headteacher-secondary

The mutual respect and achievements between a football coach and their players tend to have a limited shelf life, notes GordonCairns – might the same apply to teachers? I n football it’s known as the three-year curse – that moment when even the most successful manager’s proficiency with tactics and ability to motivate their team magically deserts them. Players who last season would have hung on their every word and run through brick walls for them suddenly stop performing. It happened to Jose Mourinho in his third year at Chelsea, just a few months after winning the English Premier League and the Manager of the Year award. By the time he was fired, the players had stopped listening. Later, it happened to Mauricio Pochettino too, shortly after he took Tottenham Hotspur to their first ever Champions League Final. His team had stopped responding and he was duly sacrificed. ‘Best before’ date It’s not just in football that a group can tire of their mentor’s message and style; it can also happen in the classroom, where a teacher’s skills in relationship building, motivation and knowledge are as important as they are in the field of sports management. If teachers remain with the same class for more than a year, is it possible that their teaching message stops reaching an audience who no longer respond to the same techniques? Could it be that students, like elite footballers, subconsciously stamp a ‘best before’ date on their class teacher’s forehead, after which the effectiveness of the educator diminishes? In many secondary schools it’s currently normal practice for teachers to stay with the same class for at least a two-year period in the interests of continuity, especially if the class is working towards qualifications. This laissez-faire approach makes a lot of sense – the teacher can ‘train’ the pupils in their working methods, while the experience of working with students is much better than hearing second-hand how a young person copes with class work – but it’s an approach seemingly designed to suit the needs of the teacher, their department and the timetable, rather than those being taught. On the other hand, comparatively little attention is paid towards the student whose learning style doesn’t match the Despite the wealth of educational research into teaching and learning styles, none of the heads of department I’ve spoken to have ever considered offering a variety of teaching approaches when allocating classes; taking a child-centred approach, rather than a teaching one. Perhaps this is because teachers don’t become defined by teaching style of the professional. Perhaps there’s a student who works best in small groups supported by their peers, and doesn’t learn well through the taking of notes. Conversely, their classroom teacher may prefer a lecture style of teaching, where all students vigorously take down dictated notes. Even those pupils initially motivated by this approach may soon tire of the same lesson starters, hearing the same motivational phrases and, dare I say it, even the same jokes. What may have been invigorating the first time around could quite possibly pale on the second or even third telling. What effect this has on the students is unknown. Teacher flexibility The trouble is, there’s been very little up-to-date research into the pros and cons of long-term teacher- class relationships. As far as I’m aware, the only study into this area was conducted over half a century ago, focusing on 60 junior high school biology students at the University of Iowa Laboratory School in the USA. The study found that it was better to have a single teacher over the period of a year, rather than rotate classes over a three-week duration, but didn’t examine the rotation of classes over a longer period of time. 24 “Motivation in schools remains a mystery” teachwire.net DOES FAMILIARITY BREED CONSTRAINTS? their pedagogical method in the same way that a football manager might be classified as ‘a good motivator’ or ‘master tactician’. In fact, classes tend to be allocated on a rather ad-hoc basis. A teacher given a class with behavioural issues lower down the school, for example, may be later ‘rewarded’ with an academic group in the upper school. Similarly, top sections will be