, ensure you have one inside too.

Chapter 31
Everyone remembers …
    It is a fact of life that everyone remembers their best teacher. It’s also true, as conversation will reveal at a dinner party where you happen to let slip that you are a teacher, that everyone also remembers their worst. As a teacher you have an inordinate amount of power and influence over young people, a force that exerts itself upon them throughout their entire lives.
    Churchill once said that, ‘Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested’ (Churchill 1930) and it is true. The government can only control what goes on in classrooms by fooling us into thinking it can. In other words, if we let it. It is powerless though, and necessarily so. Try as politicians might to exert some form of gravitational pull over what goes on in the classroom, at the end of the day, the direct impact on those children is created by you and you alone.
    And it is an impact that has a direct effect on who and what they are and who and what they become, an influence that extends, as we have seen, even as far as the very physical architecture of their brains.
    The influence you have over the future of the world – and the overwhelming global economic need for you to do your job well – led top business consultancy McKinsey and Co (the company where Tom Peters worked when he wrote
In Search of Excellence
) to undertake a major global research project on just what it was, exactly, that made good school systems good. Co-authored by erstwhile chief advisor to Tony Blair, Michael Barber, the 2007 paper, entitled
How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top
, created headlines around the world.
    According to the report, governments worldwide spent US$2 trillion on education in 2006, yet ‘the performance of many school systems has barely improved in decades’ (Barber and Mourshed 2007). (We are not immune to this fact in the UK. The report quotes a 1996 study published by the
National Foundation for Educational Research
that showed that ‘despite 50 years of reform, there had been no measurable improvement in standards of literacy and numeracy in English primary schools’ (NFER 1997).) Theywanted to try to identify what made the difference in the systems that were not only performing well but also improving quickly.
    The main source of information they drew on for assessing the quality of an educational system was the OECD’s PISA programme – the Programme for International School Assessment. 1 This is a massive international exercise that has taken place every three years since its inception in 2000, looking at reading literacy, mathematics and science but with a particular focus on one of these each time. The TIMSS tests 2 that Malcolm Gladwell refers to in
Outliers
(where the success in the test could be predicted by how much effort students put into filling out the lengthy questionnaire that comes with it; those who persisted and completed the questionnaire, it turned out, were the ones who did best in the actual maths, suggesting that it’s not more maths we should be teaching but better resilience) is ‘dedicated to improving teaching and learning in mathematics and science for students around the world’. As such it is quite an academic test. PISA looks more at the real-world application of what has been learned in the classroom across nearly 90 per cent of the world’s economies. For example, in 2006 it was the turn of science to be the special focus under the heading, ‘Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World’. 3 The organizers set out to assess not only the quality of classroom teaching as reflected in the performance of 400,000 15-year-olds across 57 countries, but also students’ ‘awareness of the