Dr Trevor Kerry, St John’s Student 1960–63, reflects on his career since college and offers encouragement to current students for whom the path ahead seems unclear.
In 1962, life seemed water-tight: accepted by CACTM, a training place in Birmingham, destined to work in Southwark. Six months later, events ensured none of this would happen: I approached theology Finals somewhat turmoiled; then left Durham for instantly-available employment: supply teacher in a secondary modern school for the fading summer term.
I was invited to join the permanent staff: new career, new disciplines, new intentions. I enrolled in a unique on-the-job PGCE course. Though I pursued further theological qualifications, I detoured to become an educationist. The outcome: a lifetime’s work covering all school phases, Further Education, Advisory Service, teacher education, and tutoring masters and doctoral students. I wrote my final education textbook in 2021; my involvement continues with informal groups like U3As.
Doubtless, today’s students often face those same setbacks, dilemmas, and uncertainties. Bleak times can be turned around, however. Reflecting, what strikes me most are the many opportunities to become involved in significant innovation, research and dissemination through publishing. Two things are important here. First, to emphasize that disrupted plans may not be failed plans; second, to identify five valuable lessons which emerged for me from those disrupted plans.
Knowledge is interdisciplinary
For convenience, compilers of syllabuses divide knowledge into subjects or domains; however, the solutions to the world’s ‘big issues’, like climate change, demand approaches that include experts from multiple disciplines and a team-orientated way of working. I argued this in Cross-curricular Teaching in the Primary School (Routledge 2015) and, beyond school level, included a chapter (by Mark Sandle) on the implications of this view at Master’s level in Meeting the Challenges of Change in Postgraduate Education (Bloomsbury 2010).
Back in the 1960s and 70s, before National Curriculum, cross-curricular thinking was denigrated. Masquerading under the title Topic Work, it was a convenient way of taking an idea (let’s say: Travel), and hanging largely unrelated pieces of curriculum around it – orienteering in geography; explorers in history; ballads about sea-faring in music; St Paul’s shipwrecks in RE, and so on. Then, in 1980 the government-funded Schools’ Council (teachers loved it – it listened to them) decided to highlight effective practice in interdisciplinary teaching: fortuitously, I was appointed Project Officer for this initiative. My colleague, Jim Eggleston, and I encapsulated our approach in Topic Work in the Primary School(Routledge 1983), where we argued not that teachers should abandon subjects nor that they needed different teaching skills to work in this interdisciplinary way; rather, that they needed different management skills and a more analytical approach to organize their work.
Learning is best formulated through questions
Even earlier, in the late ‘70s, I had been chosen to be Co-ordinator of a significantly-funded initiative, the DES Teacher Education Project (TEP), to improve and disseminate quality training materials for university PGCE courses nationwide. I became convinced that effective learning was achieved not through didactic methods, but through open-ended exploration based on high quality resource materials. (I and my colleagues had been experimenting with this in secondary modern schools some years before).
My personal research for TEP is still available on-line. To summarize: much teaching (especially didactic teaching) lacked cognitive depth; this could be improved by constructing learning through questioning rather than teacher talk; the overall proportion of cognitively demanding classroom verbal transactions could be raised by concentrating on Bloom’s categories of analysis, application, synthesis and evaluation; and this applied to both secondary and primary contexts. These basic tenets about classroom intellectual life have never been questioned by reliable research outcomes, yet their implications have never been properly explored by the profession. While no-one would argue that all verbal transactions in classrooms should be questions, questions should form a key part of the teacher’s armoury, and should be formulated with cognitive demand in mind. These early insights were encapsulated in Explaining and Questioning (Part Two: Questioning, Nelson Thornes 2002).
Learners and learning should not be controlled by the curriculum but should interrogate it and make it work for them
From 1993-2016 I had the privilege of teaching an excellent distance-learning, research-based, Master’s degree for senior international educationists, which emphasised that adult professionals should not merely acquire information to regurgitate it in some way for an award: good qualifications should convey the skills of critical thinking and problem-solving.
Australian academics Stewart Hayes and Chris Kenyon (Self-determined Learning Bloomsbury 2013 – to which I contributed a chapter) were working on the same lines. My version of the approach suggested: learners have a role in determining when they are ready and need to know specific information or skills. In acquiring new knowledge, learners must move beyond mere regurgitation, making connections in a Bloomian fashion. The knowledge and skills acquired by learners need not come from the teacher alone: electronic sources, experience, other people, or personally found sources are legitimate. The focus of learning is about students’ growth towards identified goals, not about fulfilling a specific prescribed syllabus. Thus, learners become self-sufficient, applying and adapting to new situations; learning is applied in broad contexts; and the process of learning becomes pleasurable and purposeful. This system does not advocate syllabus-free education, but a shift of perspective from content to a broader canvas of readiness, relevance and respect for the learner. It can be applied to other phases of education: https://www.slideshare.net/fredgarnett/heutagogy-for-primary-schools .
Our fundamental concern is the student, not the staff nor the institution
In 2007 I was invited to co-edit a book with Chau Meng Huat – International Perspectives on Education (Continuum 2008). Without prompting, our authors chose themes that coalesced around the centrality of learners. Howard Gardner, USA, examined cognition from the perspective of what he called ‘the ethical mind’ in learners. Colleen McLaughlin, UK, highlighted social development. Kristjan Kristjansson from Iceland pinpointed self-esteem, self-confidence and individualized education. Canadian John Miller wrote of wisdom and compassion. From Cyprus, by Michalinos Zembylas chose ‘new social relationships and affective connections’ in learning. This contrasted with UK Government calls for tighter curriculum control and an increasing reliance on examination performance. Meng Huat and I were happy with this outcome for our volume. Judging from the number of citations it received, it found favour with educators.
The spontaneous message of this book was: schools are about their pupils first and foremost; and, implicitly, that every kind of educational institution from infants to doctoral departments are about students, too. Every aspect of an educational institution should be directed and judged against criteria of student growth and satisfaction: their safety and security, their emergence as people, their fulfilment and happiness. The actions of education leaders are tempered, then, by those concerns for individuals – a first step on the road to an understanding of the ethical principles that underpin leadership action.
Every issue is an ethical issue
Covid lockdown gave me an opportunity to record these thoughts about ethical decision-making. Thinking about ethics after some misdemeanour or error of judgment is thinking too late. Teachers are faced with myriad decisions every day, most of them needing ethical judgement. For school leaders, the incidence increases exponentially. To be primed with an ethical perspective is essential. At every level, education is full of these dilemmas: from where the boundaries of confidentiality fall in relation to students or staff; to accepting that teaching materials we present as teachers may be biased to promote our personal view of an issue; or to the standards we keep in our personal lives.
In Ethics for Teachers and Middle Leaders (Routledge 2021), I suggested schools would benefit, periodically, from carrying out an ethical audit; I offered a template for this. The audit promotes the value of identifying positive examples of key ethical concepts being applied across an institution: integrity, honesty, impartiality, respect, patience, concern (plus noting omissions, to be addressed). The template would examine wider issues such as ethical professionalism: the attention paid to professional codes of conduct; attitudes of staff to one another; and commitment to improving professional knowledge and skills. A key concern was to scrutinize ethical approaches to teaching: issues like bias in content; transparency about personal bias; approaches to class management; and teacher professionalism in relation to preparation and teaching skills. At the school level, ethics determine: external relations; privacy policies; e-learning and electronic recording; and the extent to which students themselves are made aware of the ethical dimension.
In writing this last book, I felt that my original training in theology had come into its own – that, in a sense, I was back where I began. It was pleasing that the Church Times reviewer commented: ‘a superb resource for teacher-trainers’.
Conclusion
John’s set me on my journey. Like me, most of my generation of undergraduates was seriously concerned about future planning for life and career. My narrative might help others: no-one can predict where life’s journey will meander. My undergraduate vision of the future was nothing like the eventual reality. Yet none of that Johnian experience was wasted. In the process I have gained an unintended career, with securely researched increments towards an internally consistent philosophy of education, which itself has helped others to interrogate their own caree
John's Chronicle 