What is an Ordinary Classroom?
Labelling learners to benefit our own training and development needs.
In 2019, I co-edited my first book, ResearchSEND in Ordinary Classrooms, the term ResearchSEND has long gone, superseded by great organisations such as Whole School SEND and the Universal SEND Services, led by Nasen, which brought the SEND sector together and continues to support teachers to be better equipped to meet the needs of learners with Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) in our schools.
Meanwhile the book is still relevant (and still available) and we decided to keep Ordinary Classrooms, as a representation of a developing ‘work’ portfolio, and an umbrella for the differing strands of work that Ordinary Classrooms would support and would take part in, as it grew as a teacher support organisation.
Thus, our intention at Ordinary Classrooms was and still is to develop a portfolio which is representative of the practicalities required to meet the needs of all learners in all schools, and widen its scope beyond its original SEND and ResearchSEND label.
We believe that knowledge exchange should be transparent to support all learners in all our classrooms, and that practitioners should not have to search ‘here, there and everywhere’ to support the learners in their classrooms. Confused titles, and ResearchSEND in Ordinary Classrooms in retrospect was one of these, did not give us the ability to share good practice well enough.
One of our missions is to share good practice, in a clear and transparent way, and we start with the first blog in our ‘what is an Ordinary Classroom series?’ on Labelling learners to benefit our own training and development needs with this clearly in mind.
‘Labelling Learners’
Ordinary Classrooms are where extraordinary learning happens with extraordinary teachers, and include every learner.
Labels can and still exist in ordinary classrooms, and can be used to enable adaptation where and when it is needed and we believe that labelling learners can be a useful tool to do this.
Labels can; identify learners at risk of underachievement, increase awareness of a learner’s individual needs and help us gain additional funding.
But Labels can also be limiting and damaging, consider how we sometimes label learners in our schools, ‘low ability pupils’, ‘red group,’ ‘the Circles’ and ‘the bottom group’.
We may think that we have carefully put our groups together and disguised what we are doing, but our learners will know when they have been defined, even if they are called green dragons, purple hexagons or wonderful wizards and they know what this means.
I sit on the orange table, not the red or blue or green, this is where miss has put me and I think I know what it means.
It means my writing’s not so good; it means I cannot spell; I don’t know if they know I know, but I only know too well.
I sit on the orange table, its where I’ve sat all year. I can’t do maths and science they say, and so they put me here.
I’m not so hot at school work which means I’m not too smart so I sit on the orange table so that I can be kept apart.
I sit on the orange table; they say that this is best.
But they can’t see the orange fire that burns inside my chest
| Are the learners from socio economically disadvantaged backgrounds? What was their early years education like? Did they access any? What does their access to language, social and cultural capital look like? Are you labelling them as low ability because of their lack of opportunity? How often are they supported by a teacher or a teaching assistant? How are they accessing high quality teaching and highest expectations? Are they receiving any interventions? What do these interventions look like? Are they appropriate? Do they match need? Adapted from Learning without Labels. Marc Rowland (2017) |
Our advice at Ordinary Classrooms, is that it is best not to try and label learners yourself.
It is easy to go to google and find a diagnosis or a label for a condition, but it is more nuanced than that. A definition may prejudice or limit your work with that learner, and many conditions are not fixed.
Some conditions, for example, need a medical diagnosis and support from professionals. Learners with sensory and physical difficulties, for example, depending on their needs, require support from teachers with mandatory qualifications in Hearing Impairment (HI) and Visual impairment (VI), knowledge of communication systems such as sign language and braille and specialist equipment; interventions which cannot be learnt over night.
Both Braille and British Sign Language can take up to 2 years to reach fluency, and if wish to learn these skills, you may need to work with a specialist teacher or undertake a post graduate course at a university to develop this skill.
We have to acknowledge that a diagnosis is only the start.
You will still need to make reasonable adjustments and provide high quality teaching and be aware that the same diagnosis can present differently in different learners. You will need to look beyond the label and see a learner’s strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying what information is relevant to your teaching and their learning.
It may be that you are not sure how to meet the need, which has been identified, it is ok to ask someone else to signpost you to strategies and services.
It could be that you decide that you need support in developing your teaching and learning strategies to develop your adaptive teaching around individual learner diagnosis and identified labels and that you need input from training and development courses and programmes alongside mentoring and coaching. You may need to search around and take ownership of sourcing and managing your continuous professional development (CPD) and this could be your individual and personal target for the year.
Training & Development
In ‘Can professional environments in schools promote teacher development?’ Kraft and Papey (2014) believe that there are variations across teachers and schools in terms of CPD. For example, if you are a beginner teacher within the first five years of your career, you are more likely to make rapid gains in your teacher development, however through their conclusions, they warn, do not take this for granted, because if you are not in a ‘supportive environment’, you will not make the same gains. Their prognosis for teachers with over five years of experience, is more worrying still, as they suggest; the more experienced teachers have ‘plateaued’, implying we may not learn any new skills or strategies for the rest of our careers.
There may be for a number of reasons, for what seems to be a less ‘supportive environment’, and years of experience, and maybe we can push against a sense of reaching a plateau. TeacherTapp (2018) have identified that the focus on CPD it as likely to be our own personal priorities. During one of their daily surveys, for example, they found that teachers wanted the focus of their CPD sessions to be ‘curriculum planning in a subject of your choice’ (38%), followed by ‘managing staff’ (12%) and then ‘SEN’ (8%) leading to whole school CPD to be interest led, i.e., subject based, rather than diagnosis and individual learner led.
In choosing curriculum planning after five years of teaching, are we reinforcing what we know, with little new knowledge to learn, and in which case we can see how we may reach a CPD plateau.
There are however a number of ways you can manage your own CPD, and break this trend (if it exists), on focus on learning beyond curriculum planning and our own subject specialisms to explore the learner’s experience. Places such as nasen are a good place to start with their condition specific videos, as are creative education, who if you sign up to their mailing list offer a number of free and cost-effective courses, focused around subjects such ‘how the small intervention project prepared me for the role of senior mental health lead’ which certainly intrigues us, and we have a lot more than five years in school experience.
You could also attend events and undertake additional training and development in your own time, through a taught masters or a Saturday events, for example and you may of course sign up for one of the revised National Professional Qualifications (NPQ) which are more targeted than their previous incarnations, removing the focus from middle leadership positions to a more thematic approach with three distinct NPQML qualifications Teaching and Learning, Behaviour, Leading Teacher Development, which impact on improving and evaluating learner outcomes and include collaboration and expert challenge.
You could simply collaborate and work with your own colleagues, in our own settings, or as a result of professional supervision, mentoring, and coaching and dedicate the time to talk to one another over a coffee after the school day in the staff room, to support you in your ordinary classroom where extraordinary learning does, can and will happen.
This blog was originally written for inspired idea blog and an edited version can be found on their website
Michelle Prosser Haywood is the CEO and Founding Director of Ordinary Classrooms and can be contacted via ordinary.classrooms@outlook.com. She tweets at @michhayw and @ordclassrooms and is the author of ResearchSEND In Ordinary Classrooms and the Beginner Teacher in Ordinary Classrooms series which are available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginner-Teachers-Ordinary-Classrooms-Securing-ebook/dp/B0BSCC1JFR
Keywords JoshuaSeigal, TeacherTapp, nasen, WholeSchoolSEND, OrdinaryClassrooms, NPQ, ResearchSEND, Inspired, Creative Education
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