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Secondary

Can teachers get to know a class too well?

The mutual respect and achievements between a football coach and their players tend to have a limited shelf life, notes Gordon Cairns – might the same apply to teachers?

Gordon Cairns
by Gordon Cairns
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In football it’s known as the three-year curse – that moment when even the most successful manager’s proficiency with tactics, ability to motivate and form relationships with his team magically deserts him.

Players who last season would have hung on his every word and run through brick walls for him suddenly stop performing. It happened to Jose Mourinho in his third year at Chelsea, just a few months after winning the English Premier League and the Manager of the Year award. By the time he was fired, the players had stopped listening.

And it happened to Mauricio Pochettino earlier this season, shortly after taking Tottenham Hotspur to their first ever Champions League Final. His team stopped responding and he was sacrificed.

It’s not just in football that a group can tire of their mentor’s message and style; it can also happen in the classroom, where a teacher’s skills in relationship building, motivation and knowledge are as important as they are in the field of sports’ management.

‘Best before’ date

If teachers remain with the same class for more than a year, is it possible that their teaching message stops reaching an audience who no longer respond to the same techniques? Could it be that students, like elite footballers, subconsciously stamp a ‘best before’ date on their class teacher’s forehead, after which the effectiveness of the educator diminishes?

In many secondary schools it’s currently normal practice for teachers to stay with the same class for at least a two-year period, especially if the class is working towards qualifications in the interests of continuity. This laissez-faire approach makes a lot of sense – the teacher can ‘train’ the pupils in their working methods, while the experience of working with students is much better than hearing second-hand how a young person copes with class work – but it’s an approach seemingly designed to suit the needs of the teacher, the department and the timetable, rather than those who are being taught.

On the other hand, comparatively little attention is paid towards the student whose learning style doesn’t match the teaching style of the professional. Perhaps there’s a student who works best in small groups supported by their peers, and doesn’t learn well through the taking of notes. Conversely, their classroom teacher may prefer a lecture style of teaching, where all students vigorously take down dictated notes.

Even those pupils initially motivated by this approach may soon tire of the same lesson starters, hearing the same motivational phrases and, dare I say it, even the same jokes. What may have been invigorating the first time around could quite possibly pale on the second or even third telling. What effect this has on the students is unknown.

Teacher flexibility

The trouble is, there’s been very little up-to-date research into the pros and cons of long-term teacher- class relationships. As far as I’m aware, the only study into this area was conducted over half a century ago, focusing on 60 junior high school biology students at the University of Iowa Laboratory School in the USA. The study found that it was better to have a single teacher over the period of a year, rather than rotate classes over a three-week duration, but didn’t examine the rotation of classes over a longer period of time.

Despite the wealth of educational research into teaching and learning styles, none of the heads of department I’ve spoken to have ever considered offering a variety of teaching approaches when allocating classes; taking a child-centred approach, rather than a teaching one.

Perhaps this is because teachers don’t become defined by their pedagogical method in the same way that a football manager might be classified as ‘a good motivator’ or ‘master tactician’. In fact, classes tend to be allocated on a rather ad-hoc basis. A teacher given a class with behavioural issues lower down the school, for example, may be later ‘rewarded’ with an academic group in the upper school. Similarly, top sections will be rotated round experienced staff in order to keep those teachers motivated and up-to-date with subject knowledge, while reminding them of why they went into teaching in the first place.

On the other hand, could all of this actually come down to a question of teacher flexibility? Professor Brian Boyd – who worked in the Faculty of Education at the University of Strathclyde for 13 years, after a career in which he held the posts of headteacher, education officer and education adviser – believes it’s a case of teachers themselves being best placed to meet their pupils’ range of needs:

“I think the issue here is about variety of teaching approaches. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to ensure that the pupils are learning,” he states, adding, “This entails finding out how pupils learn, and tailoring methods appropriately.”

Rotation’s pros and cons

Of course, there’s an elephant in the room here – namely the effect that a poorly performing teacher can have on pupil progress. A recent survey of secondary teachers carried out by Leeds Beckett University found that three quarters of respondents thought poor mental health among teachers was having a detrimental effect on pupils’ education, with teachers reporting that they feel less effective in the classroom if their mental health isn’t good. But can a head of department realistically use staff rotation as a means of alleviating the disparity in quality of their teaching cohort without acknowledging that some teachers are simply better than others?

Rotation does happen in other professions, but not always successfully. While junior doctors will often move round departments as they find their specialism, the Civil Service’s Fast Stream scheme is routinely criticised for how its graduates barely get the chance to master one role before being rotated into another department.

Being rotated round classes like a football manager could well be an attractive option for many in the teaching profession, especially if accompanied by a salary boost – though if poor results led to regular sackings, you’d naturally expect far fewer to support it! However, we do need a serious examination into whether rotating secondary teachers around classes can have a positive effect on student performance.

Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications

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