Research For Teaching Others! - Part Two

This post opens then early in 2009, halfway through a new teaching course (the DTLLS), that offered an alternative to the PGCE, and the start of a new job role working with family and in education, a new sector.  My course this time was with a College based university centre, so was another new take on education.  The DTLLS course itself was a relatively short-lived qualification, and was later replaced with the Level 5 Diploma in Education.  When I later took a job myself in a University Centre, it was traditional to show your post nominals; this was incredibly difficult with the DTLLS; I had to track down advice through the awarding bodies who redirected me to a central support service I had previously never known existed; there I was advised that, because I had also attained my subject specialism and held a degree, I was entitled to the post nominals of PCET (Post-Compulsory Education & Training), as this was now the closest reflection of my achievements given the dissolution of the original DTLLS qualification.

Returning to 2009, one or two of the components I learned have stayed with me ever since, such as the four stages of competence, and some of the psychologists, such as Maslow to who the four stages were incorrectly attributed through a Johari window (this is still how I remember them), but other elements of the course were very poorly delivered; not really surprising for a brand new qualification following a new mode of delivery.  The worst moment was discovering that RCAT had the accreditation for the DTLLS, but would (unexpectedly) be unable to deliver the subject specialism.  My family member employer had this covered; she had a gift for connecting with people, and had already met an examiner from City & Guilds, who had directed her to a new company capable of delivering workplace learning at a higher level than usual.  Signing me straight up, I began collating a plan for completing a work-based qualification at Level 4 simultaneously with the evening classes and essays for the College-based Level 5 DTLLS course, which also needed 100 teaching hours plus observations.  It was at this point I realised that, firstly, I hated teaching.  I mean hated it, passionately.  I had stage fright before a class so severe that I could not eat or drink, and spent the first ten minutes of every class unable to speak through fear.  And secondly, I had severe morning sickness, so severe that I had dehydration and required secondary medication alongside the timed injections.  The Team Teach sessions needed as part of a teaching qualification (and conducted in class) were only ten minutes long, which was the whole time it took me to pull it together to start teaching, and these were necessary to pass the course.  Things were not feeling under control.

On the other hand, the discussions about the course were suddenly much more in-depth, and research was much more relevant.  The internet was more accessible than it had been just a few years ago, we were all employed in the same sector, some of us in the same company or set of companies, and our research often interlinked, or we could pass each other relevant links and pieces of information.  Sometimes these were so new they were actually in the news, as education and its regulation was rapidly changing in light of political changes and the scrambling towards a General Election.  Essays being written by my group were open to being read, as we were not interested in research theft, we were too work-focused, engaged, angry, and clear on our own subject for that - it was our paid work after all, so some of the best pieces that I read were by my own group and focused on subjects such as disability in the classroom and the change to a regulated industry through the introduction of QTLS.

At the same time, I found a neat trick for the work-based learning, and completed my Level 5 Key Skills Communication coursework in three months, offering an abridged version of my degree dissertation as the main submission, and was put in soon after for the examination; a level higher than I expected, in a subject I had not even been sure I could access, for the subject specialism I needed for course writing.  I have an odd talent for English; my one claim to fame is that I am the only student on City & Guilds records to ever have scored 100% on the Level 4 exam.  I issued my certificate to RCAT along with my second year DTLLS portfolio, and it was accepted as a subject specialism, effectively confirming me as a fully trained English teacher.  As far as I know, I was the only student on the course to obtain a subject specialism that year, all the other students had to reapply elsewhere and take their specialism separately.  I got through the Team Teach sessions with another mental kick from my mum, who reminded me that I was fine teaching, as long as I had the ten minute run up.  We sometimes taught classes at work together, so she started booking me the class slot straight after hers, then made me pretend I was teaching with her, despite actually being sat watching.  I had to mutter along with her under my breath, which probably didn’t look great to absolutely everyone else in the class, but by the time I took my place, I had kind of done the first ten minutes.  I still stumbled, but I successfully supplied the Team Teach sessions with a very average score.  My course colleagues, who knew about my odd problem, turned a blind eye to my dreadful performances apart from overt support and occasional cheerful sniggering.  By now many of us had shared workplace teaching as another form of shared research - by ourselves, not as part of the course, we did this as work progression to practise for observations, so my peers knew I could actually teach when needed.  Oddly, my overall teaching scores from work observations were pretty high, so my marks overall were fine.  If I had a course weakness, it was spotty attendance from the pregnancy medication.

What all of this shows, to me, is what a consummate teacher my mother is.  So were many of the others on the course.  The assumption the rest of the group began with (mistakenly) was that I would be a good English teacher, being good at the subject, when actually I am about as altruistic as a cat with my knowledge.  My contribution was as a writer and researcher; I was often asked for help with elements of that, the research, finding leads, did I remember that book?, and in return they helped me teach, because I am not a natural with a group unless I have a run up, although I am pretty good one to one or with a handful of students at a higher level.  My assumption was that I could learn any skill, because my skill always had been learning; again this was wrong, my skill was working, and in researching a subject at speed.  I could spit out an essay on a subject that would be decently written and acceptable researched, I would have stumbled across a higher than average number of leads that were useful to others while doing it whilst barely noticing I was doing so, but the practicalities of passing that ability on were alien to me.  Frustrating but true.  I was good at writing courses; that took exactly the same twisty mind set as writing projects.  This highlighted something I had felt the edges of previously; my controversial view is that we do not have it in us to learn every skill.  My assumption has always been that I can learn anything I apply my mind to.  My experience though suggests that, while I can probably get a basic idea of anything, I can grasp some skills much more easily and effectively than others, and am simply better at some things than others.

This short period of intensive research ended with the submission of my assignment portfolio along with my teaching and observation portfolio in July, which assured completion of my DTLLS qualification.  The 2008 recession was now in full effect, and private teaching businesses were one of the hardest hit thanks in part to the new reforms.  I was notified of my pass grade within days of admittance to hospital; the stress had taken its toll, and thanks to my poor pregnancy related health, my second daughter was born far too early, at seven months and three days, and admitted immediately to the emergency baby care unit.  We were both released in December, just in time to discover the family business was closing on Christmas Eve, and the Christmas wage payment would be our last.

Five of us, as staff affected, joined together, took over the busy order book, and went self-employed.  Our biggest blow was that our starting member did not have the heart for it, and stopped there.  She was offered a well paid job with good security; a rarity at this point in the recession, and has done well since.  We were now completely responsible for researching and delivering our own teaching and learning; this was incredibly interesting, but was also undertaken with the knowledge of eventual failure.  The recession was now well established, we were making a wage, and we were also managing our own hours, as by now most of us involved had children needing school hour care, but we knew we were unlikely to continue long term, given the large scale closures.  Our aim was to get five years out of this venture, survive the recession and infant school, then find a new option.

We began by opening a private limited company, and transferring the original accreditation for delivery of First Aid training; it was easy to deliver on work based sites, and we were all overqualified to supply it, plus we were well known in the local sports sector and already their chosen tutors.  We had to jump through many hoops in the new year of 2010, then meet fast with past customers, convincing them to continue with the same teachers but under a new company name.  We were good at it, and expanded the same concept across the whole care package in the first seven days; it was our main money maker for the duration we operated.  We had no overhead costs, as we worked from home.  I concentrated on course writing for a Basic Skills Maths and English package, and we began looking at an Apprenticeship contract.  To manage this, we had to have an office space, so we took a starter unit with the Council, and then began initial contracts in Healthcare and Teaching Assistant apprenticeships that we gradually expanded over the next few years.  This was our greatest mistake; we grew and we gained a lot of experience of the education sector, but we also overbalanced, and it was these contracts and the way they are paid by the government that eventually did force us to close in 2014.  During this time though, we ourselves sat every examination that we were asking our students to sit, so that we knew what was expected of them, and what we were aiming for during the learner journey.  It was a massive experience; in those five years, Basic Skills was phased out for Key Skills and expanded to incorporate ICT, and then Key Skills was phased out for Functional Skills.  The Level 3 Functional Skills ICT examination is one of the hardest I have ever had the misfortune to sit through.  During this period, I did not really consider education from the viewpoint of a student or teacher, but as a researcher.  It is very obvious that at most levels, a course is designed to make a student pass an exam, and is not necessarily designed to provide a skill, which added to my already skewed assumptions about the education system as a whole.

It had lasted exactly five years.  By May 2014, completely exhausted, the process ended through a concatenation of events.  Our company had closed and we went our separate ways basically sick of the sight of each other, I was 36 years old, now a good group teacher myself though disenfranchised as were many in the sector, divorced, out of work until I was fortunate enough to be accepted for a post as a part time doctor’s receptionist, struggling for childcare as a single mother, broke, and had bought a tiny house in the same village where I had purchased my first home, when I had simultaneously paid for my degree all those years ago. But we had survived school pickups and the early school years.  It almost felt like Monopoly.