I teach. That is what I do.

Look away now if you take pride in defining yourself as one of those two things that apparently every teacher has to be one of.

You know the ones I mean.

You won’t like my blog and your initial sense of hope of a calming read that you may be able to nod along to will simply lead to you being left in a place beyond any level of disappointment that you have previously imagined.

For one half of this apparently unbridgeable divide we shall say as the Finns do: are you “perinteinen” or “eteneva”? For the other half we shall say it as the Chinese do: are you “Chuantong” or “Jinbu”. Thank you Google translate, although clearly if I have just asked if people are elephants or books then my thanks is withdrawn!

Anyway, the debate about how to teach in classrooms is one that seems endless. It rears its head on a regular basis in the world of educational discussion on Twitter, leads to many blogs and seems to act like the rerunning of Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks or Blur vs Oasis. You can either follow Lenin or Martov, or you can sing along to Park Life or Don’t Look Back in Anger. What you cannot do is try to have a bit of both. Teaching is not apparently a Now album or a debate at the Second International, and if you try to say that you are both or that you refuse to place yourself into one of the two camps then you have simply developed false consciousness.

This is my twentieth year of teaching. During my career my classroom has been laid out in rows, horseshoes, groups and some very odd arrangements due to numbers that I can’t really describe. I currently teach in a number of different classrooms that are laid out by the teachers who have ownership of the rooms in a variety of different ways. For some of my classes we have to have different seating plans depending on the room we are in as the classroom layouts are so different. However, we just get on with it and do not make a fuss.

I have planned what seems like thousands of lessons during that time. I imagine it is probably actually not a thousand, but I know I have produced plans and resources for around one hundred and twenty-five lessons since the start of 2018. This current spurt of planning is probably leading to me exaggerating my overall numbers. I have produced every type of lesson imaginable (by me). I have designed lessons which involve comprehension questions from textbooks, lesson which involve throwing tennis balls around the room, lessons which involved nothing but discussion, lessons where students work in groups, lessons where everyone sits in total silence and listen to me for an hour, lessons which use technology, lessons which use flipped learning, lessons which specifically lead to written assessments, lessons which involve learning facts, lessons which involved role play, basically lessons which use every approach my simple mind can think of.

When I plan lessons I start at the end and work backwards. I gather all the textbooks that my department has on a topic so that I can either use the activities that someone else has produced, use the information that the textbook has included, or simply be inspired by what others have done. I spend some time online looking at various history teacher groups for resources others have produced. I think back to other lessons or schemes of learning I have planned and consider if I have used ideas or approaches that could inform the new unit. I think about the lessons I have taught that colleagues have planned and consider if those approaches may work. Sometimes I come up with something that seems completely new to me in order to produce a lesson.

After twenty years of doing this, I have an idea that I might be reasonably good at it. I have written lessons for schools in a wide range of contexts, and shared lessons with teachers from across the world. My students seem to do OK when it comes to exams. Other teachers I work with seem to like the lessons I plan, either using them as they stand or with some developments to suit their classes. Most of my lessons go well and deliver the outcomes that I aim for. Some of them are not quite so successful, and occasionally I am left standing in front of a class realising that I don’t understand what we are doing and that therefore it is no wonder that they are even more confused!

For me I just want to do what is best for my students. I absolutely cannot be bothered with the endless debates about being a traditional or a progressive teacher. I want my students to learn the information they need to know, I want them enjoy learning it, I want them to be good at communicating their knowledge through strong skills, I want them to develop good social skills through their learning, and I want them to go away from my lessons thinking that they have worked hard but in a way that they recognise as worthwhile. I think I am probably a bit simple as a teacher really. Whenever I see anything labelled as an argument over traditional teaching against progressive teaching I just switch off and stop reading. I read books about education but if I think I am going to be lectured about how if I don’t buy into one way or the other then I am not good enough as a teacher then I avoid the book or the blog like the plague. I know that this statement is a red rag to some, and will simply reinforce their view that I lack the necessary intellectual rigour that truly great teachers have. Oh well. I shall have to live with that.

As someone once said in a much played clip about teaching, “You have no idea how much I enjoy teaching you!”. I like his words and shall always stick to them.

I teach. That is what I do.