More tips from Charlie Burkitt
Video transcript
right charlie what’s tip number two please tip number two i feel like we’ve focused so long on tip number one there i’ll dive into tip number two um tip number two oh yeah so this is a really important one it is enjoy the kids company and what i mean by that is uh the warmth the warm side of teaching you know people i’m sure would have heard about uh warm strict and the kind of the first thing i’m talking about there i guess it’s the strict you know it’s the it’s that fundamental layer of authority you need to have uh in a school building uh in that the kids will follow the school rules now once you get that it’s so so important that you have the warmth on top of it otherwise the kids you know they’ll just be marching around the kind of prison camp and they’re not going to be enjoying themselves and they will not be working hard for you and everyone’s going to be having just a worse time you know so if this is something i really missed in the beginning of my teaching career i thought if only i had the systems they have at mckayla if only i had detentions if i if only i had centralized attentions um then i could just sit back and relax and and the lessons would just sort of happen for me and i could just walk in in a really wooden way deliver lessons and if they would just go well now i’m so sorry to break anyone’s heart who thought the same thing as me any you know me’s out there right now unfortunately not unfortunately fortunately you know i’ve come to realize it is the case that we also need to show the kids we love them and you know this this is actually such a wonderful discovery for me in my teaching because it’s made me enjoy my lessons and my teaching career so much more being able to have a laugh with the kids being able to show them that you’re on their side like connecting with them as other human beings having a relationship with them i used to think uh and i’m you know i’m ashamed to say this now i i’m ashamed to admit this but i used to think that relationships was a bit of a dirty word around school i used to think that um people who leaned on their relationships with kids in order to get them to do things were undermining everyone else because everyone else was following the systems and they were in some way undermining everyone else now there are subtleties and complications to that we can get into but it’s so important that i that i say here and so that all the me’s out there can hear that you must show the kids you love them you must build a connection with them you must have a laugh with them you must enjoy their company because they’ll enjoy your lesson so much more that your classroom and the school will feel like a warmer more joyous place and in the end then this is you know the utilitarian side of it and in the end the kids will work harder and we’ll get better grades and it’ll be better for them again this is fascinating this charlie and you you mentioned warm strict that’s one of the things that people often latch on to and think well that’s just sounds absolutely ridiculous it’s a contradiction and so on and so forth so i’m interested in diving into the practicalities of this because tip one obviously you’ve outlined the rules that exist within the lessons and so on and so forth that can definitely kind of fit into the kind of strict camp there so how do you get the warmth in lessons do the rules sometimes get in the way of this warmth or are the rules there to support the warmth if that makes sense oh yeah the this is the amazing thing about it the rules actually really enable the wall because it’s i think it’s only when you have that foundation of kind of authority in the room and control of the space and the feeling that the kids are all safe and can trust you and trust that the room is going to be a safe place in which to exist then on top of that layer of security and kind of trust and calm you can build on top of that all the relationship building stuff so you know when you’ve got a room of kids who are just sat politely looking towards you waiting for you to teach the lesson that’s the moment at which you can be a bit silly and you can kind of make a couple of jokes or tease one of the pupils uh you know in a fun way or kind of uh you know sing happy birthday to a pupil or put silly glasses on a pupil or all of the all of the silly fun things that we do on top of just normal teaching to show the kids we love them um those all happen on top of a bedrock of of authority and of understanding that we all follow the rules now what happens is the kids if you’re being silly in front of them and and having a laugh with them they will be laughing along with you safe in the knowledge that it’s not going to get out of control and people aren’t going to start standing up and throwing things and shouting out and doing all that stuff because at the end of the day we will always follow through with the rules if we start to be silly and loving and warm and the pupils because you know they’re real human beings and this will happen and they maybe take it too far they take the joke too far they start doing something silly well then we then we roll it back and we say actually no the rules are the rules uh you know and of course we’ll give out the merits and so on to to rain the kids back in a little bit if they start to get out of control but that’s not to say that you’re afraid to in the first instance let the grains go just a little bit so that the pupils are enjoying the time in the lesson got it got it it sounds tricky to get right charlie again i can only speak from my experience here but this kind of giving them the freedom to you can imagine you come in you’ve been cracking a few jokes being a bit silly so then the kids join in and all of a sudden it’s kind of bubbling up a bit and then you’ve then you’re in kind of a bit of a tricky position because it’s almost like you’ve started this process off you know with the silliness and then you’ve got to say all right okay now it’s time to stop and the kids might be thinking well well you started it so now we’re just trying to join in so is it quite tricky sometimes to kind of kind of get this balance is it just something that comes with experience no it’s certainly tricky and it’s and it is certainly something that comes with experience you know i say uh teachers when they first join the school do really struggle to find that balance because uh people i think when they first come are a little bit on the side of being stricter actually and in holding the reins tight and not letting the kids uh go you know even even for an inch now i would say that that is not necessarily a bad strategy because it is it is better i would say to er on the side of being in control and purposeful and the lesson going in a productive academic direction uh rather than just being silly and having a laugh and you know everything unraveling so i’ll caution with that and i would say that one way of actually showing the kids that you love them and showing them warmth is actually to do the lesson itself as in the content that you know for me it would be math that i’m teaching um in a way that shows that you love your subject and that you love when the kids get it right and that you’re so happy when they give you the right answer and you’re really enjoying the math lesson you’re enjoying your time with them so to be clear the warmth that you’re showing doesn’t just have to have to be you being silly and making jokes that that’s part of it and putting glasses on them and so on and putting wigs on them that’s part of it and particularly for the younger kids that’s a fun thing that i think should exist in education um but you can show them that warmth in a more purposeful way got it charlie um this question might be a rubbish question so feel feel free to disregard this and it’s probably the most obvious question as well it feels to me that the the kind of warmth of the silliness i don’t know what the right word is but it’s kind of one way it is one way kind of the teacher makes the decision that now’s the time we’re gonna kind of be a bit off task or less focused now feels like the appropriate time where we’re going to be a bit silly and talk and so on i’m just wondering is is there room for the kind of spontaneity where the kids all you know maybe it’s the time that they should be quiet but now actually one of the kids spotted something funny so they’re going to say it or it’s someone’s birthday and you don’t know about it and one of the kids tells you or just those kind of magical spontaneity spontaneous moments i guess the cliched view of michaela will be that they simply can’t happen because the kids know that for example when you’re modeling i mean you’ve already said they can’t talk over you and so on and so forth so i just wonder is it very much kind of one way this this warmth or is the room for that kind of spontaneity the other way i don’t know if that makes sense at all that does make sense no it’s a good question i think um the the thing with this is that what you’re trying to build up with the kids is a sense of uh and this is what we want i think out of all people of all adults and at the end of the day what we’re trying to do for these kids is to raise them up to be you know sensible functioning human adults you want to try and build up with the kids a sense over time of when is it appropriate to make a joke and what is an appropriate joke and you know so yes of course you can um you can you you can feed off the kids there in the if they raise that it’s so-and-so’s birthday or something and you didn’t realize and they’re they’re they’re starting the joke then that is fine of course at the right moment you know if you’re in the middle of explaining simultaneous equations then you don’t want the kids to be interrupting you to tell you something silly of course and if that were to happen we would say no now is not the time kind of thing um but then again you know if there’s an appropriate moment maybe it’s form time where it’s just a little more relaxed and you’ve just taken the register and that there is that moment of of kind of slightly freer time and the kids raise something that is funny or maybe they come to speak to you in the playground to say something along those lines then of course you’re inviting it and then you you can riff off it and you can play with it and i think you as a teacher need to be confident to lead the mood of the room and the culture of the room and if you’re if you feel like the appropriate mood of the room in that moment is that you can be a bit warmer and just take your foot off the gas a little bit in terms of being really strict with the kids all the time and getting to see loads of maths then you need to be a judge of that and you need to trust your own judgment of that so if you feel that the kid’s taking it too far or raising a joke at the wrong moment then then then say then be then be the authority in the room and say you need to dictate the culture of that space and and and the kids should be able to read from your body language what you’re saying the moment of the lesson whether it’s an appropriate moment for that kind of behavior got it fantastic final question on this one charlie you’ve alluded to it a little bit um how does the warmth play out and showing the kids you love them outside of lessons is what kind of things do you do on kind of break duty form time and so on to to foster this yeah good question i mean this is actually a huge space where you can foster that warmth because of course in lessons a lot of the time you want to be purposeful and if you can kind of weave in jokes into your math teaching in a way that you know you feel is both productive and getting that relationship then brilliant but that’s obviously high level teaching i would say that if you can’t do that in the beginning and actually all the time do try and catch the kids in the in the break spaces you know for us there’s obviously break time and then it’s lunch time i imagine it’s the same in most schools at lunch time we have um basketball uh happening we have table tennis happening i’ll often just hop on you know to the table tennis or grab a basketball and just you know try and aim at the hoop you know have a bit of banter with the kids about scoring not scoring whatever happens just kind of rip off that a little bit so yeah it’s a really great time when when you’re in that slightly more relaxed space to take advantage of that and to show them your human side and to show them that you care about them and you want to enjoy their company you know which which was what i started with on this tip obviously there’s also um more uh sort of functional things like we write postcards uh for kids who we think are doing particularly well um so you know in terms of systematizing your warmth you can think about ways you know stickers um stamps postcards uh you know even even marking books where not well it wouldn’t be books in maths from our point of view but if you’re a subject where you mark books or mark essays or mark tests or whatever it is that you just you do that in a way you know but you put a little smiley face on their paper that’s just one more way to show that you love them you know and that’s that’s what i’m trying to get at here that’s fantastic and charlie just before we move on to tip three um i can’t let that little uh thing you’ve said there that if in maths we obviously don’t mark books if you’re not going to come to mark in a little bit later on will you just tell us just very quickly what what do you mark in math cause i know maths teachers out there will be like what is it going on about there yeah sure i mean we might get derailed here for a good uh hour i feel craig but i’ll go into it slightly um you might i can’t remember i did listen to yours and danny’s uh very long chat you had a number of years ago now and i think danny might have spoken about this a little bit but i’ll just kind of summarize it for those of us the listeners that haven’t heard this before so what we the main thing we mark each week is we mark a quiz that the pupils do in lessons um now the kind of cycle of that and i’ll summarize it very very quickly because it you know we could go into loads of detail is sure the pupils do the pupils do a written homework on some math questions that are partly what we’ve been studying recently and partly just general revision they do that on a thursday night they bring that in on friday and in friday’s lesson we go through all those questions and we make sure the kids understand what’s happening in those bits of maths and we and we in general try and push them their flexibility a bit to make sure they can answer questions that aren’t just the ones in front of them but are around that topic a little bit they go away over the weekend and they do a very similar version really almost identical version of that same homework with the numbers just changed slightly or the question just changed ever so slightly but it’s it’s almost the same questions so they should be able to do it without help because we’ve gone through it on friday then they come in on a monday morning and they will sit a quiz which is again a very similar version of the same questions now the extent to which it’s similar depends a bit on how old the kids are and their ability um you know a year seven people who who is lower ability their quiz is going to be almost identical to the homework they did if you have a year 11 people whose high ability it might be really quite different but on the same topics um now the main piece of marketing we do is we’ll take that quiz and we’ll go and we’ll go away and we’ll mark that in detail and we we produce scores for the pupils um and that’s a way of holding them to account on doing their homework properly and also doing it’s just such good practice for the kids constant um constant mini assessments so they get really used to the idea of you know you’ve got that piece of paper in front of you you need to know some maths get it out get it down on paper in a way that you know it is sort of exam style um we will if we have time and i would say this is not mission critical but we will look through their homeworks that they’ve done um but the really mission critical bit of marking that we do is that quiz got it that was very well summarized i think yeah danny took about an hour and good that’s amazing stuff