AEM Podcast #25 - Theuns Opperman - Headteacher Talks About Duty of Care...

My Only Story and our Duty of Care

 My Only Story - A Response

(The post below will only really make sense once you have listened to Season 2 of the My Only Story podcast. In brief - it addresses the issue of school leadership failing in their duty of care to all students.)

″‘Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.‘”

‘Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.’

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

When the story around Thomas Kruger started breaking, I tried to maintain an aloof distance. This was yet another exposé of an inappropriate teacher. My jaded self was happy that another one might be caught, but I did not have the time or energy to follow proceedings too closely. But my daughter followed the podcasts closely and kept on giving me feedback. Friends kept on asking: “How does this happen?” Then, I read the open letter of a previous victim of teacher abuse. And I thought about my own experiences as a pupil and now as a Head of a school. 

I forced myself to listen to all three episodes (at the time of writing) and look back at the media reports. This is my response.

My first reaction to all of this is to point a very definite finger at the very idea of Boarding Schools in general and Monastic Boys’ Boarding Schools in particular. Especially in the case of the elite “good” boarding schools, they have become not dissimilar to the Catholic Church in their culture of covering up anything that might reflect badly on the school. They appropriated the original ideas behind a Prussian Military School of two centuries ago, and ended up keeping only the military barracks culture. (A VERY sweeping statement, but like many generalisations, with more than a kernel of truth.) While this "barracks culture" is not policy at the vast majority of schools any longer, it is still very much part of the student experience.
Sidenote: While the context here is around a sexual predator and how he was able to get away with his actions, my focus is on the broader underlying systemic and cultural failure of these schools which contribute to the environment within which this can happen.

First, a caveat: These schools do many wonderful things. There are excellent, caring teachers at all of them. Many boys can tell wonderful stories about what these schools meant to them. They offer wonderful opportunities. These schools can (and should) be real beacons of excellence and positive impact. 

But.

While there are excellent teachers who take their duty of care of the individual students seriously and who sincerely attempt to make a real connection with each individual student, as entities, these schools exist primarily with the purpose of perpetuating their own myth. The identity, culture, heritage, history of The School is sacrosanct, and nothing that threatens it can be tolerated. And the “threats” exist as they are perceived by the custodians of the image and heritage of The School. This, by the way, is also why these schools struggle to transform in any meaningful way. All transformation efforts must still be in service of The School, as determined by its historical custodians, and not, finally, in the service of anything greater than The School.

At Management and Leadership level this is tacitly understood. The marketing machine attached to these organisations go out there and sell something that is so unattainably perfect that just maintaining the glittering facade becomes the primary goal. Anything less than perfect must be hidden and dealt with in the background. And this usually means getting rid of the problem, not solving it.

When it comes to getting rid of problematic teachers, we see the same process at play that we saw in the Catholic Church when it came to addressing cases of child molestation. The guilty party would merely be passed on to another parish. In the case of schools (and this goes much broader than just The Schools under discussion), the teacher would usually leave before a full hearing or investigation could be conducted. And, as was the case with David Mackenzie, they would soon be employed elsewhere. 

The events described in the podcast are almost laughably typical: The pressure to act becomes so big that a disciplinary process is begun. The accused party bolts. Everybody gives a sigh of relief. Not our problem anymore. Dodged THAT bullet. Let’s move on.

Because I am now also a Head of a school, I initially resisted my daughter’s breathless insistence that The School had mismanaged this process to an almost criminal degree. I knew the complexities involved in building a case that could be prosecuted. I knew how incredibly cunning and insidious a sexual groomer can be. I have had to deal with this in my school, too.

However, when you actually place your duty of care of the individual student first and reputational management of The School second, certain things do become less “difficult”.

When you have the actual WhatsApp messages indicating inappropriate conduct, you call your lawyers in and start building a case. You don’t call in an HR Consultant to help with damage control. You immediately suspend the suspect pending an investigation. You believe your Housemasters and parents who point out the red flags, uncomfortable as that might be.

And you do not allow that teacher to teach again. When a case of sexual molestation was exposed at my current school after the guilty teacher had already left, we immediately supported the parents to lay criminal charges and reported the matter to SACE so that his registration could be revoked. In spite of this, he managed to find two other teaching positions before all the processes caught up with him. Because, as was the case with Mackenzie, schools do not always practice due diligence when hiring. I was phoned for feedback on this teacher only after he was accused of molesting students at the school he went to after leaving us. But the point is still: Unless the school acts decisively on any misconduct and follows through on disciplinary action, these teachers will remain in the system.

I have my own stories in this regard, too.

Like Lucas-Bull, I also formally flagged concerning behaviour in the boarding house of a school where I taught. I was on the Senior Management Team at the time and, in 2015,  wrote a letter to one of the Housemasters and the Head of School expressing my concerns over a culture of “breaking down” the Grade 8s in order to build them up again into “dogs” worthy of the House. (All the preceding terminology was used by the Student Head of the House at their end of year dinner.) I was told in no uncertain terms that I was overreacting. In 2017 this School, too, had a monstrous event of consistent bullying exposed.

What worries me even more, is that it would appear that the problem is getting worse, and not just because there is more exposure due to social media.

I started this piece with a quote from Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield has been the poster boy for the outsider in the elite School for decades now. But Holden really was an outsider. A misfit. And people who didn’t “get” him found it easy to dismiss him.

However, all the victims at St Andrew’s were boys who really wanted to be there. Who arrived with all the correct credentials. They did all the right things, participated in the right sports. And still, they didn’t “make” it. Why?

I certainly don’t have the answers. Just some questions that we might want to look into.

As the educational space becomes ever more commercialised, are we keeping our focus on the well-being of our students first and foremost? The rich Schools will immediately point to the psychologists, wellness programmes, Sanatorium staff, etc. that they employ to this end. But clearly, this is not the answer. I would suggest that we actually go to the trouble of doing a proper analysis of the load that our core teaching and boarding staff is supposed to carry. My sense is that they are so overwhelmed by the increasing demands of parents and Councils and accountants that they do not have any “bandwidth” left with which to provide the deep level of “parental” care that comes with being an educator - especially in a boarding school. This provides the space for predators like Mackenzie to insinuate themselves into the lives of students without us even noticing. In fact, they get away with it because so many pupils and staff see them as that “special” person who truly “understands” the children.

It has almost become a cliché in online teachers’ forums to complain about things being added to what teachers are supposed to do, without anything ever being taken away. Maybe we should listen to this?

But in the end, Councils, Governing Bodies and School Leadership need to face this question honestly: Are we still about the children or are we about The School? And note: I use the term “children” deliberately. They are not “young adults”. We use that term when it suits us to get away with either expecting too much of them or when in dereliction of our duty of care. The conservative answer will be: Without The School, there is nothing for the children. Our Roots and Traditions create a safe space. It gives the students a sense of belonging. They need the structures that we provide. Etc. Ad Nauseam. I call bullshit.

If schools cannot meet the needs of the students that they serve, they need to stop existing. Maintaining a Prussian ideal of military structure in a modern-day school is ludicrous. Imposing these systems on students have done untold (pun intended) harm to thousands of students.

This last point highlights two issues:

1. Our expectation that military-style discipline is the answer to all behavioural problems.

2. The romanticization of suffering.

I don’t think that I need to spend too much time on the first point. I suspect that even supporters of this would by now be able to point to its failings. But, in essence, this is still the premise that all boarding discipline is built on. And until schools sincerely start looking at alternatives, the iniquity will continue and Seniors will terrorise Juniors.

The second issue is more challenging. 

There is a survival mechanism in the male psyche that appears to trivialise and make light of suffering once the immediate danger is over. I caught myself doing this shortly after the end of my 2-year conscription to the SADF in the 1980s. You would meet your friends in a bar and reminisce about the “fun” you had. And even the really awful, dehumanising days where you wanted to die rather than carry on get added to the “fun”. I am now 54 years old. Thinking back to my time as a conscript, I still remember some good days. Humans cannot survive two years of just bad. But did the process make me “a man” as society claimed it would? No. It made me a lesser human. Which, I suppose, is what a man is supposed to be when toxic notions of masculinity are allowed to thrive.

Boarding schools have always been places where a military-style discipline structure is imposed. This structure is enforced to a large part by the students themselves. Expecting immature teenagers to practice self-control when offered - tacitly or overtly - almost unchecked power is asking for trouble. Yet, the entire system is built on this premise. For generations now, boys who have attended boarding schools have lived through this process of institutionalised violence. Yet, even those fathers who had a very hard time themselves keep on sending their sons back for more.

My theory is that - because of our romanticization of the suffering - we look past the real harm. We justify the bullying and dehumanisation as part of a process of growing up and “becoming a man”. And if we ourselves had a really hard time and did not necessarily feel that we grew from the process, we tell ourselves that surely, by now, things must be better and my own child will not have to suffer all the indignities that I had to? Sidenote: The "Spud" series of books can be read as a good example of this process in action.

Holden refers to the “hot-shots” in the quote above.

There are layers of experience in a boarding environment. There are Holden’s “hot-shots” who excel at almost everything. These are the poster boys for the boarding establishment. Everyone is measured against them. These lucky few are the ones who maintain the dream of what The School represents. Most (but not all) of them actually do have a wonderful time. When they themselves end up as teachers or Heads of these schools, they sincerely believe in the marketing and the myth of The School. They are not bad people, but they often have a real blind spot for the different experiences that others might have had of the same space that they inhabited.

Secondly, there are those who do not necessarily excel at the recognised sports, but they have created a niche of excellence for themselves in something. If they don’t rock the boat and their excellence in their field is appreciated, they can go through the system without too much hassle.

Thirdly, you have the bulk of the footsoldiers. Normal, average students who want to be part of the bigger whole and will accept the structures and get on with their lives. They accept the structures as “part of life”, put their heads down and try to get on with it. The low-level anxiety present all the time is what you need to manage, along with the occasional incidents of real conflict. They buy into the “this is how things are supposed to be” narrative. This is also the group that does most of the romanticisation after leaving.

Lastly, you have the outcasts. The ones who either cannot or will not fit in. They are perceived as weak and must therefore be targeted for exclusion at best, elimination at worst. This is done physically and emotionally by the boys and structurally by The School.

And it is into this space that characters like Mackenzie insinuate themselves to create off-shoots of hierarchy that provide a home to those boys who might not feel that they have found their real home in The School yet. They have always done this. What might be making it worse now?

Part of the reason I already alluded to: The good teachers and Housemasters (and they are the majority) simply have less and less time to engage sufficiently with all the students. It is crucial that we train all staff to recognise predatory and grooming behaviour, but also that we ensure that they have the bandwidth to do so. (Added on 18 October 2021: Listen to Episode 4 of Season 2 of My only Story for an excellent explanation of the grooming process.)

But mostly it is a leadership issue. School leaders at elite schools are expected to first and foremost protect the image and legacy of The School. The students are there to provide the money for the business to continue and be the marketing cattle with which to sell the Myth. This might sound harsh, but if you as a leader make any concessions in your duty of care to each individual student in an attempt to limit negative publicity, this is essentially what you are doing.

And until Boards, Councils, and Old Boys do not acknowledge this, Heads will continue to do it because that is what is expected of them. Until we are very intentional about truly being about every child first before anything else, we are selling a fake idea of school. Until we are intentional about meeting the needs of the children today, not the mythological child of 1950 or 1850, we are selling a fake idea of school. And until we are intentional about breaking the cycle of violence in our boarding establishments, we are lying to ourselves and our parents. And this does not mean expelling the odd boy for going too far in the system that we helped put in place. This means re-examining everything we think we know about discipline, school structures, hierarchy - everything.

On the passing of Sir Ken Robinson

I fell into teaching by accident. In fact, I actively resisted. In my younger days, I never saw myself as an educator. I believed that I did not have the temperament.

But life happened. Out of need and necessity, I took on a part-time teaching job. And loved it. And hated what went with it. I accepted a permanent position. And my doubts about me being in education increased. Maybe I was right after all. Maybe this wasn't meant to be.

After a while I realised that, even though I was still struggling to get it right, it wasn't the teaching or the students that got me down. It was the culture in the buildings. It was, more often than not, the staffrooms. And it was the politics around education. The public perception - and misconceptions - around education.

How can something this important be treated in such an off-hand manner, I asked myself. How can we allow policies to suck the life out of teaching? How can we allow bad, uninspired teaching to be foisted upon our youth? And because I, myself, had not been trained properly or exposed to best practice before setting foot in the classroom, I did not know where to begin looking for answers.

This dilemma became even worse as I moved into management positions later on. I knew something was wrong. Something important was missing. I fell into the poisonous circle of endless complaining without doing. Things looked uninspiring and without hope. Was I going to be just another cog in the wheel of this soulless education machine?

And then Sir Ken happened.

I can't remember the event that I attended. But I saw my first Sir Ken TED talk. And the lights came on. For the first time I heard someone put into words what I had only vaguely suspected. And how eloquently those words were expressed!

It was a call to arms. It was a challenge to all teachers and administrators to remember that we are not just preparing cannon fodder for the great Industrial God out there, but that we were instrumental in helping young humans become. That the "becoming", in all its potentiality, was the business of education. That narrowing the picture to end of year results amounted to a kind of sin.

He spoke passionately about teaching. But he also spoke passionately about educational management. And from one of these talks I got my own motto: 

“The real role of leadership in education…is not, and should not be, ‘command and control’; the real role of leadership is ‘climate control.’”

If you haven't yet done so, go and watch everything of his that you can find. He really does light the way for all searchers in the teaching space.

Rest well, Sir Ken!

Life lessons involving dignity

It has become a cliché to say that teachers should be life-long learners. That does not make it less true. In this post I am not going to talk about your learning in your subject area or pedagogy or classroom management. Those are self-evident, I would propose.

The more challenging area of growth and learning, I think, is that of Emotional Intelligence. But this is also the one that most of us would like to avoid. We shrug and say: "This is who I am", or "I am not here to be liked" (see Rita Pierson debunk that notion brilliantly).

Which is the worst kind of cop-out if you are a teacher, and even more so if you would presume to be a leader.

Two events conspired serendipitously (as it often does) to make me think of this. The first was an unfortunate conflict between myself and a student in our last week of term, followed a day later by a colleague posting a link to this article by Rosalind Wiseman: https://bigthink.com/future-of-learning/dignity-student-engagement. Do read it, it is not long.

Back to the first event - me ending up in a skirmish with a student. Picture the scene: It is the last week of term. At the best of times, teachers are frayed and volatile in the last week of term. But it was also the term of COVID. I am even more overwhelmed than usual. The Grade 9s have been off campus and being taught remotely for the entire term. For the last week, we have sent the Seniors home to be taught online again and have arranged a series of on-campus workshops for the Grade 9s so that they can do their subject choices for Grade 10. A lot of preparation has gone into this, complicated by all the hoops we have to jump through to manage students coming onto campus for the first time under COVID regulations. Forms had to be completed, etc.

All goes well until one boy arrives on campus late. He has not completed any of the necessary prework or paperwork, even though he clearly got the message because here he is! I confront him. He shrugs me off with "I was very busy last week". I explode. In front of the whole class I launch into a speech/tirade about lack of respect and responsibility, etc. You know the drill. With lots of grumbling I eventually get him settled and register him for the online aptitude test and off we go.

And then it hits me: This boy's grandmother, who had been looking after him for the past several years, passed away two weeks before. I remember his name now - the Dean of Students informed me at the time. He is in the midst of a custody battle. When he said that he had been busy, it was not disrespect, it was a statement of fact. I watch him while he works through the 90-minute long online assessment. His shoulders are drooping. He is completely uninterested in what he is doing. At the break after the assessment I go to him on the playground and apologise. I hope I have saved the rest of the day and subject choice process to some extent.

But the point is not his specific context - although we must never forget that each student arrives on campus every morning with a lot of extra weight in their backpacks that we are not aware of. The point is that I, through my sense of righteous indignation, impinged on his dignity. Any student, even one who might have been guilty of real "disrespect", would lose interest in the task if their dignity is trampled on. This is the point of Wiseman's article above.

I am now 53 years old. I have been in education for 21 years. And still I have to consciously learn how to manage my personal behavioural triggers. I am still growing up and gaining maturity and skills in this very difficult aspect of working with children. And we need to also be aware that students' perception of dignity differs from one place to another. It is our responsibility as educators to be ultra vigilant and humble while we learn about the culture around us.

Read the article again. Watch Rita Pierson's TED talk again. And never forget that how you treat the students at the worst of times is the most important interaction you will have with them. That is where you both grow as human beings. That is our biggest challenge and responsibility.

On instruction and the lack thereof

When I was a student, Dead Poets Society happened to me. It affected me on a very deep, visceral level. I must have gone to see it about eight times in the month it was released in South Africa. With me having come from a very conservative, paternalistic background, it should of course surprise no one that the film spoke to me like that.

 

It should then also come as no surprise that I emulated the Robin Williams character (Mr Keating) in no small measure when I started my teaching career. But the romance of a film only gets you so far when you have to engage with curriculum content, syllabi, end-of-term assessments and final Matriculation results. Especially when you dive into teaching with absolutely no training like I did.

And then PGCE happened. What an absolutely mind-numbingly boring experience that was! Except for a glimpse of the works of Piaget and Vygotsky et al, I learned nothing that could prepare me for the world of teaching. I disconnected utterly - to the extent that I had to rewrite a module called "Classroom Management" two or three times before I could get my qualification. The "Teaching Practicals" were tick-the-box exercises with very little impact. After two years of this I was a qualified teacher! And so I floundered on, as I mentioned before, figuring it out as I went along.

Eventually, I moved into school management positions. I worked with absolutely astounding teachers over several years. I also worked with some pretty ineffectual teachers, to put it mildly. One of the things that struck me was that there wasn't really any measuring tool for what went on behind the closed doors of individual classrooms. We assumed that the teacher would get on with the job, and as long as there wasn't mass failures or too many complaints, well enough was left alone.

Fast forward to 2017.

I took a leap of faith and joined a completely new group of schools. They were taking their cue from the American Charter School movement and built their schools around the concept of Instructional Leadership. No closed doors. Glass walls. Constant teacher observation and feedback which was the sole job description of their Academic Deputies. A complete revelation for me who had never before heard of any of this.

Two months after starting in my new position I was enrolled on an 18-month course in Instructional Leadership run by the newly-established Instructional Leadership Institute (ILI). This was an incredible experience that took me miles outside of my comfort zone at the ripe old age of fifty!

*The Three Holy Scriptures of Instructional Leadership

So, for other South Africans coming from the traditional way of doing school, what are the differences?

1. The very firm belief that the function of school leadership is to focus on the instruction that happens in the classroom to the exclusion of almost everything else.
2. The job of the school leader is to be an instructional coach. Their driving question: "Is teaching happening as effectively as it possibly can and how can we improve it?"
3. Professional development (PD), teacher observations and coaching must happen on a daily basis. And more importantly, PD is something that must happen in a hands-on fashion based on real-time observations of teaching. The coaching, feedback, and PD must have immediate, measurable results.
4. As alluded to above, without data to measure the impact of your coaching and PD, you are just making noise.
5. Staff performance reviews happen separately from the coaching and PD process, but staff growth is measured according to specific outcomes agreed on as part of coaching.

The above is my own summary of what I learned. The training offered by ILI was intense, to put it mildly. I was exhausted by the end of each day of our contact sessions. I was petrified by all the role-plays and "taking it live" sessions - things that I, as a committed introvert, always avoided like the plague. But, for the first time in all my years involved in teaching, I actually learnt teaching skills overtly and received instant feedback on how to improve. At the same time, I was also learning how to coach other teachers on how to improve their classroom practice. I felt immensely empowered. And, also for the first time, I had the tools that would get me behind those closed doors of the more traditional schools in order to ensure that the teaching was up to standard. This was the fastest, most impactful professional development that I had ever experienced. I would encourage any teacher or school leader to sign up for this.

But what about my hero, Mr Keating?

It has to be said that the proponents of the Charter Schools and this version of Instructional Leadership have very little time for the likes of Mr Keating. And to understand that one has to understand a little of their background.

It is a complex picture that you can read about here. For the very narrow scope of this blog, I would like to point out the following:

• In many instances, they provided an alternative to failing state schools in the inner cities of America.
• Their funding is largely determined by student results.

Focusing on only those two elements, it followed that they would develop models meant to (1) fix underperforming teachers' instructional and classroom management skills and (2) develop measurement tools to ensure maximum student results. No room here for Mr Keating and his tearing out pages from books for the sake of the purity of enjoyment of literature! When the ship is sinking, you focus on the actions that will ensure survival, the band can play show tunes again when we are on even keel.

Proponents of this model have very little time for Pedagogy and academic analysis of educational philosophies. They have an almost mechanistic approach that holds that, given the right skills training, anyone can become a good teacher.

This very narrow focus on instructional impact definitely has its place and is currently largely missing from our own teacher training programmes and school management systems. We definitely can learn a great deal.

But, as always, when you have a new religion with new messiahs and disciples, things can get a little narrow and one-sided. A few things bothered me.

1. There is a level of cultural blindness that comes with all missionary movements and the disciples of Instructional Leadership do not always miss that trap.
2. Their approach to teachers is one of deficit that can only be fixed by sticking very rigidly to "The Way".
3. Their disdain for theory can lead to an impoverished, mechanistic perception of the teacher, instead of a fully rounded professional vision.

These points of concern bothered me greatly as I could not fully put my reservations into words. That was until I read this excellent article by Corinne Campbell. I encourage you to read it for a far more scholarly approach to what I attempted here.

In closing, what would I want for teacher training? If I could put together the skeleton of a new PGCE, what would I want?

1. A deep reading of the works of the great Educational thinkers like John Dewey.
2. A deep reading of Educational Psychology.
3. A deep reading of the impact of current cultural and political realities on the Educational space.
4. An in-depth, practical course in Instructional Practice, as per the ILI or similar.

I believe that this would make for a balanced and empowered young teacher who might make significantly fewer mistakes than I did in my first three years! And, as we all know, once you have mastered the basics of your craft, you have so much more room for the creativity that enhances both your own experience and that of your students.

*

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, Driven by Data: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools

Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College

Teaching in the time of COVID (with thanks to Gabriel García Márquez*)

Our school broke up for the August holiday on Friday. For a blogger, it follows ipso facto that this is the perfect time for some introspection on what the past four months have been like.

In a nutshell: It fundamentally changed me as an educator.

There are so many things to consider. In this article, I am only going to focus on one: the social and emotional impact it has had on our staff, students and parents.

Some context: I am the head of an independent school in the South of Johannesburg. Our fees are similar to those of some state schools ("ex model C") but much lower than the top, traditional independent schools.

After the first lock-down at the end of March, we, like many other schools across the world, focused on doing the one thing that the techno-sceptics have told us for the past decade was not possible: shifting learning and teaching online. And, like thousands of teachers across the world, our teachers delivered this brilliantly in almost no time. We used Google Classroom and that was pretty much it. Free whiteboard apps where we could find them. Zoom in very small chunks of time.

Our school, teachers and the majority of our students do not have the money to pay for lots of data. Most of the students and teachers only have access to mobile data in very limited amounts. (Having said that, we still had more access to data than the majority of rural South African students and teachers do.) But we got the job done. Teachers had to redesign curriculum and delivery on the fly. And they did. By working incredibly long hours and going the extra mile to support their students. But that is the topic of another article.

Then the reopening debate started.

And the amount of uninformed pontificating just exploded.

We are teachers. We know that kids should be in school. We prefer to teach them face-to-face because we know that relationships matter. We also know that, even though we managed to continue teaching, those students preparing for exit exams need more on-site support. We want them back in class as soon as possible. Most of us are also parents. And we know that having your children stuck at home is not good for them (or us!). 

Like all South African schools, we opened up and like most independent schools, we opened up for more Grades than initially allowed because we had the space and ability to do so. 

But please, be careful with your certainties around the reopening of schools if you have not spent a year in a classroom.

The prompt for this blog came from one of my heroes, Max du Preez. When I was a student, Max started Die Vrye Weekblad (now resurrected in digital format). They held up a blinding spotlight to the atrocities of the final years of the Apartheid government in South Africa. I respect Max's opinions greatly. But he posted this and I realised again that we all have our blind spots:

To me, this tweet shows how deeply disconnected even well-informed people are to the daily reality of standing in a classroom in South Africa (and most of the world). It goes without saying that any person who ventures outside of their house to go to work would be at greater risk of contracting the virus than they would if they stayed at home. 

But when it comes to measuring the risk and the impact on children and the community, we at least need to understand the kinds of interactions that we are talking about. Having been part of this debate from the inside, I can assure you that this one is fraught with complexity and anxiety from school leaders, school owners (in the case of independent schools), parents, teachers, and students. What is the appropriate cost/risk factor, if we want to use business-speak?

As is often the case, a full appreciation of context is critical. I am heading a school that is part of a group of schools. And even for our schools inside our group, we had to make allowances for differences in context.

Firstly, are we talking about pre-school, primary or secondary? Each one of these phases has different operational realities that need to be accounted for. For example, in a primary space, most subjects are taught to a class as a whole and, in the lower grades at least, one teacher will cover all subject areas with that class. In the secondary space, especially in senior grades, you have multiple subjects being taught to multiple classes at the same time. A very different logistical space to manage.

But, more importantly in our country, there is the socio-economic space. We are all acutely aware of the vast disparities in our society. We are still dealing with Thabo Mbeki's "Two Economies". 

When you consider the realities presented by this photograph on the left, are you assuming that all schools must open, regardless?

Image 2: Source: Business Insider

 

Are we to assume that children and teachers in this school on the right (Image 3) will be as safe from transmission as those working in a school serving the left of the Image 2?

 

   Image 3: Source: Mail & Guardian

 Image 4: Source:  

Even in this relatively well-resourced school above (Image 4), carefully observe the spacing. Remember that this teacher will be in this closed space with these children for at least six hours every day. Anybody who has spent a year in a classroom will tell you what happens during flu season in any school. 

Note the cartoon below (Image 5). While funny, any teacher will tell you that there is a lot of truth in this. (And also note that there are only six children depicted!)

                    Image 5

                                                           

All of which then leads to Scooby and team trying to find substitute teachers to look after those classes now without teachers. And, from personal experience, I can tell you that doing substitution when teachers are absent is an incredibly difficult and complex task to manage. The children will arrive, and if there is no one to manage them, they will fool around. They are children, after all, not passive little units of DNA waiting to be manipulated on a checkerboard when we can find the time.

Now, when the reopening of schools was announced, we were presented with volumes of documentation with advice and instructions on how this should be approached. None of which you will now find on the Department of Basic Education (DBE) website here. Although I do still have two PDF documents shared with us earlier: DBE1 and DBE2. In these documents you will notice requirements around social distancing and the need to be able to trace student movement and contacts that clearly did not have any relationship with the reality of the vast majority of schools in this country. Not even within the relatively privileged space that my school inhabits.

Let's return to Image 2 above. My wife teaches at a school that services only the ultra privileged, wealthy people represented by the left of that picture. My school serves a cross-section of students and parents from mostly the grey area in between those two worlds as well as some people from the edges of the two extremes.

When my wife's school reopened, they had almost 100% attendance across the board and that was sustained all through the term. When my school reopened, we started with around 60% attendance and, as the number of cases in Gauteng rose, that figure steadily dropped towards the end of the term.

Why?

Imagine you wake up in a comfortable house on the left of Image 2. It is only you and your own immediate family in the house, situated in a garden behind gates. When you drive your children to school it is to one of those depicted in the masthead of Nic Spaull's article here in the Daily Maverick with enough space and students sitting quietly in their desks. Nothing really to worry about.

But if you wake up in an RDP home or shack or overcrowded flat represented by the right of Image 2, things look very different. You are probably sharing that space with elderly relatives who are extremely vulnerable, you look out your window and you see a crowded street with little or no social distancing happening. Your kids must take public transport to get to school. You must take public transport to get to work. None of the COVID-regulations will be enforced. Some of the teachers at my school must take six taxis to get to and from work every day. Then spend their days as depicted above and return to their own families.

And even this is a simplification because I have had parents from both sides of the divide wanting their kids to stay at home (or come to school).

I spent many hours over the past months only dealing with the anxieties of parents and teachers trying to address their fear of what would happen to them and their families should they or their children be infected. Anxieties supported by the ever-changing picture of how the disease is spread to others by children. Anxieties of parents needing to weigh up academic progress vs safety.

But, in the South African context and Max's tweet and stated explicitly by Nic Spaull in his article, I believe that at the heart of the sometimes cynical view of teacher's concerns about returning to work lies not only a blind spot for what happens on a daily basis in schools, but also a level of anger and exasperation with our biggest Teachers' Union, SADTU. And this is perfectly understandable. SADTU has a terrible track record for supporting mediocrity in education and actively undermining any efforts to improve teaching. However, it is worth noting that almost all the teacher's unions support SADTU in their call for caution on school reopening because they know the dire state that most schools are in. Just because SADTU is usually wrong doesn't imply that they are always wrong.

My plea is for some level of real engagement with the people in schools every day when making your arguments for the blanket reopening of schools. Every point in Spaull's article has merit. But his cost/risk analysis suffers from a lack of context. What will the real cost of an acceleration of cases be should schools reopen under their current constraints with no real support in manpower in order to facilitate the level of control required to avoid the spread of the disease? Do we really understand the dynamics of schools in South Africa when we make pronouncements on how to interpret international research data on the spread of the disease in schools?

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Gabriel García Márquez*

The blog that isn't

Looking at my terrible track record at sustaining this, maybe I should rename it to "The Blog that isn't". That way I remove all expectations!

My last post was in 2013 in anticipation of a planned trip to Finland. A lot has happened since then, which, (I hope!), will be the material for the next few posts.

But first, I need to deliver on that promise from way back in 2013.

Was Finland all it was (and still is) cracked up to be?

As always, the answer is complicated. Here is a link to a very brief feedback presentation I made to my school at the time. For more background, also see the articles referred to in my previous blog on this.

Hotel Finn in Helsinki

The trip was a fascinating one. From sharing the flight from Frankfurt to Helsinki with the Finnish band Nightwish to spending two nights in the very quaint Hotel Finn with its ancient elevator to the beauty of the countryside outside Fiskars, it was a wonderful trip.

My lodgings in Fiskars.
I was in the room at the top.

So, what did I learn about the Finnish way of teaching? When you read gushing articles like this one, you expect to be wowed by what you find. But if you read past the sales-pitch language of articles like these, you will see that it is a very common-sense approach: Create an inclusive, safe environment run by highly-trained, professional teachers. And that really is pretty much it. Of course, since that visit, there has also been more research cautioning against the adulation. From the same source as the article above came this one (still with a misleading headline!), urging for a more balanced view. Then, of course, there is the whole underlying debate about what constitutes a good education system, such as this one questioning the validity of the PISA scores. This is not an easy question to answer, and if you are new to the debate, I am afraid you are going to have to read all the referenced articles and more!

The best I can do here is to give a very personal response grounded in my experience in the South African context. What did I find valuable?

1. Teacher training is paramount. Anyone who has had any experience in our own schools will agree. It does not matter what system you choose to use, if your teachers do not have the basic training and skills to implement that system, it will fail. Teaching is not an easy thing to do. (It took me three years of aimless floundering in the classroom to realise that!). Through various developments (both local and international) over the past few years, the profession has been devalued to the point where even some "teaching experts" will have us believe that with a few mechanistic drills anyone can become a good teacher. This has lead to the stagnation of teacher training and the idea that "if you're not good enough for anything else, become a teacher". The Finns went the complete opposite route and it shows. The calm confidence of the teachers and students that I observed in classrooms showed professionals at work in a space that they have mastered. When you have trained your teachers properly to a high level of competency and professionalism, you can allow them to take full ownership of and responsibility for the learning outcomes. This has a far better chance of long-term success than trying to micro-manage a lot of under-educated individuals to deliver something that they have not mastered themselves yet.
   
2. Creating an inclusive space that is child-friendly. This requires some investment in staffing and infrastructure, as well as a view of the child as an entity that is in the process of becoming - not a mini-adult to be equipped for the "world of work". (To that last point: don't fight me yet - it requires a lot of clarification. Material for a following blog entry.) On investing in staff and infrastructure, it is important to note that Finland is not a wealthy country. They are not building state-of-the-art, hi-tech schools. However, they choose where and how to invest their resources very carefully. They made the conscious decision that the available funds will be spent on staff first before anything else.
   
3. Diversification. Not all students are expected to follow the same narrowly defined route to senior secondary and tertiary education. See this website for a full breakdown.

What is required for us to emulate at least some of the successes of this system, is the political will and testicular fortitude to (1) fix teacher training, (2) provide good, (basic) infrastructure, (3) focus on and fund what is really important and cut out luxuries, (4) design pathways of success for the different skills required for both the students and the country.

There certainly is a whole lot more to address, but as a brief summary of what I took away, this will have to suffice.

As always, comment and challenge any of the above to get a more in-depth debate going.

I'm back!

It has been a while. Good intentions only get you so far. Then you get mired in the daily grind. Discipline is the only thing that will keep you going. I preach this to my pupils and then fail miserably myself.

I was strong-armed into revisiting my blog by a series of events. The culmination of which was that I might be visiting Finland in August to see first-hand how they manage to remain at or near the top of the global test results score card. One of my twitter-followers immediately challenged me to blog about my findings, hence the resurrection of Theuns' Homeroom.

Much has been written about the Finnish experiment. I will provide links to two articles at the end of this post, but some factors include well-trained teachers, well-remunerated teachers, well respected teachers - all of which allow the Finnish government and people to expect absolute professionalism from their teachers in return. There is also an emphasis on creating a positive culture of learning and not a culture of testing. For some perspective, read these articles:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
http://www.businessinsider.com/finland-education-school-2011-12?0=international#more-from-europe-27

And on a more light-hearted note: http://www.cracked.com/article_20321_5-things-it-turns-out-you-were-right-to-hate-about-school.html

More to follow soon.

It's all about relationships

One of the academic departments at my school went through a bit of a rough patch earlier this year. Some of the teachers were unhappy with the HOD, some of the students were unhappy with one of the teachers. Academic performance was not what it could be, given that all the teachers involved were highly skilled and competent. During the mediation process one common theme emerged: The teachers who felt aggrieved said the the HOD was not accessible enough. The pupils claimed that their teacher "did not know their names". The relationships needed mending.

I was reminded of this when I read Anne Knock's pointers on becoming an innovative school: http://anneknock.com/2012/08/05/becoming-an-innovative-school-my-top-10-ideas/ Point seven on her list confirms a universal truth: Good teaching happens when there is an authentic relationship between teachers and students. In his book "Visible Learning", John Hattie looks at the results of more than 800 studies of achievement in schools. One of the very few really positive predictors of success is the relationship between teacher and pupil. ( http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Learning-Synthesis-Meta-Analyses-Achievement/dp/0415476186 )

Regardless of infrastructure or official policies, the teacher as person can and should create positive, authentic, professional relationships with his or her students. It has been proven to lead to success. But the best part of creating these relationships is that it becomes mutually motivational. When you invest of yourself  in an authentic way, you are also energised by the relationship. We so easily become victims of the "fake pearls before real swine" syndrome (as one of my more cynical colleagues calls it) - that sense of draining yourself through having to give, give, give all the time. Dare to have real educational relationships and both you and the students will benefit.

(I just came across this insightful article about what authentic leadership is: http://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2012/08/what-makes-a-leader-authentic/ )