3. Teachers TV
Teachers TV (www.teachers.tv, Sky channel 880, Virgin TV 240, Tiscali TV 845, Freeview 88) provides a huge store of classroom footage.
The channel and website is an unprecedented attempt to exploit the possibilities of the new digital technologies to make accessible to as wide an audience as possible a diverse range of examples of classroom practice.
What can make the resources a little difficult to use is that they are so tightly framed, so heavily mediated. To a very large extent, the programmes are constructed within the conventions of television documentary, so what the classroom footage means is presented to us, the viewers, as a neat package. Each programme explores a clearly defined aspect of curriculum or pedagogy. The evidence provided by closely edited classroom footage is explained to us by expert voices, thereby confirming some meanings and excluding others. This tends to limit the interpretive space of the viewer – and to limit the possibilities of open exploration of the footage by student teachers.
(One possible activity is to ask student teachers to view a programme and to discuss the frame that has been used: what is the point of view of the specific programme? What different contributions do teachers, children and ‘talking heads’ of academics/’experts’ make to the programme?
If student teachers carry out an analytic activity like this they will be more aware of how video programmes are filmed and edited with a specific focus in mind. However, it is worth remembering that framing does not necessarily mean distortion, but a point of view.)
In any case, it is still possible to use these programmes for purposes other than those which are presented in the Teachers TV categorisation of the footage. And there are distinct advantages to looking outside the category of English. For example:
3.1 Messy Art at KS2
Messy Art at KS2 provides opportunities to explore:
- how space is organised in a primary classroom
- how learning is organised in a primary classroom
- the physical resources that are available for learners within the classroom
- the cultural resources that learners bring to the activity
- questions of planning over time
- how and why the teacher intervenes (or does not intervene) in the activities and in the learning
- how agency is distributed in the lesson
- the ways that language is used by teachers and by the pupils:
- How does the male teacher, who has come in to demonstrate how to run a lesson, explain the purposes of the work to the viewer and to the pupils?
- What is noticeable about his use of language? (Consider the use of conditionals and language which suggests possibility rather than certainty…)
- The children give explanations of their work and make some evaluations. These could be useful starting points for discussion about how to create opportunities for explanation and evaluation, particularly as many of these pupils are bilingual.
- There is a very specific issue here about the children’s understanding of the word ‘abstract’. The footage provides powerful evidence of children’s developing understanding of the word and of the concept, of the web of meanings and associations that cluster around the words as their activities enable them to participate in the making of abstract art. Making sense of a term like ‘abstract art’ is shown to be a long-term process: it cannot be achieved by the giving and receiving of a dictionary definition, but the children’s participation in the classroom activities is the route whereby they can begin to grasp something of what ‘abstract’ might mean.
3.2 Gifted and Talented – History – Causal Reasoning: WW1
This video clip presents a mixed-ability Year 9 class grappling with the linguistic and conceptual demands of constructing an argument about the causes of the First World War. The activities and the issues involved in this lesson are familiar territory to English teachers, while the unfamiliar curricular context – the fact that this is a History lesson and not an English one – makes it easier, in some ways, to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the pedagogical interventions that are made in the lesson.
3.3 Changing Teachers - Finland Comes to England – Secondary
This video clip starts with a situation which is both very different from that of a student teacher and also very similar. I would very strongly recommend using this with student teachers because of the unique insights it provides. It helpfully complicates the pictures of classroom management, teacher role and teacher identity that student teachers tend to have at the start of their training.
Maija Flinkman, deputy head and teacher of biology and geography at a secondary school in Finland, visits a south London girls' state comprehensive school to teach science.
We see her difficulties with classroom management and her reflection on these difficulties (as she says, it is hard for her to command attention when she doesn’t know the girls’ names). The classroom footage thus demonstrates very clearly the centrality of relationships to the whole process of teaching.
Equally fascinating is Maija’s reflection on her experiences - reflection that might serve as a model of that which we would encourage in our student teachers: in a lesson on respiration, she expects that what will enthuse the students is the practical activity of dissecting lungs, whereas what catches their attention is her first-hand account of her experience as a diver. (And here, too, all the questions that might be posed in relation to the primary art lesson in Section 3.1 would be equally relevant.)
3.4 KS3/4 Drama – Engaging with a Difficult Text – Dr Faustus
This video clip demonstrates the potential of physical, drama-based activities as ways into complex, demanding literature.
Student teachers could be asked to consider the relationship between secondary English and Drama as school subjects, as it is instantiated in this lesson. Particular foci for discussion might be:
- the contribution that the warm-up activities make;
- the significance of the Drama Studio as a pedagogic space (what difference would it make if this lesson were in a ‘normal’ classroom?);
- evidence of the teacher’s knowledge of the students;
- the teacher’s skill in organising and structuring activities;
- the teacher’s skill in questioning – and in listening to what students say;
- the space for the students to draw on and share their own funds of knowledge (Bedazzled, The Simpsons, etc.) as cultural resources that enable them to engage with Marlowe’s play;
- the opportunities for students to use a wide range of semiotic resources (gesture, movement, sound, expression);
- the learning that is made possible by collaboration among the students;
- how students gain confidence and ownership over the text;
- the ways that peer- and self-assessment are used in the lesson.
 
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