More tips from Harry Fletcher-Wood
Video transcript
hey harry okay what’s your fifth and final tip for us please so having having railed against the abstract this is maybe the most abstract but i think there’s something in it so bear with me so so it’s maintain perspective and concretely finding a way of stopping reminding yourself what matters looking after yourself and looking at situations afresh so i think there are different bits of this one is around like changing your mind so if i if if you’d like interviewed ten year ago me now and i was listening to it i’d be like who’s that called and why does he think those stupid things things and i’ve changed my mind about almost everything in education sometimes more than once um and whatever you think as a listener there’s a good chance that and at least some things you might do the same at different points and so there’s a there’s a point there don’t you know like work as hard as you can do as well as as well as you can in the moment but being willing to try out alternative things test alternative things and accept that you might be able to learn from people who think the diametric opposite of you and then i think tied around this tied to this there’s a sort of workload well-being perspective point of same like you get really caught up in a like there’s one student there’s one class this year’s gcse results whatever it is and if we didn’t get a bit caught up in that we wouldn’t do great work and so that’s important but making space and knowing like there’s the rest of the world there’s uh you know our families to think about there’s whatever else we enjoy in life and that kind of thing of of maintaining this perspective and like living a decent life and being important around teaching um and i think that also ties something i i did a project years ago where i was interviewing teachers who’d been really successful in quite tricky schools as new teachers and one of the things that came through was this idea of like we call it wiping the slate clean they get to the end of the day they like wipe the slate clean come back tomorrow have a fresh start and give themselves a new chance give their students a new chance so something around that of like again taking a step back and and yeah giving yourself a break like sometimes all the time in between lessons uh yeah you name it lovely okay a couple of questions on this one harry so changing your mind’s an interesting one i’ve i’ve changed my mind many many times what what was it for you what is it for you that causes you to change your mind what do what needs to happen and how do you then go about if it’s like a real kind of long-standing belief how do you go about almost kind of building it into a habit that okay now i’m going to do something differently because that feels difficult it’s a slow process isn’t it i mean it’s probably a thing of threshold concepts and you know threshold concepts being troublesome and irreversible and transformational and integrative and and um it’s this troublesome thing like you see a thing and it nags at you and you’re like it’s not quite right here but you don’t know what it is and then and and so you know like to go from the point where you don’t know what it is to where you do know what it is a lot of different things have to happen so maybe i need to come and see you doing something different in my classroom maybe you need to also pop into my lesson and say have you thought about this maybe i also need to read a book and those things need to come together in a way it’s a sort of a light bulb moment inside thing that is very hard to predict like it’s it you you could you could sit and say i’m going to teach harry the basics of cognitive load theory in this 20 minute period but the thing of like re-envisaging your the whole way you teach around cognitive load it’s a thing that’s going to be much slower so this thing around patience the thing around willingness to learn and just you know like read some of what your opponents those who you don’t believe in writing and thinking um and and a willingness to try stuff out i guess and learn from that but can i find i don’t know if i’m allowed to do this can i fire it back at you because you know you wrote a whole book around this oh yeah promised i get another plug into the excellent books which i genuinely recommend to to people who are both are and aren’t maths teachers um what like what was your experience because that it was 12 years obviously i met a lot of it was sort of backloaded wasn’t it because you spent a few years doing your swiss rolls and then it’s only later on you’re like oh this you know maybe wasn’t the best way to do it what helped you to to make those changes yes it’s an interesting one hurry i think one part of it was a gradual shift over time i was thinking i’m not convinced by this i was still the results were still fine the kids were still enjoying the lessons but i was never getting through as much as i hoped and often i’d be really excited about teaching kids a concept but they and then and then i think what’s a fun activity to design around this and they never quite get as excited as i hoped they would do and so on so there’s a definite gradual shift going on but then also there was kind of a bit of a jolt which would be when i started to speak to people who knew far more about stuff than i did and i think i was lucky i did that by the podcast but i think twitter’s a great kind of place for this now and as you say purposely going out of your way to find smart people who disagree with your point of view and thinking well why do they disagree and is it worth trying it but i think the real danger is i mean i had a definite incentive because i did it in quite a public way i was speaking to people and i kind of thought right well i do actually have to go off and try something different here but i think there’s a real danger if you agree with this just as teachers it’s quite easy to avoid doing that change particularly if you’re if your results are fine you’re ticking along nicely because making a change is difficult it’s often time consuming it’s risky you often get the short term dip in either performance or whatever or however you label it it takes something doesn’t it to to make a change as as a kind of busy full-time teacher it’s it’s really hard i find i don’t know if you agree well particularly when you’re renouncing things that you believe yeah so like by changing what i do now i’m basically saying i give gave laughs years exactly yes and that’s incredibly uncomfortable um and so that’s that’s again where i think it’s like you know you take a long time potentially denying yes even as it’s gradually dawning on you and i think that that point of getting on twitter and finding people you disagree which obviously on twitter people who disagree with like so the smart people who disagree with you i think one thing that’s been really helpful to me um uh is is a different change in perspective which is is what scott alexander who would say is the difference between conflict and mistake theory so you’d say like one reason why we don’t agree on anything is is conflict theory that like people are out to get each other so in politics it’s like you know the rich are out to get the and the whoever’s getting and you know in in schools it’s like the leaders are out to get us kids are out to get us and so on and you say mistake theory is more around like life is just hard and it’s hard to get things right so maybe the government are incompetent because they’re like malicious deliberately trying to ruin everything and it’s always hard to rule that out but maybe governing a country is just incredibly different difficult and so many of the screw-ups are just because people just like ourselves are tired overworked and screwing things up and in the same way maybe school leaders are awful human beings who you know were just trying to ruin our lives or maybe running a school is incredibly difficult and it’s hard to get right um and so for me seeing more things in in terms of mistake theory than conflict theories be quite helpful because it allows me i think to learn a little bit more from others and maybe to be a little bit more humble about yeah like that that clash but even you know like a mistake theorist a conflict theorist would say you know i’ve just sold out to them you know whoever it is so it’s it’s it’s a hard one to push lovely that harry a final question just for me on on this uh particular tip you mentioned well-being and that’s something over the course of this um this this podcast in these videos i really want to dig into because it’s a it’s a massive part of being a teacher and and something that’s that’s potentially overlooked and what are some of the things again you can speak for this personally yourself or work that you’ve done with other teachers that help that teachers can do practically that help kind of leave the job in the school if if that makes sense and it’s difficult to do because we’ve got to sometimes take the job home for marking but i’m talking more about leaving the bad times and kind of switching off and so on is there anything you do yourself or that you’ve observed other teachers uh do practically their help for this so my my first school sat down with a head teacher before i came in with with some of the new teachers and he was sort of he was retiring so he was like you know talking about various things but he made this this throwaway comment around um maybe one of the reasons so many teachers cyclists so they uh so they can’t take books home with them uh and it was one of the things that inspired me to start cycling school uh a year or two later um but there’s something in that and it’s not to do with necessarily not taking work home because as you know as you find with a young family maybe you want to do pick up and then do some work but it’s around i think some kind of bright lines of knowing where where your limits are and and so i now have like quite elastic limits because i do a couple of different jobs and i have to try and keep a lot of different people happy but at least trying to be clear like there are certain periods of time so i normally have my son on a thursday and during that day i won’t be looking at anything even if i’m happy to work at other random strange times so to working out a clear set of limits i think making space for nice things so one of the most useful and powerful things that i learned to do um when i was having quite a tough year was uh in the middle of in the middle of the working day you’ve got lunch you could sit at your desk and do very good work and go for a walk and i was quite lucky there were a bit areas of green space around the corner from where i was go out walk 15 minutes and just come back like a happier better person and and so you know like you might not be lucky enough to live next to or have a school next to parking that way but find it like what’s the really nice thing you can do in the middle of the day that isn’t just more of the same because actually if you’ve been at your destination at 7 30 and it’s 1 30 and you talk four lessons you’re not going to do your best lesson planning or anything and now i said there’s someone the other day is an assistant head now he’s like well i’ve always been ahead of you so i just couldn’t i couldn’t do that but if you are ahead of you and you’ve got a free maybe you’ve got one of your friends that’s allocated and you can take 10 minutes just go and like make yourself a plush coffee like see more and more posh coffee machines in schools make yourself a crushed coffee like so like finding little things that are going to give you a little bit of um a little bit of pleasure yeah so i threw a throat throw those out too i like it harry that’s fantastic