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Michaela: The Power of Culture
The Power of Culture, a follow up to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, drives at the heart of what makes Michaela a trailblazing school. Their teachers and pioneering Head Katharine Birbalsingh reveal all as they take the reader on a journey through Michaela's alternative ways.
380 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 10, 2020
60 people are currently reading
252 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 15, 2020
I have been aware of Ms. Birbalsingh since her infamous appearance at a Conservative Party conference some 10 years ago at which she dared to criticise the breakdown of the education system in England. More recently I have followed her on Twitter as a voice of reason and common-sense on many topics not just educational ones.
This book about the teaching methods and ethos of the amazing free school, Michaela, she setup in a somewhat deprived area of inner-city London is fascinating. It consists of a series of short essays by mostly teachers but also by a few support staff explaining why they do the things they do and why they think those things are so important to help children perform to their utmost without turning the children into mere knowledge machines.
I am a lay person, not an educationalist, but I found this an immensely uplifting read. Many of the methods are a throwback to how I was schooled in Scotland very many years ago with their focus on silent corridors, tough-love discipline, teacher authority, and inspired tuition by teachers who care.
Obviously schools now have new problems to contend with, not least the handling of mobile phones and how to surmount fads and wokeness in the curriculum, and Michaela's efforts to tackle these and many others is innovatory.
This is a truly excellent read and I hope it finds a wide audience amongst educators and the generalists alike.
This book about the teaching methods and ethos of the amazing free school, Michaela, she setup in a somewhat deprived area of inner-city London is fascinating. It consists of a series of short essays by mostly teachers but also by a few support staff explaining why they do the things they do and why they think those things are so important to help children perform to their utmost without turning the children into mere knowledge machines.
I am a lay person, not an educationalist, but I found this an immensely uplifting read. Many of the methods are a throwback to how I was schooled in Scotland very many years ago with their focus on silent corridors, tough-love discipline, teacher authority, and inspired tuition by teachers who care.
Obviously schools now have new problems to contend with, not least the handling of mobile phones and how to surmount fads and wokeness in the curriculum, and Michaela's efforts to tackle these and many others is innovatory.
This is a truly excellent read and I hope it finds a wide audience amongst educators and the generalists alike.
July 22, 2024
All this sounds extremely convincing. It is very impressive what they have built, especially in an area where the pupils ordinarily - according to statistics - would have done poorly, but then it emerges, one of the best schools in the UK. Fantastic.
I talked to a friend of mine who has worked all her adult life in schooling, as a teacher first, now headmaster of her own school, we often disagree on political topics. But on this we agreed: We would have liked the Norwegian school system to be open to many different approaches to pedagogy. (Maybe we would have disagreed again if we came to talk about what kinds of pedagogy we’d prefer! Haha. Well, disagreement is a sign of a healthy society.) How I would have tried to get my son into a school something like this. Oh my.
I talked to a friend of mine who has worked all her adult life in schooling, as a teacher first, now headmaster of her own school, we often disagree on political topics. But on this we agreed: We would have liked the Norwegian school system to be open to many different approaches to pedagogy. (Maybe we would have disagreed again if we came to talk about what kinds of pedagogy we’d prefer! Haha. Well, disagreement is a sign of a healthy society.) How I would have tried to get my son into a school something like this. Oh my.
March 4, 2023
6 stars - Amazing book. A big fan of this teacher and her disciplinary style. I believe that humans are like trains and if you give them rails to ride on they will travel far and eventually lose those rails themselves and learn to fly. It's like in islam and muslims. They have 5 “rails” / “train tracks” prescribed to them daily which if they adhere to will teach them to fly also. The word discipline also comes from the word disciple and Katherine has created a whole bunch of disciples with her methodology.
Best bits:
In reality, the space that was once totally occupied by traditional forms of authority - the teachers and parents who once had total control over what children would watch and read and at what time - is increasingly colonized by a new authority, the encroaching influence of which many parents are barely even aware the internet. Anyone working on the frontline in a pastoral role in a school, as I do, Knows this. As they ask weary-looking pupils slumped over desks how many hours were spent yesterday evening on their smartphones, they know that many of them won't have gone to sleep until well after midnight, pretending to their parents that they're asleep so that they can stare at Instagram, Snapchat or Netflix. The 'Screentime' feature on smartphones is depressingly informative in this regard: one of our pupils clocked up eight hours on her phone on just one school day last year. Another pupil managed 18 hours one Sunday when her mum was at work.
Michaela does not produce the rows of thoughtless automata that many
would have you believe. Once, my colleague was playing his Year 8 form The Planets Suite by Holst in form time. Unusually, he got his pupils to guess which planet they were listening to. Because this class had been taught about the Roman gods, they were able to make meaningful guesses saying, "is this Mars because Mars was the god of war and this sounds very war-like?" or, "is this Venus? Venus is the Roman god of love and it has a very romantic sound". Had those pupils never learned about these gods then this would have been a pointless guessing game, but because of their background knowledge they were able to feel very clever! The more knowledge you have been given, the more of these links you are able to draw, the more creative you are able to be.
As with so many things, experience has shifted my thinking on this question.
The first time a pupil you know gets stabbed or beaten up, or a pupil you love drifts towards violence against others, you realize that values are not inevitable or irrelevant. The ideas that surround someone control the decisions they take. It is through our shared values that we learn about truth, morality and acceptable ways to behave.
I always say to staff, don't be that person who makes my or your line manager's 'to do' list even longer. Don't be an extra stress that we have to worry about to chase. Be that person of whom I can ask something and it just gets done, as if by magic, making my life easier, not harder. In fact, be even better than that and be proactive, take the initiative and help to lead the school
I have a quote by Thomas Sowell in mv office that all staff are aware of that says, When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear! We live by this mantra at Michaela.
The common denominator of almost all of the issues I deal with can be traced back to overuse or misuse of smartphones. Parents normally appreciate That the smartphone presents a problem, but they don't follow the chain of causality from smartphone misuse to problems at school. I find this is the case with most people, even my friends. Few understand just how destructive smartphones are to the peace, happiness and success of the kids I teach.
Here is a small sample of what parents have said to me over the last year:
"She's a good girl, and she does her homework really well. But she's just obsessed with messaging this boy all evening once her homework is done." I caught him the other day. He said he was doing his online maths on the phone. But I looked, and he was on a game."
"I did a check of her WhatsApp conversations, and found this. [swearing and abuse to and from another pupil]."
"Every night he does his homework, and it takes him a very long time.!
Wonder whether it is a good idea to let him have YouTube on his phone
whilst he's doing it."
I now think that victimhood culture, lack of family support, inappropriate music choice and friend choice, refusal to take personal responsibility, inability to embrace one's duty, inability to be grateful for what one has however little it is), and peer pressure to conform to the ways 'of the street' over academic pursuit are devastating obstacles in children's lives.
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man?'
Rousseau espoused the notion that children are inherently good, and essentially just need space and freedom, not instruction and authority, in order to flourish and develop into their full, naturally good selves. What many fail to realize is that Rousseau had his own children (some of whom he never even bothered naming) sent to an orphanage where their chances of survival were shockingly low. Had he put more of an effort into being a responsible father, he may have noticed that his notions of children's innate goodness were rather optimistic and didn't necessarily stack up with the evidence. Any parent will testify that children don't need to be taught to misbehave; it seems to come quite naturally. To help curb this tendency requires intervention, not abdication, and so reverting to maintaining order, structure and clear boundaries - ideas tried and tested for thousands of years - actually proves to make much more sense.
As Patrick Deneen puts it:
'liberty is not a condition into which we are naturally born but one we achieve through habituation, training, and education - particularly the discipline of self-command. It is the result of a long process of learning. Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature'
'It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate natures can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters' -
Edmund Burke
Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are not disciplined you are a slave to your moods; you are a slave to your passions.' - Eliud Kipchoge. Burke and Kipchoge - hundreds of years and continents apart - understand a universal truth that was once accepted by everyone from Aristotle to Aquinas: true freedom only comes with virtuous self-government. In this way, self-discipline is an act of freedom.
At Michaela, we know that the formation of character cannot be achieved overnight. It takes time, patient feedback and deliberate practice. In this way, learning to regulate an emotional response becomes a practiced skill in the same way that playing the piano or swinging a golf club is a practised skill. What begins as a single, laborious and studied action becomes, in time, a habit. And as that habit becomes ingrained, it becomes who we are. It passes from something that we do tentatively and deliberately, to something that we do automatically and instinctively. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that 'the palace of wisdom is arrived at through the courtyard of habit.
We do teach biblical literacy in a way that empowers our pupils to speak knowledgeably about, perhaps, the most influential book that was ever written. Such a view is increasingly rare in British schools, whose general squeamishness about scripture alienates pupils from a great sweep of culture - music, art and literature - as well as the compendium of ideas that has done more to incubate Western assumptions than any other.
We believe that some constraints and some boundaries can be liberating.
At Michaela, our butterflies don't just break free; they become free.
The privately educated grow up believing they are powerful, and should lead. Since birth, they are surrounded by discussions about politics, references to history, literature, art and culture; they visit places of historical or cultural importance at the weekends, read many more books, and are exposed to richer vocabulary. A result of this upbringing is a deep knowledge of the culture and history of the country, and a sense of their place within it. Part of their confidence therefore comes from knowing our country inside out. When they read Shakespeare, he belongs to them and to their cultural heritage. This sense of belonging bolsters their belief that they are future leaders of our society.
In our brave new world, the education system has been geared towards individualism rather than community.
As Hannah Arendt argued, "by being emancipated from the authority of the adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority"
This means teaching them to be kind, considerate and responsible for their actions. It also means teaching them as much as we can about the immensely complex world around them. Failure to assume this responsibility is a disaster for the child, for their peers and does nothing but aggravate a problem which is then left to other members of society and future generations to contend with.
"You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilisation needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice or creativity...
Tret] we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." - C. S. Lewis
Whilst relieving him of any responsibility might be comforting for him in the moment, it pushes the problem further into his future. As an adult, a failure to accept responsibility and act to change one's Future can be disastrous.
One of the weirdest (but wonderful) aspects of Michaela lunch-time is
'appreciations'. This is when, in the final four minutes of lunch, pupils will all raise their hands and any chosen will stand up and say an 'appreciation' essentially a thank you) to someone they are grateful for:
The research impact of a thinker is measured on a scale known as the h-index. Freiré has amassed an enormous 138 points (not far behind Karl Marx himself on 173, and the heavyweight Noam Chomsky at 180).
It's not as if these violent songs are kept somewhere in the underground, they are openly played on the radio as well, side-by-side with Ed Sheeran. Imagine if these songs referenced killing animals. No one would be okay with that, and rightly so. But killing people, is that supposed to be fine? And let's all let vulnerable inner-city kids listen to it, especially as they're surrounded by knife crime every day of the week. It's utter madness!
However, at Michaela, we believe that some drilling, used moderately and judiciously, can make learning, in the long run, much easier for pupils. We know that by drilling the component parts of a more complex task, just as instrumentalists do with scales or arpeggios, we can free up our pupils to devote their working memory to the parts of the task that are most abstract or complex.
Then I became a form tutor at Michaela. Every morning during term, like all form tutors at Michaela, I receive an email from our Head of Music. The email contains a hyperlink and some basic facts about a famous piece of classical music that we can play to our form as they come into class. Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King; Vivaldi's 'Spring', Tchaikovsky's 'Waltz of the Flowers'® and Custav Holst's Jupiter' are among the regulars that feature
we have a duty to curate the most powerful knowledge that exposes our pupils to the very best that has been thought, said, and composed in our respective disciplines' curricula.
In 2020, society is wrong about a lot. One fundamental thing it gets wrong is believing that creativity comes from lack of structure and lack of consistency. Jonathan Porter's chapter 'School of Freedom' talks about different types of freedom. He says, 'some constraint and some direction frees our young people to be the best that they can be'. That's true.
We use tutor time to urge them to aim for the moon so that even if they don't reach it, they will fall among the stars.
In English we also get pupils to do something magical with their homework. We get them to check their capital letters with their green pens before handing it in. If they haven't checked them, they get a detention. So, they check them. This transfers into their classwork as well; all of a sudden, every single one of my pupils uses capital letters and full stops correctly, and I've gained back hours of badgering children about the simplest thing to complete in writing - something that so many pupils just didn't bother about at my previous school.
Through the imposition of limits and boundaries, we seek to free our children from our children from two of the greatest threats to their childhood, the use of technology (particularly social media) and bullying.
Asking new staff to learn the names of all established staff and pupils before the start of term empowers them, as they are able to make connections straight away.
There comes a time when words tire. And silence starts to tell the story - Kahlil Gibran
Brits spend more than two hours a day on their phones. That adds up to approximately 14 hours a week, or 60 hours a month, or 30 full days a year!
a study found that 83.5% of us have experienced the situation where we think our phone has gone off when it has not (Sauer et al. 2015). Known as the "Phantom phone sensation", we are so obsessed with contact from other people we start to dream it up. If that isn't distracting from concentrating on your work, I don't know what is.
Catherine Price uses a great example for this. Compare reading a book to reading something on your smartphone. Distractions when you read a book are external to the page. A dog barking or your partner hoovering is not right there on the page. Consider when you read an article on your phone: links, ads. notifications are popping up literally left, right and centre. All of these distractions claw our attention away for a split-second. Consequently, our phones are teaching us terrible habits of essentially mindlessly doing tasks without ever fully focusing on them. After all, the more distractible you are, the more links you click on, and the more value you are to websites and advertisers.
When raising children, we want them to be able to hold sustained conversations without getting distracted. No child addicted to their smartphone is going to fare well in life, have a meaningful relationship, cook a meal read a book. when they cannot concentrate because they are forever wondering whether the phone in their pocket is full of messages and Instagram "likes".
I had never before considered in so much detail the way that I stand, the tone of my voice and the use of my facial expressions which can really make the difference between being a good teacher and being an inspirational teacher who really drives their class forward.
Best bits:
In reality, the space that was once totally occupied by traditional forms of authority - the teachers and parents who once had total control over what children would watch and read and at what time - is increasingly colonized by a new authority, the encroaching influence of which many parents are barely even aware the internet. Anyone working on the frontline in a pastoral role in a school, as I do, Knows this. As they ask weary-looking pupils slumped over desks how many hours were spent yesterday evening on their smartphones, they know that many of them won't have gone to sleep until well after midnight, pretending to their parents that they're asleep so that they can stare at Instagram, Snapchat or Netflix. The 'Screentime' feature on smartphones is depressingly informative in this regard: one of our pupils clocked up eight hours on her phone on just one school day last year. Another pupil managed 18 hours one Sunday when her mum was at work.
Michaela does not produce the rows of thoughtless automata that many
would have you believe. Once, my colleague was playing his Year 8 form The Planets Suite by Holst in form time. Unusually, he got his pupils to guess which planet they were listening to. Because this class had been taught about the Roman gods, they were able to make meaningful guesses saying, "is this Mars because Mars was the god of war and this sounds very war-like?" or, "is this Venus? Venus is the Roman god of love and it has a very romantic sound". Had those pupils never learned about these gods then this would have been a pointless guessing game, but because of their background knowledge they were able to feel very clever! The more knowledge you have been given, the more of these links you are able to draw, the more creative you are able to be.
As with so many things, experience has shifted my thinking on this question.
The first time a pupil you know gets stabbed or beaten up, or a pupil you love drifts towards violence against others, you realize that values are not inevitable or irrelevant. The ideas that surround someone control the decisions they take. It is through our shared values that we learn about truth, morality and acceptable ways to behave.
I always say to staff, don't be that person who makes my or your line manager's 'to do' list even longer. Don't be an extra stress that we have to worry about to chase. Be that person of whom I can ask something and it just gets done, as if by magic, making my life easier, not harder. In fact, be even better than that and be proactive, take the initiative and help to lead the school
I have a quote by Thomas Sowell in mv office that all staff are aware of that says, When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear! We live by this mantra at Michaela.
The common denominator of almost all of the issues I deal with can be traced back to overuse or misuse of smartphones. Parents normally appreciate That the smartphone presents a problem, but they don't follow the chain of causality from smartphone misuse to problems at school. I find this is the case with most people, even my friends. Few understand just how destructive smartphones are to the peace, happiness and success of the kids I teach.
Here is a small sample of what parents have said to me over the last year:
"She's a good girl, and she does her homework really well. But she's just obsessed with messaging this boy all evening once her homework is done." I caught him the other day. He said he was doing his online maths on the phone. But I looked, and he was on a game."
"I did a check of her WhatsApp conversations, and found this. [swearing and abuse to and from another pupil]."
"Every night he does his homework, and it takes him a very long time.!
Wonder whether it is a good idea to let him have YouTube on his phone
whilst he's doing it."
I now think that victimhood culture, lack of family support, inappropriate music choice and friend choice, refusal to take personal responsibility, inability to embrace one's duty, inability to be grateful for what one has however little it is), and peer pressure to conform to the ways 'of the street' over academic pursuit are devastating obstacles in children's lives.
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man?'
Rousseau espoused the notion that children are inherently good, and essentially just need space and freedom, not instruction and authority, in order to flourish and develop into their full, naturally good selves. What many fail to realize is that Rousseau had his own children (some of whom he never even bothered naming) sent to an orphanage where their chances of survival were shockingly low. Had he put more of an effort into being a responsible father, he may have noticed that his notions of children's innate goodness were rather optimistic and didn't necessarily stack up with the evidence. Any parent will testify that children don't need to be taught to misbehave; it seems to come quite naturally. To help curb this tendency requires intervention, not abdication, and so reverting to maintaining order, structure and clear boundaries - ideas tried and tested for thousands of years - actually proves to make much more sense.
As Patrick Deneen puts it:
'liberty is not a condition into which we are naturally born but one we achieve through habituation, training, and education - particularly the discipline of self-command. It is the result of a long process of learning. Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature'
'It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate natures can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters' -
Edmund Burke
Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are not disciplined you are a slave to your moods; you are a slave to your passions.' - Eliud Kipchoge. Burke and Kipchoge - hundreds of years and continents apart - understand a universal truth that was once accepted by everyone from Aristotle to Aquinas: true freedom only comes with virtuous self-government. In this way, self-discipline is an act of freedom.
At Michaela, we know that the formation of character cannot be achieved overnight. It takes time, patient feedback and deliberate practice. In this way, learning to regulate an emotional response becomes a practiced skill in the same way that playing the piano or swinging a golf club is a practised skill. What begins as a single, laborious and studied action becomes, in time, a habit. And as that habit becomes ingrained, it becomes who we are. It passes from something that we do tentatively and deliberately, to something that we do automatically and instinctively. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that 'the palace of wisdom is arrived at through the courtyard of habit.
We do teach biblical literacy in a way that empowers our pupils to speak knowledgeably about, perhaps, the most influential book that was ever written. Such a view is increasingly rare in British schools, whose general squeamishness about scripture alienates pupils from a great sweep of culture - music, art and literature - as well as the compendium of ideas that has done more to incubate Western assumptions than any other.
We believe that some constraints and some boundaries can be liberating.
At Michaela, our butterflies don't just break free; they become free.
The privately educated grow up believing they are powerful, and should lead. Since birth, they are surrounded by discussions about politics, references to history, literature, art and culture; they visit places of historical or cultural importance at the weekends, read many more books, and are exposed to richer vocabulary. A result of this upbringing is a deep knowledge of the culture and history of the country, and a sense of their place within it. Part of their confidence therefore comes from knowing our country inside out. When they read Shakespeare, he belongs to them and to their cultural heritage. This sense of belonging bolsters their belief that they are future leaders of our society.
In our brave new world, the education system has been geared towards individualism rather than community.
As Hannah Arendt argued, "by being emancipated from the authority of the adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority"
This means teaching them to be kind, considerate and responsible for their actions. It also means teaching them as much as we can about the immensely complex world around them. Failure to assume this responsibility is a disaster for the child, for their peers and does nothing but aggravate a problem which is then left to other members of society and future generations to contend with.
"You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilisation needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice or creativity...
Tret] we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." - C. S. Lewis
Whilst relieving him of any responsibility might be comforting for him in the moment, it pushes the problem further into his future. As an adult, a failure to accept responsibility and act to change one's Future can be disastrous.
One of the weirdest (but wonderful) aspects of Michaela lunch-time is
'appreciations'. This is when, in the final four minutes of lunch, pupils will all raise their hands and any chosen will stand up and say an 'appreciation' essentially a thank you) to someone they are grateful for:
The research impact of a thinker is measured on a scale known as the h-index. Freiré has amassed an enormous 138 points (not far behind Karl Marx himself on 173, and the heavyweight Noam Chomsky at 180).
It's not as if these violent songs are kept somewhere in the underground, they are openly played on the radio as well, side-by-side with Ed Sheeran. Imagine if these songs referenced killing animals. No one would be okay with that, and rightly so. But killing people, is that supposed to be fine? And let's all let vulnerable inner-city kids listen to it, especially as they're surrounded by knife crime every day of the week. It's utter madness!
However, at Michaela, we believe that some drilling, used moderately and judiciously, can make learning, in the long run, much easier for pupils. We know that by drilling the component parts of a more complex task, just as instrumentalists do with scales or arpeggios, we can free up our pupils to devote their working memory to the parts of the task that are most abstract or complex.
Then I became a form tutor at Michaela. Every morning during term, like all form tutors at Michaela, I receive an email from our Head of Music. The email contains a hyperlink and some basic facts about a famous piece of classical music that we can play to our form as they come into class. Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King; Vivaldi's 'Spring', Tchaikovsky's 'Waltz of the Flowers'® and Custav Holst's Jupiter' are among the regulars that feature
we have a duty to curate the most powerful knowledge that exposes our pupils to the very best that has been thought, said, and composed in our respective disciplines' curricula.
In 2020, society is wrong about a lot. One fundamental thing it gets wrong is believing that creativity comes from lack of structure and lack of consistency. Jonathan Porter's chapter 'School of Freedom' talks about different types of freedom. He says, 'some constraint and some direction frees our young people to be the best that they can be'. That's true.
We use tutor time to urge them to aim for the moon so that even if they don't reach it, they will fall among the stars.
In English we also get pupils to do something magical with their homework. We get them to check their capital letters with their green pens before handing it in. If they haven't checked them, they get a detention. So, they check them. This transfers into their classwork as well; all of a sudden, every single one of my pupils uses capital letters and full stops correctly, and I've gained back hours of badgering children about the simplest thing to complete in writing - something that so many pupils just didn't bother about at my previous school.
Through the imposition of limits and boundaries, we seek to free our children from our children from two of the greatest threats to their childhood, the use of technology (particularly social media) and bullying.
Asking new staff to learn the names of all established staff and pupils before the start of term empowers them, as they are able to make connections straight away.
There comes a time when words tire. And silence starts to tell the story - Kahlil Gibran
Brits spend more than two hours a day on their phones. That adds up to approximately 14 hours a week, or 60 hours a month, or 30 full days a year!
a study found that 83.5% of us have experienced the situation where we think our phone has gone off when it has not (Sauer et al. 2015). Known as the "Phantom phone sensation", we are so obsessed with contact from other people we start to dream it up. If that isn't distracting from concentrating on your work, I don't know what is.
Catherine Price uses a great example for this. Compare reading a book to reading something on your smartphone. Distractions when you read a book are external to the page. A dog barking or your partner hoovering is not right there on the page. Consider when you read an article on your phone: links, ads. notifications are popping up literally left, right and centre. All of these distractions claw our attention away for a split-second. Consequently, our phones are teaching us terrible habits of essentially mindlessly doing tasks without ever fully focusing on them. After all, the more distractible you are, the more links you click on, and the more value you are to websites and advertisers.
When raising children, we want them to be able to hold sustained conversations without getting distracted. No child addicted to their smartphone is going to fare well in life, have a meaningful relationship, cook a meal read a book. when they cannot concentrate because they are forever wondering whether the phone in their pocket is full of messages and Instagram "likes".
I had never before considered in so much detail the way that I stand, the tone of my voice and the use of my facial expressions which can really make the difference between being a good teacher and being an inspirational teacher who really drives their class forward.
August 19, 2020
Great book. The best essay is on freedom by Jonathan Porter - "Michaela - a School of Freedom".
Coming from Eastern Europe, from a rather top end state school in 1990s, the baseline against which this school is portrayed as radical, is rather sad! I must have been pretty insulated, but the idea that in your average inner city school pupils would bring knives, would shout at their teachers, bully each other in intervals, finish school unable to read or write, teachers not worrying about spelling mistakes or homework - this all sounds like something that happens only in films. But turns out that's the baseline in inner city schools!
Coming from Eastern Europe, from a rather top end state school in 1990s, the baseline against which this school is portrayed as radical, is rather sad! I must have been pretty insulated, but the idea that in your average inner city school pupils would bring knives, would shout at their teachers, bully each other in intervals, finish school unable to read or write, teachers not worrying about spelling mistakes or homework - this all sounds like something that happens only in films. But turns out that's the baseline in inner city schools!
October 19, 2020
A important book aimed at anyone with an interest in education. Each chapter is skilfully written to challenge some preconceived views we have with suggestions why we may be misguided and how we can do better.
July 16, 2024
- “'We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man” (C.S. Lewis).
- “Less than a quarter of new teachers make it past their first five years… teaching is about far more than pedagogy. It’s a test of spirit, a test kf heart, a test of resolve. And if you don’t fight, you won’t last long.”
- “'It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate natures can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters” - Edmund Burke
- “Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are not disciplined, you are a slave to your moods; you are a slave to your passions” - Eliud Kipchoge
- “Those who repress anger rather than venting lead healthier lives” - Steven Pinker
- “Our actions become our habits, our habits become our character, our character is who we are… the palace of wisdom is arrived at through the courtyard of habit” - Aristotle
- “The classroom needs the adult to be in charge, to enforce the rules of the room, in the same way that a football match needs a referee to enforce the rules of the game. Can you imagine a football match without her? Even if the ref sometimes makes mistakes, her word must be final or the game falls apart.”
- “Less than a quarter of new teachers make it past their first five years… teaching is about far more than pedagogy. It’s a test of spirit, a test kf heart, a test of resolve. And if you don’t fight, you won’t last long.”
- “'It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate natures can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters” - Edmund Burke
- “Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are not disciplined, you are a slave to your moods; you are a slave to your passions” - Eliud Kipchoge
- “Those who repress anger rather than venting lead healthier lives” - Steven Pinker
- “Our actions become our habits, our habits become our character, our character is who we are… the palace of wisdom is arrived at through the courtyard of habit” - Aristotle
- “The classroom needs the adult to be in charge, to enforce the rules of the room, in the same way that a football match needs a referee to enforce the rules of the game. Can you imagine a football match without her? Even if the ref sometimes makes mistakes, her word must be final or the game falls apart.”
October 30, 2023
This is an inspiring book written by a wide range of teachers and admin staff on how one of the highest achieving schools in the country is run. Although the perception is often of a terrifyingly strict school and old fashioned teaching methods such, rote learning, there is so much more going on. Children should be taught by teachers leading from the front rather than by group learning around a table of peers and certain facts have to be learned and memorised before creativity can take place.
The school clearly takes discipline seriously with demerits and after school detention appearing to be regular events. Its clear where the line is drawn and all the teachers and staff hold to it - the result is the pupils know the consequences and also are reminded that the strictness is for their benefit.
One of the chapters has a dozen or so students giving their feedback on how the school has affected them - some are quite inspiring!
It’s also quite clear that the teachers get much back from the school - with constant feedback and ideas on how to improve a lesson, what tone of voice to use to get a good balance between strict and warm etc. I also think its great that they encourage visitors to learn what they’re doing and their family lunches are a great idea.
The school clearly takes discipline seriously with demerits and after school detention appearing to be regular events. Its clear where the line is drawn and all the teachers and staff hold to it - the result is the pupils know the consequences and also are reminded that the strictness is for their benefit.
One of the chapters has a dozen or so students giving their feedback on how the school has affected them - some are quite inspiring!
It’s also quite clear that the teachers get much back from the school - with constant feedback and ideas on how to improve a lesson, what tone of voice to use to get a good balance between strict and warm etc. I also think its great that they encourage visitors to learn what they’re doing and their family lunches are a great idea.
June 3, 2022
This book is an invaluable resource. I wish every principal would read this book. It is even helpful for getting ideas for parenting as these teachers are inculcating values in their students who come from tough backgrounds. Also great for homeschooling to understand what is important in education. They come from a viewpoint that a great college education is essential for success in life, which I would question, but the reality is they know not all their students end up there.
June 11, 2023
It's not a book I would reread or go back to as there are too many concepts that grated on me as a socialist. I don't agree with some of the events she speaks at, and I should have known from the endorsers on the cover what I would find. I do, however, agree with a lot of the teaching practices that they have in place, which makes this a unique educational institution.
February 21, 2022
Another excellent collection of articles by the staff of Michaela Community School. A must-read for anyone in education.
January 6, 2024
A whole lot of common sense, and thus completely at odds with much of modern educational theory.
November 14, 2024
Absolutely brilliant and inspirational.
January 22, 2025
Bold, unpopular, but I think it gets a lot right.
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