Sat in a staff meeting, waiting for the latest thing we are expected to do. Someone has been on a course, read a blog or seen it in action, and now it is the must-have thing. We’ve all sat there knowing they won’t work as well, but we have dutifully tweaked, adapted and implemented them as requested, all to find after a period of time they had no impact at all.
So here they are, the most useless fads of the last 20 years.
Learning Styles
We worked out what side of the brain we liked to use, we found out what kind of learner we were. We looked at the person next to us and raised our eyebrows and either gave a ‘hmm’ noise or a knowing look that said you’d known you were wired that way for years. We tweaked our lesson plans — made sure we had video in every lesson, eyes-closed listening tasks, and of course gave everyone the chance to get up and about to stretch those legs and refocus.
Never mind the fact that research and evidence never showed any impact of these changes on learning or retention. People might have enjoyed aspects of it more, but in terms of learning? A whole heap of work, for not much in the way of outcomes.
Shall I put that in a video for you?
Double and Triple Mounting
Ah, displays. The bane of my life. Hated doing them. They served no use for me really; they just became wallpaper. But the mounting! Oh, the mounting! Did you know that double mounting increases impact by 47% and triple by 139%? No, I didn’t think so either. The amount of paper, card, trimming and time spent on these that kids looked at once and then promptly ignored for the rest of the term.
Written Marking Everywhere
Every piece of work needs 2 stars and a wish. There must be a comment on everything, every book, every lesson, regardless of age. Forget the fact that the kids can’t read them, or don’t really care, or don’t take much notice of them — if you’ve written the comment they must have learned more, right? Wrong. The endless faff and time spent at the beginning of the lesson getting them to read the comments, and if they were young, reading it to them as their little eyes looked up at you, all glazed over. What a waste of time.
Dialogic Marking
Now that brings me on to dialogic marking. Not content with writing on everything, the children then had to write back, opening up a feedback dialogue. I wrote a comment, they wrote one back, I responded again… where did it end? Whether the kids had responded to their marking was a key part of a work scrutiny where I worked, so putting post-it notes next to all the comments they hadn’t responded to the day before the books were due in. Didn’t matter that the comments were from three months ago — I’m sure they still had an impact.
Copying the Learning Objective
How else would they know what they were learning about? They can only know if they’ve written it down? How else would SLT know what they had learned in that lesson? How would the children know in a few weeks what they had learned? It took hours with little ones, had no bearing on their understanding, but we made them all dutifully do it, and in a lot of places we still do.
SMARTboards
Controversial, but they never really lived up to their promise, hence the changes to TV screens over the interactive nature of SMARTboards (other brands are available). We spent hours getting our head around Notebook, finding the perfect graphic, interactive slides, timers and screen shades, all for what? I won’t mention it leading the way to having to have slides for Every. Single. Lesson. Madness.
Naming Every Child on a Plan
That’s right — PP, EAL, LA, MA, HA, G&T, SEN, FSM and any other acronym you could find. They all needed their own individual provision written on the plan, whether they needed anything different from everyone else or not. Ctrl C and Ctrl V came in very useful.
Data-Based Performance Management
Of course, everyone worked harder with particular children if they were on their performance management targets, right? I would never have put so much effort into a child who wasn’t listed as potentially impacting my pay now, would I? To be honest, I never remembered who was on there until the day before my appraisal when I hastily tried to find evidence for the targets that had been set. The angst on data drop day when you realised they hadn’t made the progress they should have, or reached the required level. The PM meeting wouldn’t be fun — it would be time to fight for that pay rise.
The ‘In the Back Pocket’ Ofsted Plans
Have 8 lessons to cover the two days that you can just teach when the call comes. Have them resourced and planned, ready to go. Stuff the topic, progression or the fact they might need to follow on from what had come before. Find an outstanding lesson plan, prep it and deliver it no matter what, no matter who, and no matter where.
The silver bullet for outstanding classrooms everywhere.
Stickers and Stamps for Everything
If a tree falls and no one hears it, did it really fall? If work was done independently and a sticker wasn’t put on it, was it truly independent? Not to mention LO stamps and the worst of all, verbal feedback stamps. Who else could a pupil articulate whether they had been spoken to about their work? And, of course, you only spoke to them, and they could only remember if the stamp was there. There were multicolours too — that made all the difference.
And I know that won’t be everything — I haven’t even touched thinking hats, submitting weekly lesson plans, icebreakers or staff meetings for the second half of the summer term. I also know many of these might still be being used in many places.
Everything goes around at least once and I think I can hear Wake and Shake calling.
The Secret Headteacher 