Category: Personal

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Coordination Personal

Reflections: first term in senior leadership

In August 2018 I started a new position as the IBDP Coordinator at a school that had recently adopted the IBDP to replace its A Level program. This was my first time in a senior leadership position and I want to take sometime to reflect on that first term.

Prior to this role I had worked as part of the founding team of a secondary school. During that time we took the school through IB MYP and DP authorization, CIS accreditation, where I planned resourcing of the science department, as well as planned and developed the university and careers program. It was a busy time, and I learned a lot about things that I would not have got exposure to if I had stayed at my previous school. Through observation, I spent a lot of time watching and reflecting on the actions of various senior leaders.

So, naturally, entering into senior leadership for the first time, I felt that I had some ideas of do’s and dont’s of leadership, to help guide me in my initial steps. I also felt that I knew some of my natural weaknesses that I needed to work on. Looking back I think the biggest lesson I learned at my previous work was an echo of a prior lesson that I learned in my first year of teaching: It is ok to not have all the answers. It is ok to admit to knowledge gaps.

Starting in a new school always brings new challenges, and this term was no exception. It was odd, being new, being in leadership, and feeling like I was expected to have answers in the first week about processes and systems that I was still just getting my own head around. In addition to picking up new classes (I am still in the classroom 10 hours a week) one of which was a Y13 biology class, and having to learn the ropes of IT systems I hadn’t used before as well as the expectations of policy and procedure, I was implicitly and explicitly asked by staff about various points of procedure which I just didn’t know how the school did it. I had my own ideas of how things should be done, but I certainly did not want to impose those from the start.

In my first week, I was, figuratively, thrown under the bus being required to present to the whole primary and secondary school about priorities for KS5 and the rest of the secondary school. I also was front and center, leading multiple sessions during the staff inset. During all of these sessions I was careful to thank those who had put the work in before my arrival and show humility in the way I talked about the DP and my ideas. I was also happy to admit that this was my first DP Coordinator post. I think that this went some way to helping me build relationships with staff members.

On top of planning and marking (It was the first time I was teaching IGCSE biology in 4 years) during that first term my time was consumed mostly by:

  • Managing teachers
  • Developing policy
  • Developing exams processes and procedures
  • Developing the DP options process

Before becoming a senior leader I thought that most of my time would be taken up with managing student behaviour across the board but this term I was surprised to find just how much time is taken up by teachers! 🙂 Not all of this is good or bad, much of it is healthy relationship building, and I had already clocked in my last job that this was an area I needed to work on: relationship building.

I like to work on my own, not surrounded by other colleagues to talk to or distract me. I find planning and prioritisation hard when my time is broken up, and I like long chunks of uninterrupted time to focus on my work. In my last job I had already told myself that I needed to get into the staff room more but this term this has been an imperative. Why send an email if I can have a conversation? I have come to understand that this is so important for a senior leader and as I write I am reminded of an old Head who always used to admonish me to come and see her and not send emails. However, I currently believe that this is a responsibility of senior leadership not teachers. At the time I was teaching four classes of biology, two classes of TOK, running the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and setting up the careers program. I didn’t have time to try and find people (in fact a lot of that year I spent in tears). This Head should have been coming to find me, instead of showing a profound lack of understanding about what I was doing with my time.

As DP Coordinator I need to be aware of the pressures my teachers are under and get out there to support them. However, when issues between staff arise, this can take up a huge amount of temporal and emotional space as I learned this year. I have also seen how destructive certain habits can be for individuals.

Developing policy has been a key focus for the term. As the DP program is quite young, there are a lot of policies and procedures that need attention. Initially we have been focussed on developing academic honesty policy and I wrote about that here and here.

Since October, my time has mostly been absorbed by planning the administration of the mock exams to be held in January (getting the dates in place is another story) and developing a process for the DP options/subject choices procedure for year 11.

I also had the importance underscored, more than ever, of working in a team and holding the party line. When decisions are made as a leadership team that might be unpopular and that you are either personally neutral to or don’t really agree with, it is really important to support the party line. Not doing so, can serve to undermine the effectiveness and efficiency of that team. While it may be tempting to admit privately that you disagree with a decision or that the decision wasn’t yours, the result of doing so will not be positive.

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Education Personal Resources Teaching & Learning

PGCE Research: Teacher Understandings of Educational Neuroscience

Below is the pdf of my research project that I completed as part of my PGCE top-up course. It followed from a fuller literature review that can be read here.

Completed in 2015, I only just realised that I didn’t have a link to it.

Download (PDF, 387KB)


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Personal

Reflections from examining 2018

This season I marked 140 IB DP Biology HL Paper 2 Timezone 1 papers. It was unusual for a couple of reasons: 1) I managed to pass the qualification marking on the first attempt for the first time in six years! 2) I managed to complete my marking target within seven working days and nine days before the deadline – the first time I have managed to complete the work so quickly.

I felt that this years timezone 1 exam was very straightforward to mark. This was particularly evident in the data analysis responses where the mark scheme was much easier to interpret than I recall previous years being.

Qualification

To qualify for marking, normally there are practice scripts and qualifying scripts to mark. The practice scripts are a chance for you to view comments from the senior examining team, so when undertaking these it pays to go very slowly, really thinking about how the mark scheme applies in each question and when you have marked each question, checking your own marking against the comments by toggling on the annotations. Using this method you may become quickly aware of any small details in the comments that you have missed.

In the past when I have undertaken the qualifying scripts I have opted to mark them in bulk and then submit them in bulk, so I would only submit the scripts once I had marked all of the papers. This year, instead, I submitted each script after I had marked it. This gave me the advantage of being able to read the annotations on each of the qualifying scripts, check my tolerance and adjust my marking of each of the subsequent qualifying scripts. I think this may have been a primary reason why I qualified first time.

Student misconceptions on the paper

I marked 140 scripts and when you mark that many certain themes begin to emerge. This year worryingly a large proportion of candidates were conflating the mechanisms of global warming with holes in the ozone layer. This is not a new thing and it is a problem that I have noticed in previous years but this year the sheer number of candidates writing a confused response to the question on the mechanisms of global warming was staggeringly impressive.

In 2018, 18-year-old students are still writing that carbon dioxide creates holes in the ozone layer and this is what heats up the planet – or something similar. This needs to be addressed. A teacher or teachers somewhere must be teaching kids about the ozone layer.

Now I struggle to believe that this is the result of their biology teachers (who most likely will have studied this subject to sime depth and understand the science) and I am wondering if this is the result of colleagues in other subjects unrelated to science. We know that there is a lot of confusion about climate change in the media and that the scienitific debate is often misconstrued in the popular press. We also know that this is an issue of global importance and for that reason, other subject teachers may well address it. IB student could meet it in TOK, studies in language as well as geography and other teachers. I am wondering if there are some miseducated teachers out there who are confused on the issues of climate science and are confusing their kids. This would be a great area for practitioner research and opens up the question about the professional responsibilities of teachers who have a particular subject specialism: should teachers who are well educated on a particular topic be responsible for sharing that knowledge with colleagues who may also approach this topic in the own teaching?

(on a side note a colleague previously told me that XX and XY chromosomes were “a lie” in a discussion on LGBTQ+ issues in school).

Other misconceptions that became apparent were:

  • Candidates thought that water was an organic molecule
  • Candidates didn’t understand that DNA transcription/translation = protein synthesis = gene expression = expression in the phenotype.
  • Not understanding that linked loci are genes on the same chromosome not in the same place.

Common factual errors were:

  • Few candidates knew that glutamic acid is replaced by valine.

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Personal

Working as an international teacher and wondering what to do about your pension?

When I first left the UK, I was advised by an older and respected colleague to do no more than two years of teaching outside of the UK before returning, if I wanted any hope of being able to work as a teacher again in the UK.

I am not so sure how true this advice is (I guess time will tell – I have been living outside of the UK since 2012) and it also assumes that I want to work in the UK as a teacher in the future, but it was one comment of many about the perils of leaving teaching in the UK to work overseas.

Another comment concerned pensions. This was from an older colleague, who had retired a few years previously but was continuing to work at the school in an administrative (UK sense of the word not US) capacity. This colleagues expressed shock that I could give up my UK teachers pension. I was reticent to point out that at my age at the time, I was unlikely and indeed, definitely not going to get the same pension deal from the government that teachers of his generation did. This was in 2011.

I am and always have been concerned about my financial future. Partly, it comes from my particular family background. My parents encouraged me to work from a young age (my first job was at McDonalds at 15 and I held steady work all threw 6th form and university) and they encouraged me to save. They have also reached their 70s without pensions and are still having to run their business, but that is another story.

Nevertheless, while I would dispute that it is worth making entire life choices based on the UK teacher pension (particularly in it recent forms), and would clearly stress that leaving the pension scheme should not stop anyone from leaving teaching in the UK, the comment haunted me for a few years.

Each country is different, obviously. And financial arrangements for school-teacher pensions are diverse between and within different schools.

Working in Switzerland I was paid a decent pension in line with Swiss labour law by both the schools that I worked at. I am not going to get into technicalities here, but the Swiss pension system works on their “three pillars”. Pillar 1 is the equivalent of national insurance in the UK, Pillar 2, is a private pension provided by employers and employee and Pillar 3 is the equivalent of tax-free ISA savings. The first two are mandatory and so if you are working in a school, your employer will be contributing to these. So you are covered.

In China there is no such provision for foreign teachers. So my school does not hold a pension scheme for me or pay directly into a scheme for me. Therefore if you don’t take care you could end up spending more money that you should. Clearly without a pension fund, I need to be saving for my retirement myself. although I am paid a contract completion bonus.

In addition to this, once you have had several employers in several different countries you may end up with pots of pension money all over the place. Another problem arises from the questions of how best to keep track and potentially amalgamate all these different pools.

For a long time I have wondered how I would manage the pension issue. It began to seem quite complicated and I don’t have the kind of money to pay someone to manage this for me.

And then I met Andrew Hallam. Well not quite, he presented at my school in 2015. After listening to his talk and perusing his blog I decided to buy his books. Like most of my book purchases, I wasn’t disappointed. They are a gold mine for any teachers wondering about what to do about their finances.

I’m not going to go into the details as you can read that yourself but suffice to say that the books provide a solid model for anyone thinking about retirement planning and achieving financial independence, without the need for being a millionaire and having to rely on the role of ‘expert’ financial advisers.

For any teachers who are considering working overseas and are concerned about what this would mean for their retirement and pensions as well as any teachers who are already working overseas and are wondering how to ensure that they can achieve financial independence in retirement Andrew Hallam’s books, Millionaire Teacher and Millionaire Expat provide a lot of practical ideas that will help you navigate the murky waters of international personal finance on a teachers salary.

Categories
Education Personal

Reductionism and the problem of testimonial belief

For 10 weeks in term 3 I completed an online course on “Theory of Knowledge” from the University of Oxford’s department for continuing education. As part of this course, I have to submit two assignments. The second, was due at the end of the course and is copied below. The first can be read here.

What is the reductionist position as regards the epistemology of testimonial belief? Is such a view defensible, do you think?

In this essay, we will examine the nature of knowledge and the relationship of testimonial belief to it. We will look at the problem of testimony and the various ways of responding to this problem before addressing the question above.

A summary of the structure of knowledge

Some context is necessary here. I assume that justification, truth and belief are all necessary conditions for knowledge but in and of themselves are not sufficient conditions for an agent to claim knowledge. In addition, we need an understanding of the nature and type of the justification given. Normally we would require justification to be rational and based on evidence. In order to maximise true beliefs we are concerned with epistemic rationality: rational thinking and ways of thought that lead to the acquisition of a maximum number of these true beliefs. Epistemic rationality is either internal or external. If it is internal, the agent is aware of how they formed their beliefs and can justify them. If external, the agent may not be aware of how they formed these beliefs and is therefore not in a position to justify them consciously. However, if these beliefs were formed through epistemic norms, ways of acting and thinking that likely lead to the formation of true belief, we can still claim them as justified (Pritchard, 2014). This distinction is important when we consider testimonial knowledge and I will provide some examples later in the essay.

Testimonial knowledge

Testimonial knowledge is the knowledge gained by the transmission of information verbally, through reading or other activities where an agent is gaining knowledge from another agent. We depend on testimony for forming many of our beliefs. Most of what we claim to know through formal education is acquired through testimony. The knowledge that our parents impart to us is also testimonial. Testimony is therefore central to knowledge and can be a way of acquiring knowledge (I acquired true belief X through testimony) and also a way of justifying the knowledge an agent claims (Belief X is true because I was told or I read it). For example, I justify my belief that the moon orbits planet earth because I was told this in school. I also received this knowledge through the testimony of my teacher at the time.

The problem of testimony and the responses to it.

The problem with testimonial knowledge arises from our inability to independently justify knowledge that we gain through testimony. By independently verify, I mean that we cannot verify this knowledge in most cases without resorting to some other form of testimony. For example I know that the moon orbits the earth because I was told this by my teacher but if I wish to independently verify this, I normally would have to consult a textbook (a form of testimony). To illustrate this further, I could look for other means of justification: I could call NASA to ask them to verify this is the case but this would also mean I was relying on their testimony. Without actually acquiring a telescope and making empirical observations of the movements of the sun, moon and stars and making advanced calculations I would have no way of independently verifying this knowledge without resorting to more justification via testimony.

Reductionism and credulism both try to answer this problem. Reductionism claims that testimony based beliefs will always ultimately reside on non-testimonial evidence. Or, if we are to rightly hold a testimony based belief then we must also hold evidence that is not testimony based (Pritchard, 2014). This is an epistemically rational internalist position because reductionism requires an agent to know how they formed those beliefs and be able to explain how they formed those beliefs.

The reductionist position easily applies for local beliefs, things we can verify through our own perception and perhaps through our own empirical investigations, like a preschooler learning about the world through perception and empirical experience, for example, I know what a banana tastes like from experiencing it. Reductionism gets harder to apply with non-local beliefs, where we are simply unable to empirically verify a testimonial belief, for example, my belief that the moon is not made of cheese.

Credulism offers another response to the problem of testimonial knowledge. This position holds that we don’t always need independent grounds to justify a testimony based belief (Pritchard, 2014). Instead, it claims, such beliefs are justifiably held unless there is special reasons to doubt them. This is an example of external epistemic rationality where we don’t require an agent to be able to justify how they formed their beliefs so long as they have been following epistemic norms. In this case, an epistemic norm could be that being told something by an authoritative source is one way to maximise true belief. Holding to views acquired by testimony in this way is an entirely rational thing to do.

When credulism is modified thus we can begin to appreciate its advantages. For example, most of the knowledge that we learn at school and university is taught to us by teachers or experts in a particular field. Many of the things that we may wish to independently verify, we cannot. Would we say that something we learned in school or university was not knowledge? Intuitively not. We may regard facts acquired in this way as more robust than picking something up in a pub from a casual conversation. So we can have a methodology in terms of discriminating how reliable someone might be by their level of expertise.

The problem with credulism is that it can seem to make a virtue out of not knowing but of trusting (Pritchard, 2014). Perhaps we should be more sceptical of the information that we receive, after all, teachers can often make mistakes, or be misinformed themselves (I know from my experience of being one!)

Is reductionism defensible?

We can think of both reductionism and credulism as lying on a spectrum of justification. On one hand we have the reductionist who requires that every belief acquired through testimony needs to be independently verified and on the other hand we have the credulist who accepts that so long as these testimonial beliefs have been acquired through epistemic norms then there is no need for independent verification.

The reductionist position is the ideal because it forces agents to acquire more than one line of evidence to justify a true belief. Ideally agents should be able to justify those beliefs acquired through testimony via other means, be it through perception or empirical investigation but this ideal has some serious difficulties.

Firstly the process of independent verification of every belief acquired through testimony would take an extremely long time, enough to render the exercise impractical on an individual level. If an individual was responsible for independently verifying each one of their beliefs acquired through testimony, they would not be able to necessarily maximise their true beliefs. If we try to answer this by allowing many agents to independently verify different beliefs they hold in common, we run into the problem of relying on testimony from other agents again. Thus this doesn’t seem to be an epistemically rational way to maximise true belief.

The second problem that arises from the reductionists position in that it is not always possible to independently verify beliefs gained via testimony. Should we discount these beliefs as knowledge then? It seems that if we were to ignore any beliefs that we were not able to independently verify we would miss out a large number of true beliefs and would therefore be impoverished in what we know.

The third problem is in some cases it is not necessarily appropriate to independently verify our testimonial beliefs: “it is improper to place too many intellectual demands on people’s everyday beliefs. … if the reduction is possible, requiring it is overly demanding; the requirement to reduce hyper-intellectualizes testimonial justification. Young children, for instance, lack the intellectual capacity to consider complicated issues regarding the reliability of their parents or others who give them testimonially-based beliefs, and so it is improper to place epistemic demands on them.” (IEP, 2018)

Therefore whilst reductionism offers a seemingly strong answer to the problem of testimonial knowledge, it leaves us with the more problems regarding maximising our true beliefs.

Credulism too has problems associated with it. How do we know that another agent isn’t trying to decieve us? One proxy I sometime hear people use for knowing if a written argument is well founded is that the argument contains references. This shorthand is often used in informal academic online discussions within education but what if one agent is deceitful and simply puts many references so that readers will trust them?

In reality, most of our beliefs will be justified through testimony. We should strive like the reductionist to independently verify these beliefs where possible. Where we can’t we should accept those beliefs where we can be more confident of the source of the testimonial belief. In this way, our beliefs will dot across a spectrum, where each individual belief occupies a position between pure reductionism and pure credulism.

References

IEP (2018) https://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-testi/ accessed on 26th July 2018\

Pritchard, D. (2014) What is this thing called knowledge? 3rd edition. Routledge.