Team Spirit

My second blog, again, shamelessly alludes to hits of the ’90s to encapsulate the theme. Should schools be structured into departments or teams?

My preference is to opt for the latter but this is more complex than simply changing the label.

So, as it’s that ‘quiet’ time of year (when staff are desperately trying to pack in all the work that has been shoved to the sidelines as the terms have passed) my department is using some of this time to halt the Merry-Go-Round. We need to step off the whirl of the academic year and step out to gain clarity. To focus the discussion, I have created a list of thinking points that centre around key issues that challenge and get to the heart of both the big questions and also the smaller ones. The discussion around whether pupils should indent or leave a line to demarcate paragraphs was a surprisingly thorny one… At this point you may be raising an eyebrow but can you honestly say that all your team are on the same page, in every detail? And if not, why aren’t they? Maybe your department does collectively all work as one, religiously putting in place all agreed policy… but can they articulate why? Are all your routines and systems thought through? Do they have a defined rationale? Or are you doing things a certain way because that’s the way it’s always been done? The need to challenge every aspect of our practice is mandatory to develop a team that truly understands the narrative that underpins the curriculum. A team that speaks with one voice is a powerful one.

Irrespective of Ofsted’s latest changes, the intention to unite my department’s focus has been bubbling away on the back-burner for a while and, finally, gained time has allowed the space to start getting to the heart of the debate because if we are to be confident that students are experiencing the best we have to offer we need to ensure equality in our approach. From the ‘what’ to the ‘why’ to the ‘how’, we should be able to articulate every aspect of the experience students have as they progress through our departments. Whilst my subject is English, this issue has much wider parameters: subjects, key phases- primary, secondary, and all the layers of staffing that make up our schools, we all need to start making time to talk. We are working in exciting times where an active dialogue about education is buzzing across social media and crossing back over into the workplace. To coin the vocabulary of my subject, we have reached a volta and need to seize the opportunity to open up purposeful conversations.

A mission statement, a manifesto, a statement of intent… I have yet to ‘brand’ the proposed outcome of our discussions. The intention though is simple, in theory. As a department, my aim is to get us to define who we are. It should be straightforward but in a large team, with staff spanning a wide range of age and experience, views about teaching vary, widely. You’d think that we’d all hold similar principles about the purpose of education but we don’t, yet.

Teaching can be a very solitary profession, shut away in a classroom, separated from colleagues for the majority of the day, marking and planning taking up the hours after the school day has ended. Making time to gather together and determine exactly what you are trying to achieve is indescribably important. An obvious statement, but without heartfelt, lengthy discussion how can we ever really be a ‘team’? Without that ‘team’ ethos, departments function as a disparate collection of individuals. Staff deliver the curriculum without a clear sense of the core values and knowledge to be imparted. As a result, students over the key stages experience an incoherent narrative. No matter how tight the curriculum narrative may be, if staff don’t collectively know how to tell the story it all falls apart.

This team of story weavers extends across key stages. At the same time as my team are defining our department rationale, we are also working closely with ten of our feeder primary schools. The project aims to develop a working dialogue between the key phases. It allows us time to observe and engage with each other’s practice and to work on ways to stitch together the gap as our students move from KS2 to 3. It has been fascinating and exhilarating to observe primary colleagues and teach their classes. The process of producing a crossover lesson that utilised prior learning but bridged the gap with suitable levels of challenge has been a stimulating opportunity. But that is just the start of building our cross-phase team, only yesterday all my department and five of our feeder primaries came together to work with the RSC for the day to unite in our approach to teaching Shakespeare’s tales.

By fully understanding every aspect of our approach, we can also plot out our own story, take ownership of our shared narrative, a coherent and considered curriculum then opens up for our students. As they move from teacher to teacher, across years and key stages, the narrative continues, develops, grows; learning is logical, meaningful, progressive. We are the narrators of this education story and we must be mindful as to how we want the story to be told.