How’s The Exam Marking Going?

This is a tweet I composed today but couldn’t be bothered to explain so didn’t end up sending:

Seriously - one question about the compatibility between the Big Bang and religious teachings keeps showing just how little these 16 year olds seem to know about the evidence and arguments that support the scientific claims, as well as their general lack of understanding of the scientific method. I keep getting versions of “the Big Bang is just a theory, whereas [Insert Scripture X Here] is the infallible word of God”, as well as being told the Big Bang simply “can’t have happened” because “it’s impossible” whereas “we know” God has the power to create the world. The severe lack of consideration for the potential metaphorical and poetic role of scripture in telling the story of creation hints at a whole new generation of future fundamentalists looming on the horizon. And most of these kids have chosen to study at least one science next year for A-level!

And then there’s the question about human rights and religious teachings - would we need human rights laws if everyone just followed religious teachings? Well - a number of my students seem perfectly content to argue horrific versions of “of course [Religion X] doesn’t allow homosexuality but, other than LGBTQ people, everyone would be better off if we all just followed religious teachings” - as if LGBTQ+ people do not matter and can just be completely ignored in the equation. The more depressing students have further defended their person-disregarding thesis on some version of “homosexuality is unnatural anyway and if people followed religious teachings they would just be acting naturally and wouldn’t be homosexual anymore”.

Jesus - and I - wept!

I’m not expecting my students to all be enlightened atheists or LGBTQ+ supporting liberals like me, but I am at least expecting them to, at this stage in their education and maturity, be able to a) accept the reality of scientific consensus and recognise that there are many ways in which people happily reconcile their faith and the words of scripture with the agreed facts of the world and that if they do want to reject the science and argue for the primacy of scripture, taken completely literally, as the basis for their epistemology then they need to recognise the immensity and consequences of that decision and address, and at least attempt to defend, it; and b) recognise that whatever they may personally believe God thinks about the rightness or wrongness of certain sexualities, to deny any group of human beings the full spectrum of their universal human rights is abhorrent and as indefensible as any other such discrimination. Religion, as the walls of my classroom have always declared, is no excuse for homophobia. Even if you personally believe your faith advocates views which could be considered homophobic or prejudiced and you choose to hold those views, that belief does not entitle you to make someone who believes something different than you’s life miserable. And if you think your God will reward you for cruelty and violence inflicted on another human being because of their sexual or gender identity, in my opinion it’s time to start asking yourself how worthy of worship such a deity actually is? (Spoiler alert: if God is something that would be worthy of worship then, guess what - you probably got that nasty belief that They would want you to act with hostility and degradation to LGBTQ+ people utterly wrong, because it’s either completely out of character, or God is not who you say they are at all.)

The sheer omission of any attempt at justifying their disregard for LGBTQ+ people and/or all of known science in their writing is so depressing. Oh well - many, many more papers to go…

Ce n'est pas un examen

When the government announced in January that exams in 2021 would be “cancelled” it was clear within minutes that they were not actually cancelled - they were simply going to be outsourced. Instead of exam boards doing the job they are paid for (a job which, by the way, education would be better without) we teachers would be roped into creating, administering, marking and recording our own assessments. A whole bunch of extra work with no extra compensation - financially or mentally - after an insane year reinventing our entire profession digitally and learning on the job how to translate lesson plans into remote teaching, or rethinking how to physically teach our subjects in the new “Covid-secure” classroom.

At first though, I was encouraged by the sense of liberation that came with the idea. After all - exams are bullshit. At least they are for my subjects (Religious Studies and Philosophy). By reducing the rich subject areas I teach into easy to regurgitate chunks of rote memorisation we are forced to spend as much time training students how to jump through the relevant hoops of a “4 mark question” compared to a “5 mark question” as we are actually engaging with the course content. This is especially so for philosophy, where the AQA exam really does limit student engagement in actual philosophical thinking to mere repetition of historic ideas (mostly from a stale list of dead, white men). Freed from having to sit those old fashioned exercises in ranking and sorting students for the job market perhaps we could actually do something interesting with their knowledge this year? I imagined verbal assessments - free-ranging discussions that showed their wide range of philosophical thinking? Or perhaps an extended essay on a subject far more interesting than the tripartite view of knowledge? But just as soon as it became clear that exams weren’t really cancelled, it became clear that whatever we would be doing in schools to replace them would merely replicate normal examination. Instead of embracing the potential autonomy and radicalism of throwing out these stale assessments, schools were told to follow the instructions of the exam boards, rely heavily on materials provided by the exam boards, and rigorously “quality assure” the assessments so that they, well, basically mimicked the exams that were no longer taking place.

All thoughts of creativity were tossed aside as we were told to stop teaching students new content and plan how to amass “data” on all the things they had been taught across the last two years of their respective GCSE and A-level courses. Data meaning examined questions we had marked, or could mark, and thereby “support” decisions about final grades.

The weird thing here was that the so-called “cancellation” of exams was because of COVID 19, yet in the guidance from the DfE, and school conversations, very little is discussed about what that means. Basically sitting large cohorts in shared indoor halls for long periods is not tenable, yet in a bid to replicate the “cancelled” exams, schools are packing students in together anyway and giving them internal assessments in their stead. Papers are being passed around, rush-marked to keep up with the increased workload, and very little, if anything, has been said about safely quarantining such papers or how to administer “not exams” in a “Covid-safe” way. And then there’s the whole issue of why, given the obvious likelihood of Covid causing problems for the 2021 exams way back in 2020 when the schools first closed, the exam boards and Ofqual didn’t come up with a digital solution that would have - if they so desperately want our students assessed in this retrograde way - allowed students to safely sit their exams remotely, freeing up already over-crowded schools to be less risky transmission sites of the virus and allowing teachers to give more time to their underserved non-exam classes? Basically - all anyone in secondary education can think about right now is assessment, and specifically how to do it in such a way that all the boxes given to us are ticked so that everyone’s back is covered when the inevitable appeals come in from students who don’t get the grade they hoped for. No one cares about whether the process created to get such work done is “Covid safe”. Covid, if it is mentioned at all, is merely discussed the way actors discuss “Macbeth” in the theatre: a curse whose name should not be spoken lest it tempt a positive test result and the self-isolation of a year group before their assessments are complete.

So since March 8th, when we re-opened the schools, I have not been able to teach either my Year 11 or Year 13 classes anything new, and have instead had to revise content with them and devise multiple examinations to “gather data” on them before we send them home again in a few months time. Even once my “not exams” are finished, there are exams in other subjects they need to do, which means my timetabled lessons with them are either used for those other assessments or time in which they need to be revising for them. I am merely a babysitter and invigilator for my colleagues to gather their data, as they are for me to gather mine. And as the papers come in, my other classes suffer too, being as I have no time to mark their work or think too much about what I’m teaching them. In fact, to help with the workload, thankfully, we have even been given a few days off to do paperwork and get marking done. Which is great and necessary - but means those other classes aren’t getting any teaching and instead of doing anything useful we teachers are just doing the jobs of the exam boards when the job itself is unnecessary.

Because no one needs to be examined in this way. If schools cared about education we would trust our day-to-day interactions with our students as indication of their learning or lack thereof in our subjects. We would not ignore everything but the arbitrarily timed tasks done in silent rows under watchful eyes and without resources; we would credit all the hundreds of instances that their understanding and interest was clearly there in the classroom. And we wouldn’t rank them. A simple “yes they understand” or “no they don’t” would suffice. And the universities would know they could do their chosen subject when they leave us by talking to them rather than waiting for some exalted certificate that shows only on one particular day, in one two hour period, they happened to be quite good at memorisation. The jobs they compete for could have their own in-house ways of determining suitability that would surely make more sense than assuming the random numbers or letters they got in geography, religious studies, maths and biology told them anything of importance about how good a bank manager they’d be.

But we live in a myth. We know the world is unjust, unfair and unfit for purpose and that many live in poverty and many do not have the basic necessities of life. And so the only way we can sleep at night is to tell ourselves that there is a hierarchy. A meritocracy no less! That those who work hard, get good grades, get into good universities and get good jobs and those who don’t fail because they just weren’t good enough. Even as we know that this isn’t true, we tell ourselves that it is because the truth is just too painful: that we have devised a system which requires some to fail so that others may succeed. That success is not based on merit but based on who you know and what advantages and privileges you happen to have.

So we pretend exams are important and their judgements fair. We bend over backwards to ensure our made up, subjective and arbitrary letters and numbers we give are “rigorous” and “meaningful”. We lie to ourselves and we lie to our students.

Like the lie that exams were ever cancelled.

Or the lie that the government cares about our students’ wellbeing.

We lie, lie, lie…and we come up with new ways to categorise and sort our students into a ranked hierarchy of success or failure, condemning some to lives of purposefully designed misery even as we offer others keys to the unfair kingdom.

No Healing For A Broken People

I have been so encouraged over the last year at how much my school has tried to improve its equality, diversity and inclusion. Especially as so much of it has been student-led. Following the murder of George Floyd last year, the anger some of our students felt about what they saw as a lack of comment from the school regarding the brutal assault led to some honest and impactful conversations with the Headteacher and the creation of a Black Lives Matter group which has, this year, morphed into a broader Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee looking at all aspects of “EDI” across the school. Action from the school’s Student Council, and co-ordination with fellow Councils from across all the schools operated by the same Academy Trust - led to a Trust-wide committee with similar aims. Concurrently and independently, a decision was made to start working towards a Stonewall School Champion award - knowing we are a long way off but deciding to start the work right now; inspired by LGBTQ+ students we know need better support than we are currently offering them but who are already breaking down barriers within the school community.

All of this is really promising, and already behind the scenes a lot is being done. Subject audits, transformations to hiring policies and processes, changes in the way we mark exams, and this afternoon some online CPD sessions on inclusivity and diversity. Soon, we will all be receiving training in unconscious bias too. Working on this stuff has been one of the professional highlights of my year and I can already imagine the difference it has the potential to make to so many lives going forward.

At the same time, however, discussion about diversity remind me just how inherently conservative and identity-oppressing schools - at least schools in the UK - institutionally are. We talk about celebrating diversity and ensuring representation, yet ask our students to subsume their personalities into identical school uniforms, punishing them for adding any embellishments which might allow some self-expression. How can we expect our students to flourish as “themselves” when we police their appearance, their language and even sometimes their hobbies at every turn? Meanwhile we continue to teach the disputed curricula of colonialism and marginalisation which remain embedded in formal exam specifications. Exams do not “celebrate diversity” - they instantiate ranking and hierarchy, sorting difference into success or failure that starts in the classroom and ends in the job market. How inclusive can we really be when it remains our prerogative to deny you entry to the next stage of your education or employment on the basis of your aptitude for arbitrary tests of memorisation and regurgitation? What hope have we got to truly create a more equal, diverse and inclusive world when it remains our professional responsibility to groom our students into becoming a certain kind of citizen: one who is accepting of the unjust norms of an unequal and fundamentally flawed social order and able to navigate their way to success within it; a success which, by necessity within such a system, can only come at the expense of somebody else? Someone likely disadvantaged by the structural inequalities and exclusion that, in their lived diversity, has left them vulnerable to systemic prejudices and discrimination?

If I teach my students to reject the whole damn thing then apparently I do not meet the professional standards expected of a teacher. But as the Black radical, Kehinde Andrews, puts it: “there is no sanctuary within this imperial system; there is no respite, no safe space. We can only ever partially heal when we are constantly living under oppression…There is no healing for a broken people while the system that breaks us is left intact.”

Making It Up As I Go Along

Trying to make the most of the six weeks ahead and not worry too much about mixing with 300+ students a week for 50-100 minutes at a time in crowded and poorly ventilated rooms (at least I’ve had my first shot of the vaccine!) I arrived at work today with “improvisation” on my mind.

My Y13s are in the unenviable position of being forced to face a barrage of tests over the next few weeks across all their subjects to try and gather sufficient “data” to get them a “grade” in the alleged absence of this year’s external examinations (the government have basically outsourced exams to the schools rather than cancel them and schools, scared of having their final grades challenged on appeal, are largely just mimicking normal exams internally). In my subject, Philosophy, we have tried to ease their burden by minimising the number of assessment essays we are asking them to write for us and also offer their final lessons where they are meant to be “revising” as free-form philosophical chats instead. The deal is that they can ask any questions they want about the topics they are getting ready to be assessed on, but also use the time to discuss absolutely anything else philosophically that piques their interest beyond the curriculum. We call them “philosophy unleashed” lessons. I have run them for years, and they have inspired a long-running blog of mine of the same name. But when every other class is revision, revision, revision, my students seems to be enjoying these oases of provocation and intellectual stimulation even more than usual.

By the end of last term I was very disillusioned at the way we had made it a national issue amidst the pandemic to get all Year 11 and Year 13 students back into school as high priority only to then, despite all the talk of “lost learning” cease teaching them anything new and spend the remaining in-school time with them simply preparing them for assessment instead of actually educating them. It is an ever-creeping feature of my overall disillusionment with my profession that so much is dictated by an exam system more concerned with ranking and sorting students into easy to deploy categories for future job markets than in meaningfully educating them. The current situation has merely amplified an already unsatisfactory system and anything I can do to alleviate the stress it is causing my students feels like a worthwhile way to spend our time.

Today’s Philosophy Unleashed session we discussed banning “the N-word”, linking it to other offensive uses of language and free speech and offence in general. Is it possible to ban anything, let alone a word? Over the Easter break I had read both Kehinde Andrews excellent Back to Black and also David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count so brought in some ideas from each book and the students added their own Easter reading insights and thoughts. It was a far more interesting and thought provoking learning experience than re-hashing the topics they have already studied over and over to ensure rote memorisation and regurgitation on Friday and still, at times, inspired organic moments of legitimate revision.

Year 10 may not be involved in the current circus around assessment, but they are at the mid-way point in their own journey towards examination and in my classes we have reached the end of a topic. Because I will be prioritising getting the incoming tsunami of Year 11 and 13 papers marked over the next few weeks, the prospect of marking another 90 assessments on top of all that is not something either necessary for their immediate learning or healthy for my wellbeing. I decided over Easter therefore to set them the expected end of topic test online instead of doing it in class today on their first day back, so that they can access it at a more leisurely pace and, importantly, I can keep them waiting in the ether of the internet to be marked when I get the opportunity without worrying about losing their work in the intervening weeks. I explained this to them explicitly and told them that we would be using today’s lesson instead for revision, to give them the best possible chances of doing well when they sit down to answer the test questions. But I then gave them the power to determine how that revision would take place, asking them how they felt the time would be best spent.

I had two different Year 10 classes across the day and each class took a very different approach. The first all agreed that the best revision for them would be a Kahoot quiz. If you don’t know what Kahoot is, it’s a fun way of putting together some multiple choice quizzes which students can access on their phones. However, as a learning tool it is also fairly limited as, being multiple choice and something you can click A, B, C, or D to on a phone, it cannot go very deep with student responses. The kids like it because they like using their phones, but as revision it is a pretty poor way of going about things if you want to really test the depth of their understanding. I also hadn’t made one for them (because they require quite a bit of effort to set up and, as I said, aren’t actually worth it as a revision tool) so it was a no-go. Unable to give them exactly what they wanted, instead, I asked them why they all thought a Kahoot would be the best approach.

Quizzes are good, I was told, as they add competitiveness and make revision fun.

Good, I said in reply, we can do a competitive quiz - just not one on Kahoot. I could improvise a team quiz for them, splitting the class in two.

But on Kahoot, they told me, everyone can play on their phones. A normal classroom quiz meant only the person who raises their hands get to answer.

Not true, I reminded them. You can all answer in your heads regardless of whether or not you get picked to answer a question for your team. And besides, not everyone has a phone so not everyone can actually access a Kahoot, whereas everyone could answer quiz questions. Also, I pointed out, by not limiting their answers to multiple choice we can have a far more competitive quiz that would actually check the depth and detail of their understanding. I also made the argument that if retrieval practice was so vital when revising for exams based on retrieval (a vicious circle of nonsense that we’ll deal with another time) then Kahoot was not fit for purpose as, by giving them multiple choices, they aren’t retrieving anything - they’re being prompted.

But Kahoot is fun, they said, because it gives so many ridiculous points for every question.

I asked a question about the Christian sacrament of Eucharist (part of the topic we have finished in RE) to one half of the room and gave the student who answered 25, 000 points for doing so. I asked the other half of the room to recite a line of the Lord’s Prayer and when, eventually, one was recited, I gave them 18,500 points. See - I could give randomly inflated arbitrary points too!

And so we had a revision quiz. One involving short answers, long answers, mime, quotations, examples, and a completely random scoring system. The students enjoyed it and we highlighted areas of knowledge they were struggling with as well as areas in which they flourished. We revised and we had fun, and it was the lesson they chose to have. Meanwhile my next Year 10 class had no interest in Kahoots and quizzes at all. They wanted serious help with their 12 mark essays and their understanding of sacraments. So we wrote an essay together as a class - me typing their words onto the board and guiding some of their thinking as they offered all the planning, structure and ideas. I got to model good technique but did so from their own prompts and suggestions.

By running each of those three lessons in a completely improvised way (not unplanned - improvised. The difference being, like a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, I still knew where we needed to go and what we wanted to achieve and that the aim of the lesson was to get there) instead of dictating a particular method for getting to the desired endpoint to my students, I allowed them to take the lead and we got there together, cooperatively rather than hierarchically. Likewise, instead of prepping them for their upcoming test by scaring them about its importance and their need to succeed, I told them that my aim for the test wasn’t for them all to get perfect scores and get everything right, but to do their absolute best and use the test to see what they don’t know. That I would rather they got a “righteous fail” and learnt from it for next time than cheat to pass (always a possibility when they work online and unsupervised for an assessment).

While I enjoyed my lessons with Year 7 and Year 12 as well today, teaching each class interesting new content, it was those three improvised lessons that really made the day worthwhile and reminded me of the everyday creative possibilities in the classroom we are often too afraid - or jaded, or overworked - to grasp onto.

These are the things it will be important to remember when the term gears up and begins to grind.